THE RAVEN. Poe’s most famous poem, “The Raven,” was composed in 1844 and revised twice, in 1845 and 1849

(1844)

Poe’s most famous poem, “The Raven, ” was composed in 1844 and revised twice, in 1845 and 1849. While many can quote this poem verbatim, few try to discuss its meaning. It appears to concern an emotionally desolate man in the “bleak December”, bereaved by the death of his lost love, Lenore, who is visited by a Raven, which rather significantly perches itself atop of a bust of Pallas Athena and squawks, “Nevermore” at its outraged human host until he suffers distraction. There are 18 stanzas, each divided into groups of six lines, of which the last three lines rhyme, perhaps influenced by Dante’s terza rima (interlocking iambic tercets: ababcb) for The Divine Comedy. Poe consciously chose the name Lenore to capitalize on its melancholy sound and its rhyming with many other words. With his innate ear for music, Poe likewise created poetic lines of inner rhyme, alliterative resonance, and emotional repetition that would unify the somber, even nerve-wracking effect of this bird’s intrusion into a man’s private anguish.

We must assume that at the poem’s outset, the narrator has been pondering “over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore” (l. 2) both to gain solace for the loss of the “rare and radiant maiden” (l. 11) and perhaps to discover some arcane knowledge to restore her from the dead. The very thought that his earnest attempts at resurrection may have elicited the desired response accounts for the fact that the tapping at the door at midnight “Thrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrors” (l.14) and had him “dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before” (l.26). The connection to Victor Frankenstein’s project of raising the dead comes to mind, and its “hellish” implications reverberate in “The Raven” when the narrator returns to his chamber, “all my soul within me burning” (l. 31). His desire for salvation from his various passions projects upon the Raven an association with “the saintly days of yore” (l. 38) when it first steps into his chamber. The bird is an emissary of nature, that eternal object of romantic pantheism to which America’s first prophet-philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson attached the powers of religious revelation and redemption. “The Raven” will prove to be a bitter tonic to Emerson’s optimistic projections about Nature, for Poe, as did his contemporaries Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, saw not only innate goodness in nature, but simultaneously the source of evil.

Symbolically the Raven climbs “upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door” (l. 41), presumably offering “a higher wisdom” than the patron goddess of ancient Athens, the goddess of wisdom in Greek myth. Whether “the ungainly fowl” (l. 49) is named Nevermore or can merely repeat the word unendingly becomes a moot point, since the narrator takes up a velvet, cushioned seat “in front of bird, and bust and door” (l. 68) to listen to its interminably repetitious message, its “saintly” association transformed into a fowl “whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom’s core”(l.74). The “trinity” of images—bird, bust, door—before the narrator sits converts the chamber into a parody of Emerson’s “Transparent Eyeball, ” the all-seeing eye of the prescient poet. The bird has become a demon sent from night’s plutonian shore (l. 47), a tempter to remind the unavailing Orpheus that his Eurydice, Lenore, can never be retrieved from Hades’s clutches. The narrator suffers an emotional paroxysm of lost faith: “Tempter sent... tell me truly, I implore— / Is there—is there balm in Gilead? ” (ll. 86, 89). The reference is to Jeremiah 8: 22, itself a biblical book of lamentations. When he inquires whether his beloved Lenore has ascended to heaven, the Raven only retorts, “Nevermore” (l. 98). In his despair, the narrator calls the Raven “Prophet... thing of evil! ” (l. 91) and orders the “bird or devil” (l. 92) to quit his door, as his room has become an emotional “torture chamber.” In a variation of the Promethean image, the bird has buried its beak in his heart (l. 101), and having refused to leave, the bird seems symbolically wedded to the tormented narrator, whose soul lies prostrate in the spiritual shadow cast by the demon. Perhaps responding to an image from Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan, ” Poe has pushed spiritual despair and loneliness to the depths, like Coleridge’s “woman wailing for her demon lover! ” (“Kubla Khan” l. 16).