Phoebe Cary Annabel Lee Analysis

Phoebe Cary may have been a poet ahead of her time; her witty, almost sarcastic, tone is definitely appreciated more today, where good irony and sharp humor is increasingly appreciated. In fact, many of her works were softened in other to suit her contemporary audience while others were omitted entirely from publication. Cary’s wit is especially visible through her parodies, and through them she further pushed the limits by satirizing works of well-known men. A good example would be Cary’s “Samuel Brown” (478), which parodies Edgar Allen Poe’s famed “Annabel Lee.” Through her effective adaptation of Poe’s poem, Cary manages to convey humor, but more importantly, paint a grittier picture of male-female relationships as well as dispute Poe’s ideals of love. “Annabel Lee” is gothic poem about a mournful male speaker narrating the death of his lover, the titular character. However, the love
By twisting a romantic relationship to an adulterous one, Cary manages to excoriate Poe’s ideals of love.
As mentioned before, Poe’s expectations of a romantic relationship are far from being realistic; “Annabel Lee” sounds like a fairy tale with pure, everlasting love that even angels envied. No longer a “kingdom by the sea,” Cary places her characters in a very real city—Manhattan: “And often by day, I walk down in Broadway.” Additionally, there are no angels in Manhattan, only “The ladies not half so happy up there, / Went envying me and Brown.” Samuel Brown becomes a real person who is coveted by real people in a real place, and as a result, Cary’s perspective is more tangible and relatable than