During a cold, dark evening in December, a man is attempting to find some solace from the remembrance of his lost love, Lenore, by reading volumes of “forgotten lore. ” As he is nearly overcome by slumber, a knock comes at his door. Having first believed the knock to be only a result of his dreaming, he finally opens the door apologetically, but is greeted only by darkness. A thrill of half-wonder, half-fear overcomes the speaker, and as he peers into the deep darkness, he can only say the word “Lenore. ” Upon closing the door, another knock is immediately heard from the chamber’s window.
The narrator throws open the shutter and window, and in steps a large, beautiful raven, which immediately posts itself on the bust of Pallas Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, above the entrance of the room. Amused by the animal, the speaker asks it its name, to which the bird replies “Nevermore. ” Believing “Nevermore” to be the raven’s name, the narrator’s curiosity is piqued, but the speaker believes the name to have little relevancy to his question, for he had never before heard of any man or beast called by that name.
Although the bird is peaceful, the narrator mutters to himself that it, like all other blessings of his life, will soon leave him. Again the bird replies “Nevermore. ” Intrigued, the speaker pulls a chair up directly before the bird to more readily direct his attention on the wondrous beast, and to figure out the meaning of the bird’s single monotonous reply. While in contemplation in the chair, the speaker’s mind turns to Lenore, and how her frame will never again bless the chair in which he now reposes.
Suddenly overcome with grief, the persona believes that the raven is a godsend, intended to deliver him from his anguish, but again comes the bird’s laconic reply. The speaker then viciously rebukes the bird, calling it now to be a “thing of evil,” and asks it whether there is “balm in Gilead,” a biblical reference to respite in a land riven with suffering. Again, the word “nevermore” is the only answer. Shouting maniacally now, demanding that the bird take its leave, the narrator attempts to dispatch the bird back to the “Plutonian shore” of Hell from whence it came.
The bird, “the emblem of Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance,” replies again “nevermore,” and sits there on the bust of Pallas to this day, ever a torment to the speaker’s soul, and a reminder of his lost love. “The Raven” is without a doubt the work for which Poe is best known. Through this poem, Poe has taken his favorite theme, that of the untimely death of a beautiful woman, and made that theme universally understandable and fascinating, earning himself literary immortality in the process. There is no doubt that “The Raven” takes direct influence from Poe’s life experiences.
Poe was a moody bookworm, and Virginia Poe’s health had been declining since 1842. Poe’s friend, R. H. Horne, wrote of “The Raven,” “the poet intends to represent a very painful condition of mind, as of an imagination that was liable to topple over into some delirium or an abyss of melancholy, from the continuity of one unvaried emotion. ” Poe’s life was varied in experience, but, as Horne’s letter said of Poe’s poetry, static in outlook, and his life’s entire tone is perfectly encapsulated in “The Raven.
Poe, like the persona, sought “balm in Gilead,” but was, according to Hammond, “doomed to be frustrated in his quest for a perfect emotional response. ” Through “The Raven,” Poe makes his personal, introverted hell strangely mesmerizing and attractive to all, and as a result, “The Raven” is more well known than any of Poe’s other poems, and even more well known than some of his greatest short stories. Reviews and Critical Opinions of the Work During Poe’s Lifetime: “The Raven” owes its genesis to Charles Dickens’ novel Barnaby Rudge, in which there is a speaking raven.
The purple curtains and pallid bust of Athena may have been influenced by the actual home in which Poe, Virginia Poe, and Maria Clemm occupied on the Bloomingdale Road, New York. According to Hammond, this pallid bust is as “inseparably associated with Poe and as immortal as Holmes’s Persian slipper or Alice’s looking glass. ” Not surprisingly, Poe was accused of plagiarism in the composition of the poem, supposedly having stolen “purple curtains” from Elizabeth Barrett Browning and, of course, the speaking bird itself from Dickens.
In discussing the work himself, Poe gives little reference to the artistry or tone of the poem, focusing instead only on the form and rhyme scheme of the work. Speaking of the composition of “The Raven,” Poe wrote “that no one point in its composition is referrible either to accident or intuition — that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem. ” In this poem, one of the most famous American poems ever, Poe uses several symbols to take the poem to a higher level. The most obvious symbol is, of course, the raven itself.
When Poe had decided to use a refrain that repeated the word “nevermore,” he found that it would be most effective if he used a non-reasoning creature to utter the word. It would make little sense to use a human, since the human could reason to answer the questions (Poe, 1850). In “The Raven” it is important that the answers to the questions are already known, to illustrate the self-torture to which the narrator exposes himself. This way of interpreting signs that do not bear a real meaning, is “one of the most profound impulses of human nature” (Quinn, 1998:441).
