Method and Madness: An Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe's “The Bells”

In this article, U. Marie Engemann has tried to indicate the method and internal cohesion of “The Bells”: a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, regardless of its apparent madness. This poem consists of four stanzas each of which is a symbol of a stage in the human's life for which a specific bell has been dedicated to. This poem follows trochaic meter in which the poet ingeniously has used catalexis in order to imitate the chime of bells. Throughout the poem, he has used different sound devices such as rhyme, sound patterning, alliteration, and onomatopoeia to create parallelism, and accordingly, he has conformed the chime of the bells to the dominant feature of each stage of life; thus, a meaningful cohesion has been created. This article can show how a poet may use different sound devices of his own language to create a parallelism between sound symbolism and meaning. The structure of the article has been changed a little by inserting the figures and the tables in the appendices into its straight text in translation so that it becomes easier for the readers to make a link between discussions and the data presented in each figure or table.