Love and obsession is not the same thing.  Edgar Allan Poe's poem, "Annabel Lee", could be seen as a story about a depressed man grieving over the death of his one true love, but a deeper read proves something different entirely.  To engross the reader in this haunting story, Poe creates the speaker as a deeply disturbed man obsessed with the late Annabel Lee, not a romantic grieving for her, by using diction, the speaker's tone, and symbolism.

Poe's diction in this piece is precise in playing off of the disturbed man's obsession with Annabel Lee.  Poe chooses to not only name the poem "Annabel Lee" but to also include it in his work 7 times.  He is also careful in ending every other line in a word that ends with the "ee" sound, to mimic the sound of her name: Annabel Lee.  The echoes of her name throughout the poem reflect the speaker's obsession with the dead girl.  All he has in life is the sound of a name he repeats over and over again- an unsettling obsession.  Poe uses the word "seraphs" instead of angels to show the speaker's vengeful displeasure with their taking of Annabel Lee, ultimately making the angels a villain in this poem.  Using the word seraph removes the good connotation of the word angel.  The speaker also associates the seraphs and demons together, when insisting that his connection with Annabel Lee will always be stronger than them.  The association is reflective on the speaker's inability to distinguish good from bad, which is characteristic of a deeply disturbed being.    

Poe's diction in this piece creates the speaker: a disturbed man who grew up and resides in the "kingdom by the sea"(1).  The first stanza immediately introduces Annabel Lee in the form of a ballad, and ends with two lines that are strikingly different from the beginning, ending the strict ballad form: "And this maiden she lived with no other thought / Than to love and be loved by me" (5-6).  To claim the girl thought of nothing more than their love is a total exaggeration, but the speaker truly believes this because that is all he can think about: their apparent love.  His unrealistic belief in their love is one way Poe creates his deranged speaker.  The evidence of the speaker's unreliableness builds as he talks about her death.  The speaker claims that angels took away Annabel's life because they were envious of the love that the two shared.  Angels usually assume the role of taking the deceased to Heaven, a pleasant or at least bittersweet thought, but because he is so unstable, the speaker sees them as evil "seraphs" that took away his Annabel Lee.  At the end of the poem, the speaker shares that he sleeps with Annabel in her tomb: 

And so, all the night-tide, I lay down by the side 

Of my darling -my darling- my life and my bride,

In her sepulchre there by the sea-

In her tomb by the sounding sea (38-40).

 The speaker confesses to sleeping in a tomb by the side of a young and very dead girl, a deed in which universally is frowned upon.  The speaker, however, sees nothing wrong with his actions, which is what makes him unreliable and disturbed.  It should be noted that Annabel's death occurred "many and many a year ago" (1) when they were both young, and while grieving is only normal, the speaker is at appropriate point in which he should be able to move forward.  The speaker is obsessed with young, dead Annabel Lee.  Even though the speaker is disturbed, the tone is somewhat charming and intriguing, due to the fluidity of his thoughts, especially in the first stanza.  Poe's piece will have the reader proceeding through the text uncomfortably but rapidly, unable to stop.  

To play off of the speaker's somewhat haunting tone, Poe introduces various symbols in order to enhance the disturbed nature of the speaker.  Perhaps the most important symbol in this piece is the sea by which Annabel Lee's tomb is. It is mentioned numerous times throughout the text and is the last word of the poem.  Poe does this to leave the reader with the image of a huge, lonely, cold dark sea to reflect the speaker's life.  The speaker mentions demons slithering under the sea, further making the sea a scary unpleasant place; like hell.  Another important symbol is the kingdom in which the poem takes place.  Towards the beginning of the poem, the refrain, "kingdom by the sea" (1) seems almost fairy-tale like.  The same refrain is used again after the speaker's story about the "highborn kinsman" (20) who took, to the speaker's dismay, Annabel Lee's corpse away to its tomb.  The kingdom is now a symbol of tyranny and evil, like the rich people who live there that take anything they want with out asking.  The almost unsettling symbolism presented in this piece highlights the unstableness of the speaker.

Love and obsession is not the same thing.  That is why Edgar Allan Poe's "Annabel Lee" is a twisted story coming from an obsessed and disturbed man.  Though it can be argued that this was told through a grieving romantic, Poe, like he does with much of his work, laced this story with far too many hints of insanity for that theory to hold true.     

