The Raven by Edger Allan Poe
Introduction to Edgar Allan Poe
Edger Ellen Poe, an American poet, critic, short story writer and author of many great works, was born on 19 January 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts. He was the son of actors Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins and David Poe. He had a brother named William Henry and a sister Rosalie. After the death of his parents Edgar was adopted by a very wealthy merchant John Allan. Young Edgar travelled with the Allans to England in 1815 and attended school in Chelsea. In 1820 he was back in Richmond where he attended the University of Virginia and studied Latin and poetry and also loved to swim and act. In school, he became at odds with his foster father. Poe left school and enlisted in the United States Army where he served for two years. He had been writing poetry for some time and in 1827 ‘Dreams”Oh! That my young life were a lasting dream! first appeared in the Baltimore North American. The same year his first book Tamerlane and Other Poems was published.
Edgar and his stepfather John reconciled after the death of his foster mother. Poe then enlisted himself in the West Point Military Academy but was dismissed a year later. In 1829 his book Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems was published. The same year Poems (1831) was published. Poe moved to Baltimore to live with his aunt Maria Clemm, mother of Virginia Eliza Clemm (1822-1847) who would become his wife at the age of thirteen. His brother Henry was also living in Clemm household but he died of tuberculosis soon after Edgar moved in. In 1833, the Baltimore Saturday Visiter published some of his poems and he won a contest in it for his story ‘MS found in a Bottle’. In 1835 he became editor and contributor of the Southern Literary Messenger. Then he started his career as a respected critic and essayist.
After Virginia and Edgar married in Richmond in 1836 they moved to New York City. Poe’s only completed novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym was published in 1838. The story starts as an adventure for a young Nantucket stowaway on a whaling ship but soon turns into a chilling tale of mutiny, murder and cannibalism. Poe’s contributions to magazines were published as a collection in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840) which included ‘The Duc de L'Omelette’, ‘Bon-Bon’ and ‘King Pest’. The first detective story, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ was published in 1841.
Contributing greatly to the genres of horror and science fiction, Poe is now considered the father of the modern detective story and highly lauded as a poet. Walt Whitman, in his essay titled ‘Edgar Poe’s Significance’ wrote; ‘Poe’s verses illustrate an intense faculty for technical and abstract beauty, with the rhyming art to excess, an persistent propensity toward nocturnal themes, a demoniac undertone behind every page. ‘ There is an indescribable magnetism about the poet’s life and reminiscences, as well as the poems.’
Poe’s psychologically thrilling tales examining the depths of the human psyche earned him much fame during his lifetime and after his death. His own life was marred by tragedy at an early age (his parents died before he was three years old) and in his oft-quoted works we can see his darkly passionate sensibilities’a tormented and sometimes neurotic obsession with death and violence and overall appreciation for the beautiful yet tragic mysteries of life. They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.”Elonora’. Poe’s literary criticism of poetry and the art of short story writing include ‘The Poetic Principal’ and ‘The Philosophy of Composition’. There have been numerous collections of his works published and many of them have been inspiration for popular television and film adaptations including ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, ‘The Black Cat’, and ‘The Raven’. He has been the subject of numerous biographers and has significantly influenced many other authors even into the 21st Century.
Poe’s collection of poetry The Raven and Other Poems (1845) which gained him attention at home and abroad includes the wildly successful ‘The Raven’ and ‘Eulalie’ and ‘To Helen’;
Lo, in yon brilliant window-niche
How statue-like I see thee stand,
The agate lamp within thy hand,
Ah! Psyche, from the regions which
Are Holy Land!
