Amanda at Wittingshire has been messing with my favorite poem. (I always thought it was a rather self-centered poem, but only in the sense that Poe was writing about himself and his child bride.) She also talks about how her seven year old reasoned his way to the existence of God and the truth of Scripture.
And she has this thought about a safe place to be ourselves with all of our idiosyncracies:

The one refuge remaining isn’t a bar–Cheers notwithstanding–but a church, especially small churches, which are today what villages used to be, places where everyone, however peculiar, belongs.
“That’s just Ken,” people say, shrugging. “Oh, you know Lucille . . . ” And the beauty is, they do know Lucille, and they let her be Lucille–shy, perhaps, or moody; generous to a fault, acerbic, gregarious, forgetful, wise, persnickety, all the wonderful variations of human lives.

Yes, I have experienced this kind of grace myself. “That’s just Sherry. She doesn’t mean to be __________.” (unfriendly or sarcastic or any one of a number of bad attitudes I am prone to display.) Of course, I often do intend to have just the bad attitude that I’m showing to the world, but my brothers and sisters extend grace for my sins and my peculiarities.
As for the narrator in Annabel Lee being peculiar and obsessed with death, I say, “Oh, well, you must understand, that’s just Poe.”