Great Shakes!

My sister and I met Charlie the labradoodle on our walk with Ollie dog, in beautifully calm and sunny weather, along the sea-wall at Creeksea. Ollie didn't think much of Charlie but I was quite taken with him. I loved watching him retrieve his ball from the river and then having a good shake on the black pebble beach.

Today's poem is Annabel Lee by Edgar Allan Poe https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/44885

I was very interested to read that Poe's Annabel Lee ("She was a child and I was a child .... But we loved with a love that was more than love -") was the inspiration for Annabel Leigh, Humbert Humbert's first nymphet in Nabokov's Lolita which was originally entitled Kingdom By The Sea, a line out of the poem. It is thought the poem reflects Poe's relationship with his child-bride/cousin/"sister" Virginia, who was thirteen at the time of her marriage and just twenty-three when she died of tuberculosis.