Was three years old, and he was subsequently raised in the home of Frances Keeling Valentine Allan and her husband John Allan, a prosperous exporter from Richmond, Virginia. Poe was born in Boston in 1809, the son of Elizabeth Arnold Poe and David Poe, both minor professional actors. This natural progression, however, receives a dramatic emphasis because the descriptions become more and more emotionally charged. In the common occurrence of their ringing, Poe finds a metaphor for the progression of the common man from the carefree times of youth (as in the merry sound of sleigh bells), to the serious commitment of marriage, to critical situations of emergencies in one’s mature life, and finally to the conclusion of death. Through auditory and visual images, the poem describes the sound, function, and effect of four types of bells: sleigh bells, wedding bells, alarm bells, and funeral bells, all used in the mid-nineteenth century to get the attention of community members. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this poem has become one of America’s best examples of onomatopoeic effect, or use of words that recall the sound of what they describe. Published posthumously in November of 1849, a little more than a month after Poe’s death, it first appeared in the journal Sartain’s Union to much critical acclaim, and was later published in the 1850 collection The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe. Edgar Allan Poe worked on “The Bells” from the summer of 1848 to the autumn of 1849.
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