Ulalume Analysis

Welcome to the land of symbols, imagery, and wordplay. Before you travel any further, please know that there may be some thorny academic terminology ahead. Never fear, Shmoop is here. Check out our...

Regular Rhyme, (Mostly) Anapestic MeterRhymeLet's start with the rhyme. Poe likes to play around with his poetic techniques, so nothing ever stays quite the same from stanza to stanza. Still, he'...

If you've read some other Poe poetry, like "The Raven" or "Annabel Lee," the speaker of "Ulalume" probably seems familiar: he's another guy who is miserable since the woman he loves is dead. (Mayb...

From the beginning of "Ulalume," Poe is pretty specific about the setting: It was hard by the dim lake of Auber, In the misty mid region of Weir— It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,...

We think this poem has an eerie, echoey sound to it. Part of this has to do with the rhyme scheme: each stanza has two end rhyme sounds that repeat. In the first stanza, the rhymes are what we li...

Poe has a pretty long history of naming stories and poems after beautiful dead girls. There's Lenore (from "The Raven"), Annabel Lee, Ligeia, etc. So, on the face of it a title like "Ulalume" is...

Dead Girls, Depressed Guys, Spooky Images, Big WordsAs far as recognizable voices in American literature go, it's pretty tough to do much better than Edgar Allan Poe. He uses a core set of themes...

(5) Tree LineThe sounds and the sights in this poem are pretty gripping. The main story is direct and exciting too. There are a few spots where you're bound to feel a little lost (we know we did)...

Poe's college career didn't go according to plan.  In fact, he was forced to drop out of the University of Virginia because of gambling debts, and he eventually joined the army instead (source...

PGWell, there's no actual sex here. Still, there's always just a hint of a creepy/sexy vibe in Poe, so you might want to leave the kindergarteners at home for this one.

PsycheThis is a reference to Greek language and mythology. In Greek, "Psyche" literally means "soul." The Greeks turned her into a goddess, a personification of the human soul. That's what Poe i...