Poe’s wife Virginia died in 1847. He turned to alcohol more frequently and was purportedly displaying increasingly erratic behavior. There are conflicting accounts surrounding the last days of Edgar Allan Poe and the cause of his death. Some say he died from alcoholism, some claim he was murdered, and various diseases have also been attributed. Most say he was found unconscious in the street and admitted to the Washington College Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. He died soon after, on 7 October 1849, and was buried unceremoniously in an unmarked grave in the Old Westminster Burying Ground of Baltimore. In a dedication ceremony in 1875, Poe’s remains were reinterred with his aunt Maria Clemm’s in the Poe Memorial Grave which stands in the cemetery’s corner at Fayette and Greene Streets. A bas-relief bust of Poe adorns the marble and granite monument which is simply inscribed with the birth and death dates of Poe, Maria, and Virginia who, in 1885, was reinterred with her husband and mother.
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.’A Dream within a Dream
Summary of the poem:
The Raven is a narrative poem told by a man sitting in his room. The narrator is wearily perusing an old book. It’s a bleak December night and he hears a tapping at the door of his room. He tells himself that it is merely a visitor, and he awaits tomorrow because he cannot find release in his sorrow over the death of Lenore. The rustling curtains frighten him, but he decides to go and open the door. He asks for forgiveness from the visitor because he had been napping. When he opens the door, he sees and hears nothing except the word "Lenore," an echo of his own words.
Returning to his room, he again hears a tapping and reasons that it was probably the wind outside his window. When he opens the window, however, a raven enters and promptly perches "upon a bust of Pallas" above his door. Its grave appearance amuses the narrator, who asks it for its name. The raven responds, "Nevermore." He does not understand the reply, but the raven says nothing else until the narrator predicts aloud that it will leave him tomorrow like the rest of his friends. Then the bird again says, "Nevermore."
Startled, the narrator says that the raven must have learned this word from some unfortunate owner whose ill luck caused him to repeat the word frequently. Smiling, the narrator sits in front of the ominous raven to ponder about the meaning of its word. The raven continues to stare at him, as the narrator sits in the chair that Lenore will never again occupy. He then feels that angels have approached, and angrily calls the raven an evil prophet. He asks if there is respite in Gilead and if he will again see Lenore in Heaven, but the raven only responds, "Nevermore." In a fury, the narrator demands the raven to go back into the night and leave him alone again, but the raven says, "Nevermore," and it does not leave the bust of Pallas. The narrator feels that his soul will "nevermore" leave the raven's shadow.
Analysis:
"The Raven" is the most famous of Poe's poems. It is notable for its melodic and dramatic qualities. The meter of the poem is mostly trochaic octameter, with eight stressed-unstressed two-syllable feet per lines. Combined with the predominating ABCBBB end rhyme scheme and the frequent use of internal rhyme, the trochaic octameter and the refrain of "nothing more" and "nevermore" give the poem a musical lilt when read aloud. Poe also emphasizes the "O" sound in words such as "Lenore" and "nevermore" in order to underline the melancholy and lonely sound of the poem and to establish the overall atmosphere. Finally, the repetition of "nevermore" gives a circular sense to the poem and contributes to what Poe termed the unity of effect, where each word and line adds to the larger meaning of the poem.
Like a number of Poe's poems such as "Ulalume" and "Annabel Lee," "The Raven" refers to an agonized protagonist's memories of a deceased woman. Through poetry, Lenore's premature death is implicitly made aesthetic, and the narrator is unable to free himself of his reliance upon her memory. He asks the raven if there is "balm in Gilead" and therefore spiritual salvation, or if Lenore truly exists in the afterlife, but the raven confirms his worst suspicions by rejecting his supplications. The fear of death or of oblivion informs much of Poe's writing, and "The Raven" is one of his most uninviting publications because it provides such a negative answer. By contrast, when Poe uses the name Lenore in a similar situation in the poem "Lenore," the protagonist Guy de Vere concludes that he need not cry in his mourning because he is confident that he will meet Lenore in heaven.
