Today’s Poem: Soul Bride Oddly Dead in Queer Death Pact

Franklin P. Adams’s newspaper crime-blotter recasting of Edgar Allan Poe

Édouard Manet’s Annabel Lee illustration for Stéphane Mallarmé 1888 translation, Les Poèmes d’Edgar Poe (Wikimedia Commons)

In Something Else Again, a 1920 collection of his magazine and newspaper work, Franklin P. Adams (1881–1960) gave us “Annabel Lee,” the 1849 poem by Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) — as retold in the insinuating voice of crime reporting in the New York tabloids of the time:

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Soul Bride Oddly Dead in Queer Death Pact

High-Born Kinsman Abducts Girl from Poet-Lover — Flu Said to Be Cause of Death — Grand Jury to Probe

by Franklin P. Adams

Annabel L. Poe of 1834½ 3rd Ave., the beautiful young fiancee of Edmund Allyn Poe, a magazine writer from the South, was found dead early this morning on the beach off E. 8th Street. Poe seemed prostrated and, questioned by the police, said that one of her aristocratic relatives had taken her to the “seashore,” but that the cold winds had given her “flu,” from which she never “rallied.” Detectives at work on the case believe, they say, that there was a suicide compact between the Poes and that Poe also intended to do away with himself. He refused to leave the spot where the woman’s body had been found.

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Adams was a newspaper personality of a kind we just don’t have much anymore: a wit, a regular at the Algonquin Round Table, and a figure on the comic-intellectual radio talk-show circuit.

The fame-making power of writing a daily column in a New York periodical just ain’t what it used to be, and a loss we suffer in his fading is an awareness that Franklin P. Adams was a talented formalist poet who understood the difficult art of writing comedy in verse. Rarely falling into slapstick or vulgarity, he had a genius for quick and clever constructions. His most famous poem is probably “Tinker to Evers to Chance,” a complaint from a New York Giants’ fan about the Chicago Cubs. But nearly any of the poems in his 1911 collection, Tobogganing on Parnassus, reveals his wit and his formal skill.

Franklin P. Adams (Wikimedia Commons)

Even in his prose — the parodic “Soul Bride Oddly Dead in Queer Death Pact,” for example — the reader will catch how wryly clever Adams was. Notice the parody’s insinuation of a suicide pact, a lurid undercurrent to the story (carefully guarded against a libel charge by ascription to unnamed police detectives). Or the mistaken name of “Edmund Allyn Poe.” Or the perfectly judged title in the peculiar piled-up diction of American tabloid headlines: “Soul Bride Oddly Dead in Queer Death Pact.”

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As for Edgar Allan Poe’s actual “Annabel Lee,” what is there to say? It was once as famous as an American poem can be — famous enough that a newspaper columnist could use it in 1910 for a parody and expect his audience to get the reference.

“I was a child and she was a child, / In this kingdom by the sea,” the poem declares, and, yes, “Annabel Lee” is singsongy, like so much of Poe’s work. Sentimental, long for its purpose, twee in places. Wrapped in the gauzy veil of fairyland. It should be unbearable — except that it isn’t. Poe pulls off work that no one else can get away with.

Think of “The Raven,” “The Bells,” “Eldorado,” or even many of his famous short stories: Poe is an earworm that tunnels into our brain and won’t leave. The repeated end words and phrases, the cadences fed by internal rhymes, the speed of the three-beat feet with two-beat substitutions, the faux-childish diction: Each overwrought device melds with all the others to create something classic: “In her sepulchre there by the sea — / In her tomb by the sounding sea.”

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Annabel Lee

by Edgar Allan Poe

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;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
   Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,
   In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love —
   I and my Annabel Lee —
With a love that the wingèd seraphs of Heaven
   Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,
   In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
   My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsmen came
   And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
   In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in Heaven,
   Went envying her and me —
Yes — that was the reason (as all men know,
   In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
   Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
   Of those who were older than we —
   Of many far wiser than we —
And neither the angels in Heaven above
   Nor the demons down under the sea
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

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,
   In her sepulchre there by the sea —
   In her tomb by the sounding sea.

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Edgar Allan Poe (via Craiyon)