Several years ago, I memorized Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee.” I recite it from memory every morning when my dog and I go for our morning walk. As with anything one does repeatedly, one must be careful not to put the mind on auto-pilot, that is, to recite the words without thinking about what they mean. Otherwise, why say them? One faces the same problem when praying from a prayer book, repeating the same words daily. It is essential to force oneself to focus on the words. If this is done, then a benefit accrues – the multiple layers of meaning, the deeper meanings of a text, reveal themselves gradually over time.
I want to share an example of this phenomenon from Poe’s poem with you. First, let me briefly summarize “Annabel Lee” in case you are unfamiliar with it or it’s been long since you last read or heard it. The poem’s narrator tells us of the love between him and his beloved. (By the way, Annabel Lee’s lover’s gender is not conveyed in the poem.) The love between the two was so strong that even the angels in Heaven envied it. The narrator believes their envy led them to kill Annabel Lee. She dies of a chill that blew out of a cloud by night and was buried in a grave by the sea. But then, in the fifth stanza, the narrator tells us that nothing, not even death, can separate the lovers. Here is how he puts it.
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;
The rest of the poem illustrates death’s inability to separate Annabel Lee and her lover. If you want to read the whole poem, something I would encourage, you can find it here.
What a blessing it must be to love and be loved like that! How rare! How precious! There are many things to discuss in this fourth stanza alone, but in this blog, I want to focus on only one: the phrase “dissever my soul from the soul.” For here, we find an allusion to an ancient mythological understanding of love between two people, two soulmates.
The Greek philosopher Plato puts the myth in the mouth of Aristophanes in his dialogue “Symposium.” The dialogue is Plato’s philosophical exploration of the nature of love through a series of speeches delivered at a banquet. The participants, Socrates among them, discuss different aspects of love, culminating in the idea of an ultimate, transcendent love. The dialogue examines the metaphysical and ethical dimensions of “Eros.”
In his speech, Aristophanes argues that the starting point of the discussion must be understanding human nature and what happened to it. He claims there were originally three genders: male, female, androgynous. Every person, regardless of their gender, was round and had four arms, four legs, four ears, two identical faces, two sets of genitals, and one head. What bothered the Greek gods was that these humans were too strong. After they tried to mount to heaven and attack the gods, Zeus, worried about their power, decided to split them in half, weakening them. Since this splitting, humans have been looking for their other half, longing to be reunited with their original “partner.” Even today, in everyday speech, some people ask a person, “Where’s your better half?” when they find them alone, without their accustomed partner.
This mythological explanation is Aristophanes’ way of explaining several things, including sexual orientation. That’s not my purpose here, though. Rather, I want to draw attention to another aspect of the speech, what I believe is the primary point of Aristophanes’s speech (here trans. by Robin Waterfield): Love draws our original nature back together; he tries to reintegrate us and heal the split in our nature. Turbot-like, each of us has been cut in half, and so we are human tallies, constantly searching for our counterparts. (Plato. Symposium (Oxford World’s Classics) (pp. 27-28). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.)
Waterfield includes the following note on the quote above: our counterparts: turbots and other flat-fish, Plato suggests, look like rounded fish which have been sliced in half. A ‘tally’ (sumbolon) was half an item given by a host to a departing guest; the host retained the other half, to show that the guest would always be recognized and welcome back in his house. (Plato. Symposium (Oxford World’s Classics) (p. 81). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.)
Now, here’s something odd, so it seems to me. There is a Jewish midrash that shares some similarities with this Greek myth of the origin of humans. It’s associated with the idea that Adam, the first human, was created as a singular being, male and female, and later separated into two distinct entities – man and woman.
The midrash is found in Bereshit Rabbah, a collection of midrashim about the book of Genesis (Bereshit.) Rabbah 8:1 states:
“Rabbi Yirmeya ben Elazar said: When the Holy One blessed be He created Adam the first man, He created him androgynous. That is what is written: “He created them male and female” (Genesis 5:2). Rabbi Shmuel bar Naḥman said: When the Holy One blessed be He created Adam the first man, He created him with two faces, and [subsequently] He sawed him in two and made [for] him two backs, a back here and a back there.”
The quotation above is taken from sefaria.org.il and suggests that the original human created by God was male and female in one body, and then God separated them into distinct individuals. In Genesis, God puts the man into a deep sleep and takes a rib from his side to create the woman. When Adam sees her, he says:
“This one at last, bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh, “This one shall be called Woman, for from man was this one taken.” (Alter, Robert. The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary (p. 59). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.)
Therefore, the Bible continues, a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.
One Flesh! This, as I understand it, is the deeper meaning of Poe’s fifth stanza, specifically in the verses:
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.
All the best,
Gershon
Gershon Ben-Avraham 