Edgar Allan Poe/Gilles Tibo (illustrator)
Tundra Books, 1987
ISBN: 0887762301
The full text of Annabel Lee follows this article. You can also click on the pictures below to view larger images.
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A native of Gaspé Peninsula, Quebec, artist Gilles Tibo is known for The Simon Series picture books and his magic realist aesthetic. In 1987, at the beginning of his career in children's books, Tibo published a picture book set to Edgar Allan Poe's well-loved lyric poem, Annabel Lee. Readers familiar with the Gothic verse might marvel at how Tibo manages the feat--if, indeed, he succeeds in creating images that, remarkable in themselves, are complementary to the text. Despite his success as a writer, Poe's personal life was marked by misery, addiction, and poverty; his decline and death were no less tragic. Some nuances of Poe's darkly romantic poem about love, death, and loss undoubtedly escape the readers to whom Tibo's book is targeted, though his interpretation of the narrative is unusual and adept enough to appeal to Poe's older readers.
Annabel Lee begins, "It was many and many a year ago, / In a kingdom by the sea, / That a maiden there lived whom you may know / By the name of Annabel Lee". The repetition of phrases such as "kingdom by the sea" throughout the poem, and the memory of a tragedy that happened long ago, reinforce the mythic-historical tone for established in the first few lines. The narrator of the poem is a poor man, reminiscing about his childhood love, who was of a higher class. The love of children is pure and immutable, and it is more powerful than even death. Like many Gothic narratives, the narrator nurses an unhealthy obsession for his dead love. In fact, the psychological state of the narrator forces the question, was there really an Annabel Lee, or is his tale the product of a disturbed mind? Lines in the final stanza have an internal rhyming scheme, mimicking the rhythm of the waves that ultimately serve as Annabel Lee's sepulchre, as well as the vortex of the narrator's mental condition: "For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams / Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; / And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes / Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; / And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side / Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride".
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