"With a love that the winged seraphs of Heaven
Coveted her and me",
is a meaningful statement to me.
It says that even the most pure and innocent beings anyone could think of couldn't have a love that these two possessed. It says that those on higher plain of existence couldn't measure up to these two. This line connects, in one of several references, that their love was different from other loves. The line connects their union to heaven. It's similar to the line, "But we loved with a love that was more than love-". This line helps create the theme that their union was more special then others, and in a way more fantastic. He also makes the union seem more important by assuming we've already heard the story.
In the line, "That a maiden there lived whom you may know", and the line, "that was the reason (as all men know, In this Kingdom by the sea", we see that Poe makes the love so powerful and important and fantastic that we're already supposed to know about it. Not only do the angels have it out against this couple, the angels response to their love creates a legend. this poem could've easily been named, "The Legend of Annabel Lee", and it would have worked just as well.
One of the great impacts of the line and of the whole work is how the tone is set. It's very lush in it's descriptions, but it still manages to keep an air of "matter of factness" and still be desperately grasping for Annabel Lee. Poe is able to be desperate for Annabel Lee but not alienate us in its story. The opposite happens, he invites us to think of any heartbreak we've ever experienced to any degree and mull over what was, what could've been and ignore reason. The poem is a direct link to wallowing in the past, and this poem hits so hard partly because it happened to Poe. He lost his wife to tuberculosis. She was taken from him in the worst of ways, a long drawn out death with little hope for survival. She was taken from him along with other women in his life.
The poem, "Annabel Lee" by Edgar Allen Poe is a hauntingly beautiful lamentation on the death of a loved one. The love is made fantastic by the line, "With a love that the winged seraphs of Heaven
Coveted her and me", where his love's death is blamed on jealous supposedly pure beings from above. This theme is woven throughout along with the notion that we should already all know about it as if it's a legend. The poem and this line will always carry special meaning to me, and I know it will be my favorite for a long time.
