The Highwayman And Bess's Death Essay

One way that these two poems are different is the cause of the characters death. In ‘The Highwayman’, Bess’s death is caused by one of the character’s actions. Her death could have been caused by Tim the ostler, who told the British about the highwayman, or it could have been the highwayman’s fault, who came to visit Bess in the first place and gave Tim the chance to tell the British. Another possibility is that it is Bess’s fault that she died, because she shot herself. Most likely though, is that all of the events worked together to sadly kill the character. However, in the poem ‘Annabel Lee’, Annabel Lee dies of natural causes. How is this natural? In the poem, one of the lines is, “. . . the wind came out of the cloud by night, Chilling …show more content…
In ‘Annabel Lee’, nether of the characters were very developed. The poem was quite short, and it wasn’t as sad when Annabel died because her character wasn't well developed. In ‘The Highwayman’ however, it was very sad when the characters died. For example “When they shot him down on the highway/down like a dog on the highway and he lay in his blood on the highway, with the bunch of lace as his throat”.Bess was developed as a character and you could sort of connect with her because the author described her well. Same with the highwayman (since we don’t know his name). The author describes him and his emotions more, giving you a better understanding of the character. With ‘Annabel Lee’, the author is a lot more vague and only gives you a small amount of information, leaving your imagination to figure out what happened.

As different as the two poems are, they do have a few similarities. The major similarity is death. In both 'Annabel Lee' and 'The Highwayman,' the females died; however, only in the latter poem did the male perish as well. In addition, both males had to deal with the women’s death. They both had a hard time dealing with it, especially the highwayman. Although that might be an understatement, it’s