Annabel Lee
The dark Artifices
by Edgar Allan Poe, Gilles Tibo
Narrated by Patrick Lawlor
Why Listen to This Audiobook?
Poe wrote this on his deathbed, and Patrick Lawlor reads it like he knows exactly what that costs.
- Great if you want: gothic poetry delivered as an intimate, haunting experience
- Listening experience: brief and elegiac — melancholy that lingers long after it ends
- Narration: Lawlor's low, measured tone suits the poem's grief perfectly
- Skip if: you want a full narrative rather than a single poem
About This Audiobook
Annabel Lee is Edgar Allan Poe's final complete poem, a meditation on a love so pure that even the angels envied it and took the narrator's beloved from him by sending a killing chill from the clouds. Written in 1849 and published posthumously, the poem returns obsessively to the grave by the sea where Annabel Lee lies, and the narrator's insistence on the undying nature of their love gives the poem its strange, elegiac power.
Patrick Lawlor reads with a measured, musical gravity that honors Poe's formal craftsmanship. The poem's repeated refrains work particularly well in audio, where the incantatory quality of the language can accumulate without the visual interruption of the page. This brief production captures the poem's haunting simplicity.
