For Annie - Edgar Allan Poe
One of my favorite poems (or perhaps my absolute favorite poem) of all time often has different meanings to me upon each re-read. As I get older and continue to go back to āFor Annie,ā I find myself analyzing it, finding an almost lullaby-like quality to the stanzas, one which adds to the narratorsā half-conscious and exhausted state of mind. However, it is the message that remains the same each time I read this poem that makes it my favorite. Poe writes about Death better than any other writer of his time, often personifying it and describing it as a blanket of gloom, as a comforting presence in an otherwise cold life. āLiving,ā to him, is an illness that can be solved by the warm embrace of Death, who alleviates his loneliness and despair. While some may read āFor Annieā and see āAnnieā as a real figure in Poeās life (perhaps a name for his wife Virginia), I often choose to interpret it the following way, with Annie acting as a personified Death, ready to provide the narrator with her kiss:
Romantic, but wonderfully dark, Poe's "For Annie" looks at love, illness, life, and death. Poe depicts life as a fitful, horror-filled fever, emphasizing that death is the much desired cure.
Moreover, life is a "lingering illness," and death provides relief.
As the love of his life, Annie, sits at his bedside, the narrator can blissfully drift off into an eternal slumber after suffering from the fitful fever called life...Somehow, his love for Annie lives on, even after his earthly body is dead - Annie's love transcends earthly planes. Annie is giving the narrator permission to finally rest, eternally.
Rather than allowing her lover to go on suffering, the narrator knows Annie will soothe him instead. Perhaps āAnnieā is an angel ready to take the narrator away, or perhaps āAnnieā is Death herself, accepting the narrator into her arms at last. In āFor Annie,ā the narrator equates death with contentedness, rest, light, love, and warmth:
For Annie by Edgar Allan Poe
Thank Heaven! the crisis,
And the lingering illness
And the fever called "Living"
I am shorn of my strength,
As I lie at full lengthā
And I rest so composedly,
Might start at beholding me,
The moaning and groaning,
With that horrible throbbing
At heart:āah, that horrible,
The sicknessāthe nauseaā
Have ceased, with the fever
That maddened my brainā
With the fever called "Living"
Has abatedāthe terrible
For the naphthaline river
That quenches all thirst:ā
From a spring but a very few
From a cavern not very far
That my room it is gloomy
And, toĀ sleep, you must slumber
For now, while so quietly
Commingled with pansiesā
With rue and the beautiful
And the beauty of Annieā
To sleep on her breastā
From the heaven of her breast.
When the light was extinguished,
And she prayed to the angels
To the queen of the angels
That you fancy me deadā
And I rest so contentedly,
(With her love at my breast).
That you fancy me deadā
That you shudder to look at me,
But my heart it is brighter
For it sparkles with Annieā
Of the love of my Annieā
With the thought of the light