Annabel Lee and the Murderer’s Wine, Essay Example

Poe’s “Annabel Lee” and Baudelaire’s “The Murderer’s Wine” both detail a thematic excursion into a conceptual analysis of death as it is related to love. Poe’s lament for Annabel Lee describes his love for her coupled with the feeling of loss generated within the poet at her subsequent death. Baudelaire’s poem describes, in essence, the death of love, or the loss of love over time, with a certain ecstatic feeling that arises from this loss, as opposed to Poe’s sadness. In the following essay, we shall explain how the two poets approach this thematic of death and love, considering the content of the respective poems, followed by a comparison of the two pieces.

Baudelaire’s “The Murderer’s Wine” explicit and uncompromising opening lines “My wife is dead. I’m free” immediately shock the reader. The image of the happiness of the narrator towards the death of his wife immediately suggests a thematic of the loss of love over time. Insofar as the narrator has been married, it can be speculated that there once existed love in his life. However, the opening lines, with a pronounced, sharp force, signal the death of this love. Moreover, the loss of his wife signals a moment of newfound freedom: what had been once love, had become a series of obligations, a series of commitments resembling a form of slavery, as demonstrated in the connection between the death of a spouse and freedom. That Baudelaire had once loved his wife is lucid in the lines “The summer that we fell in love”, a summer of happiness; this is nevertheless compared to the happiness he now feels at the loss of his wife. Baudelaire had lost his freedom in his marriage: however, the freedom that has been lost is a very specific form of freedom, a hedonistic freedom, for example, the freedom to drink as much as he wants. That previously his drinking was met with the screaming of his wife shows a certain typical conflict inherent to marriage. However, for the narrator, the meaning of such conflicts is an essential limitation to his freedom. The narrator is thus radically individualistic: he is concerned above all with the hedonistic freedom that has been re-introduced into his life with his spouse’s death. Nevertheless, the hedonistic freedom at the core of the narrator’s thoughts is simultaneously a self-destructive freedom: “Now I am free and all alone. Tonight I’ll get dead-drunk, of course, My head I’ll pillow on a stone, without repentance of remorse.” Freedom in Baudelaire can thus be read as the freedom for the individual to negate his or her own existence. This is the ultimate liberty, the decision for one’s own fate, even if this decision would be commonly understood as self-destructive. There is a certain sickness or revulsion to life itself in the poem: the love of the spouse turns into a form of captivity; the freedom gained in the murder of his spouse turns into the desire to negate life. The individualistic freedom, for Baudelaire, is the freedom for the individual to negate his own existence.

Poe’s “Annabel Lee” takes quite a different approach to death and love. Poe’s poem can be understood primarily as a lament. The content of the piece emphasizes the profundity of his love for Annabel. “But we loved with a love that was more than love”, says Poe: this love is constituted by such a power that it even transcends other experiences of love. In essence, for Poe, it would be demeaning to compare his love for Annabel to the vulgarity of love shared by common people: there is a certain divinity to his love for Annabel. Nevertheless, this love ends with the death of Annabel: “That the wind came out of the cloud one night; Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.” Poe says in the poem that “angels, not half so happy in heaven, went envying her and me”, and thus the death of Annabel is a result of the envy of nature itself towards their love. However, there is a certain ambiguity in the poem at this point: does Annabel die because of some accident, as described by “the wind?”; or, considering the inclination of Poe’s oeuvre to dark thematics, does this suggest the murder of Annabel by the narrator? In other words, was the love for Annabel so strong that the narrator could no longer bear it, that he killed Annabel Lee? This would suggest the impossibility of life co-existing with love, when love is too powerful. In this reading, love in its purest form must be associated with death, with the destruction of a loved one so that the individual can continue living.

Both Baudelaire and Poe thus present an essential continuity between love and death. Both authors present this essential relationship in symmetrical, yet slightly different manners.  Baudelaire describes how even love can eventually turn into a certain species of hatred. The death of his wife is the condition for his own liberation: What was once love has turned itself into a limit. One can detect a similar feeling in Poe, to the extent that one accepts a reading of the poem in which the narrator is somehow complicit in Annabel’s death. Love has become unbearable, not because it represents a limit as in Baudelaire, but because it is too strong a force: the narrator must kill his love to survive. This is a similar motif to what Baudelaire implies; however, not because love is too strong a force, but because love eventually transforms from a feeling of passion into a limiting, oppressive force. In other words, both Baudelaire and Poe speak of love as a certain oppressive force: Baudelaire describes this oppressive force in terms of his own individual freedom, whereas Poe describes this oppressive force in terms of it being incompatible with anything that life or existence has to offer. Moreover, while Baudelaire’s freedom from love entails a decision for his own self-destruction, Poe’s decision for freedom love entails the possibility for his own individual survival. That is to say, Poe’s narrator, to ensure his own existence must kill Annabel, whereas Baudelaire must murder his wife to have the freedom to destroy his own existence.

Both poets, therefore, present similar basic approaches to the relation between death and love. However, the minor differences in the two accounts recall different philosophical views on the notions of individuality, freedom and existence. For Poe, love prevents the individual’s existence in a world that is unfit for love, thus this love must die for the individual to live in the world. For Baudelaire, the death of love symbolizes the possibility for freedom within the world, however the freedom to destroy one’s own existence.

Works Cited

Baudelaire, Charles. “The Murderer’s Wine.”

Poe, Edgar Allen. “Annabel Lee.”