The Fall of the House of Usher 1

 Poetry and Poe

Poems in French and English are different in a few ways. English poems don't always rhyme. They can, though. But they have a rhythm to them :

for the moon never beams without bringing me dreams

u     u       /      u   u      /       u     u     /       u     u      /

Stanza 1

a description of a woman. It introduces Annabel Lee.

Stanza 2

It's about the love between Annabel Lee and the Narrator.

Stanza 3

She was taken away from him. Seraphs took her.

Stanza 4

Annabel Lee is killed and buried (enterrée)

Stanza 5

Their love is the strongest ever. Their love can transcend death.

Stanza 6

He lies next to her tomb.

 

Some syllables are stressed / , and others are unstressed u. You have to pronounce stressed syllables louder, and this gives an English poem its musicality, along with alliterations.

C. Baudelaire was an admirer of E.A. Poe, and even translated him into French. They both belong to Romanticism, an artistic movement that started in the late 18th century in Great Britain and Germany.

Poe's USA were very different from today's USA. In the 1840s, the fertility rate was 6.9 (around 1.9 today), the infant mortality rate 300/1000 (5/1000 today) and life expectancy 35 years (around 80 today). Poe lived in the antebellum South, the South during slavery, before the Civil War.

 

 


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