Poe also considered a parrot as the bird instead of the raven; however, because of the melancholy tone, and the symbolism of ravens as birds of ill-omen, he found the raven more suitable for the mood in the poem (Poe, 1850). Quoth the Parrot, “Nevermore? ” Another obvious symbol is the bust of Pallas. Why did the raven decide to perch on the goddess of wisdom? One reason could be, because it would lead the narrator to believe that the raven spoke from wisdom, and was not just repeating its only “stock and tore,” and to signify the scholarship of the narrator.
Another reason for using “Pallas” in the poem was, according to Poe himself, simply because of the “sonorousness of the word, Pallas, itself” (Poe, 1850). A less obvious symbol, might be the use of “midnight” in the first verse, and “December” in the second verse. Both midnight and December, symbolize an end of something, and also the anticipation of something new, a change, to happen. The midnight in December, might very well be New Year’s eve, a date most of us connect with change.
Kenneth Silverman connected the use of December with the death of Edgar’s mother (Silverman, 1992:241), who died in that month; whether this is true or not is, however, not significant to its meaning in the poem. The chamber in which the narrator is positioned, is used to signify the loneliness of the man, and the sorrow he feels for the loss of Lenore. The room is richly furnished, and reminds the narrator of his lost love, which helps to create an effect of beauty in the poem. The tempest outside, is used to even more signify the isolation of this man, to show a sharp contrast between the calmness in the chamber and the tempestuous night.
The phrase “from out my heart,” Poe claims, is used, in combination with the answer “Nevermore,” to let the narrator realize that he should not try to seek a moral in what has been previously narrated (Poe, 1850). Poe had an extensive vocabulary, which is obvious to the readers of both his poetry as well as his fiction. Sometimes this meant introducing words that were not commonly used.
In “The Raven,” the use of ancient and poetic language seems appropriate, since the poem is about a man spending most of his time with books of “forgotten lore. Seraphim,” in the fourteenth verse, “perfumed by an unseen censer / Swung by seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled… ” is used to illustrate the swift, invisible way a scent spreads in a room. A seraphim is one of the six-winged angels standing in the presence of God. “Nephente,” from the same verse, is a potion, used by ancients to induce forgetfulness of pain or sorrow. “Balm in Gilead,” from the following verse, is a soothing ointment made in Gilead, a mountainous region of Palestine east of the Jordan river.
Aidenn,” from the sixteenth verse, is an Arabic word for Eden or paradise. “Plutonian,” characteristic of Pluto, the god of the underworld in Roman mythology. The Philosophy of Composition Edgar Allan Poe wrote an essay on the creation of “The Raven,” entitled “The Philosophy of Composition. ” In that essay Poe describes the work of composing the poem as if it were a mathematical problem, and derides the poets that claim that they compose “by a species of fine frenzy – an ecstatic intuition – and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes.
Whether Poe was as calculating as he claims when he wrote “The Raven” or not is a question that cannot be answered; it is, however, unlikely that he created it exactly like he described in his essay. The thoughts occurring in the essay might well have occurred to Poe while he was composing it. In “The Philosophy of Composition,” Poe stresses the need to express a single effect when the literary work is to be read in one sitting. A poem should always be written short enough to be read in one sitting, and should, therefore, strive to achieve this single, unique effect.
Consequently, Poe figured that the length of a poem should stay around one hundred lines, and “The Raven” is 108 lines. The most important thing to consider in “Philosophy” is the fact that “The Raven,” as well as many of Poe’s tales, is written backwards. The effect is determined first, and the whole plot is set; then the web grows backwards from that single effect. Poe’s “tales of ratiocination,” e. g. the Dupin tales, are written in the same manner. “Nothing is more clear than that every plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its denouement before anything be attempted with the pen” (Poe, 1850).
It was important to Poe to make “The Raven” “universally appreciable. ” It should be appreciated by the public, as well as the critics. Poe chose Beauty to be the theme of the poem, since “Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem” (Poe, 1850). After choosing Beauty as the province, Poe considered sadness to be the highest manifestation of beauty. “Beauty of whatever kind in its supreme development invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears. Melancholy is thus the most legitimate of all the poetical tones” (Poe, 1850).
Of all melancholy topics, Poe wanted to use the one that was universally understood, and therefore, he chose Death as his topic. Poe (along with other writers) believed that the death of a beautiful woman was the most poetical use of death, because it closely allies itself with Beauty. After establishing subjects and tones of the poem, Poe started by writing the stanza that brought the narrator’s “interrogation” of the raven to a climax, the third verse from the end, and he made sure that no preceding stanza would “surpass this in rhythmical effect.
Poe then worked backwards from this stanza and used the word “Nevermore” in many different ways, so that even with the repetition of this word, it would not prove to be monotonous. Poe builds the tension in this poem up, stanza by stanza, but after the climaxing stanza he tears the whole thing down, and lets the narrator know that there is no meaning in searching for a moral in the raven’s “nevermore”. The Raven is established as a symbol for the narrator’s “Mournful and never-ending remembrance. ” “And my soul from out that shadow, that lies floating on the floor, shall be lifted – nevermore! “
