Poem of the Day: ‘Annabel Lee’

What are we to do with Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)? “Annabel Lee” is singsongy, like so much of Poe’s work. It’s sentimental. It’s long for its purpose. It’s twee in places. It’s got that gauzy 19th-century veil of fairyland that palls after a stanza or two. It should be unbearable — except that it isn’t. Poe pulls off work that no one else can get away with. Think of “The Raven,” “The Bells,” “Eldorado,” or even many of his famous short stories. Poe is an earworm that tunnels into our brain and won’t let go. The repeated end words, the cadences fed by internal rhymes, the speed of the three-beat feet with two-beat substitutions, the faux-childish phrasings: Each overwrought device melds with all the others to create something classic. “In her sepulchre there by the sea — / In her tomb by the sounding sea.”