Poe's choice of a raven as the bearer of ill news is appropriate for a number of reasons. Originally, Poe sought only a dumb beast that was capable of producing human-like sounds without understanding the words' meaning, and he claimed that earlier conceptions of "The Raven" included the use of a parrot. In this sense, the raven is important because it allows the narrator to be both the deliverer and interpreter of the sinister message, without the existence of a blatantly supernatural intervention. At the same time, the raven's black feather have traditionally been considered a magical sign of ill omen, and Poe may also be referring to Norse mythology, where the god Odin had two ravens named Hugin and Munin, which respectively meant "thought" and "memory." The narrator is a student and thus follows Hugin, but Munin continually interrupts his thoughts and in this case takes a physical form by landing on the bust of Pallas, which alludes to Athena, the Greek goddess of learning.
Due to the late hour of the poem's setting and to the narrator's mental uproar, the poem calls the narrator's reliability into question. At first the narrator attempts to give his experiences a rational explanation, but by the end of the poem, he has ceased to give the raven any interpretation beyond that which he invents in his own head. The raven thus serves as a fragment of his soul and as the animal equivalent of Psyche in the poem "Ulalume." Each figure represents its respective character's subconscious that instinctively understands his need to obsess and to mourn. As in "Ulalume," the protagonist is unable to avoid the recollection of his beloved, but whereas Psyche of "Ulalume" sought to prevent the unearthing of painful memories, the raven actively stimulates his thoughts of Lenore, and he effectively causes his own fate through the medium of a non-sentient animal.
In stanza 12 and 13, the narrator sits on a velvet cushion in front of the bird and whimsically ponders what the raven meant by repeating the word. He inevitably associates it with the thoughts of the departed Lenore. At this point, the grieving lover, in anticipation of the raven’s maddening repetition of ‘Nevermore,’ begins to frame increasingly painful questions. Imagining a perfumed presence in the room, the narrator, in a state of growing agitation, asks the raven whether God had mercifully sent him to inducer in the poet forgetfulness of lost Lenore; the inevitable response causes the narrator to plead with the raven ‘ now addressed as a prophet of evil sent by the ‘Temptor’- to tell him whether there is any healing in heaven for his grief. The raven’s predictable answer provokes the grieving lover, now almost in a state of maddened frenzy, to ask bluntly whether his soul would ever be reunited with Lenore in heaven. Receiving the horrific ‘Nevermore’ in reply to his ultimate question, the distraught narrator demands that the raven, whether actual bird or fiend, leave his chambers and quit torturing his heart; the raven’s unendurable answer drives the bereaved love into a state of maddened despair. The raven becomes a permanent fixture in the room, a symbolic presence presiding over the narrator’s self-inflicted mental and spiritual collapse.
The physical setting of the poem reflects the inner personality or emotion of the central character. The poem begins at midnight in December’. the last moment of a spend day in the final month of the year. Internally and externally, it is a time of death and decay. Even the ‘dying’ fireplace embers reflect the melancholic atmosphere. The setting is contained and claustrophobic; the single room adds to this effect. The narrator himself mirrors the time and locale. ‘Weak and weary’, he seems trapped in his richly furnished prison. He hopes for the morning ‘ the return of light and life ‘ but tonight all he can do is brood on his dead beloved, ‘the lost Lenore’, and feel the solid horror of his current situation. The story that now unfolds is simple, tarrying and tragic. ‘The Raven’ divides its characters and imagery into two conflicting worlds of light and darkness. The contrasting worlds of light and darkness grandly acquire additional symbolic resonances: they also represent life and death, the speaker’s vain hope of an after- life with Lenore and the terrifying vision of eternal nothingness.
The nightmarish effect of the poem is reinforced by the relentless trochaic rhythm and the arrangement of the ballad stanzas into five lines or octameter followed by a refrain in tetrameter. This combination, along with emphatic alliteration, allows for strong internal and end rhymes, resulting in a mesmerizing syncopation of redundancies as inescapable as the sonorous refrain. This incantatory repetition creates an aural quality that helps force collaboration between the poem and the reader, a maddening regularity aptly conveying the speaker’s disintegrating reason, while contributing to the theatrical effect of the poem as histrionic performance.
The Philosophy of Composition
Edgar Allan Poe wrote an essay on the creation of "The Raven’ entitled "The Philosophy of Composition." 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. 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 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!"