[XXI
A BOND OF SYMPATHY]
HAVING told me stories, my friend Annabel Lee demanded that I should write a bit of verse to read to her.
My verse is rather rotten verse, and I told her so. She replied that the fact of its being rotten had but little to do with the matter, that most verse was rotten, anyway, and usually the more rotten the better it suited the reader.
She was in that mood.
So I wrote some lines and read them to her—there was nothing else to do. She had been kind in telling me stories, though probably she told them because it amused her. When I finished reading, she said that the verse was not rotten at all. She, for her part, would call it not yet quite ripe.
“That’s the verse,” said my friend Annabel Lee. “As for the meaning of the words in it, that betrays many things. The most vivid thing it betrays is your age. It shows that you have passed over the period of nineteen and have arrived at exactly one-and-twenty. And therefore it is a triumphant bit of verse.
“Don’t you know,” said my friend Annabel Lee, “how much verse there is thrown upon the world that means nothing whatsoever? And so when one does happen upon a bit of it that tells even the smallest thing, like the height of the writer, or the color of his hair, then one feels repaid.
“And your verse tells still other things,” said my friend Annabel Lee. “One is that you still think, as we’ve agreed once before, of that which will one day open wondrously for you.”
“I did not agree to that, you know,” said I.
“Well, then, I agreed to it for both of us,” said my friend Annabel Lee. “And your verse betrays that so plainly that one is led to feel that there are persons who grow more hopeful with each bit of darkness that comes to them. If your life were all fire and sunshine you would write very different verse. And if it told anything at all it would tell that while you looked forward to still more fire and sunshine, you would somehow know you were not really to have any more, but that it would grow less and less in the years, and by the time you were an old lady, and still not nearly ready to die, it would give out entirely.”