| The Raven (edgar Allan Poe) |
Article Index for The Raven |
Articles about The Raven |
Website Links For Raven |
Information AboutThe Raven (edgar Allan Poe) |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT THE RAVEN | |
| poetry of edgar allan poe | |
| raven, the | |
| fictional passerine birds | |
| 1845 poems | |
| narrative poems | |
This article is about the poem by Edgar Allan Poe . For other meanings, see Raven (disambiguation) . .]] "The Raven" is a narrative Poem by the American writer and poet Edgar Allan Poe . It was published for the first time on January 29 , 1845 , in the '' New York Evening Mirror ''. Noted for its musicality, stylized language and supernatural atmosphere, it tells of the mysterious visit of a talking raven to a distraught lover, tracing his slow descent into madness. OVERVIEW Its use of language, alliteration, internal rhymes, and archaic vocabulary, enhances the Gothic tenor of the piece and has led to numerous parodies. It is best remembered for its varied and repeated key line, "Quoth the Raven: 'Nevermore.'" It has a metrical construction that is mesmeric in quality, shown in its famous opening lines: :''Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, :''Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, :''While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, :''As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. :''"'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door; ::''Only this, and nothing more."'' The basic meter of the poem is "trochaic octameter", that is, lines of 8 Trochee s (pairs of syllables, the first with strong stress, the second with weak). All 18 verses have the same form, as the narrator's night terrors increase. This conserved Meter creates a feeling of stability, with the words contrasting the scheme with growing tension and anxiety. The piece is thought by many to reflect the paranoia of its author. INTERPRETATION The poem, like other works by Poe such as " The Black Cat ," " The Imp Of The Perverse ," and " The Tell-Tale Heart ," is a study of Guilt or "perverseness" (in Poe's own words, "The human thirst for self-torture"). Although we are told in those stories that the narrators have killed someone, in "The Raven" we are only told that the narrator has lost his love, Lenore (imported from an earlier poem, " Lenore " ( 1831 ) which was itself a massive reworking of " A Paean "; both are also about the death of a young woman). His reaction to the loss has been colored by Mysticism ("volume of forgotten lore"), and we know he is filled with fear at receiving a visitor (perhaps Lenore herself, "the whispered word 'Lenore'"), before he even sees the mysterious raven ("from the night's plutonian shore"—Pluto being the Roman god of the Underworld—known as Hades in the Greek mythology—implying that the Raven is from Hell), with its single word of judgment, "Nevermore." "Guilt" should not be taken here in either the standard legal or moral senses. Poe's characters usually do not feel "guilt" because they did a "bad" thing—that is, the story is not Didactic (in his essay " The Poetic Principle " Poe called didacticism the worst of "heresies"); there is no "moral to the story." Guilt, for Poe, is "perverse," and perverseness is the desire for self-destruction. It is completely indifferent to societal distinctions between right and wrong. "Guilt" is the inexplicable and inexorable desire to destroy oneself '' Eo Ipso ''. "The Raven" is also an excellent example of Arabesque writing as well as Grotesque . In addition to the narrator's physical terror throughout the poem, there are a great many psychologically disturbing sequences and images described as well. The narrator quickly learns what the bird will say in response to his questions, and he knows the answer will be a negative ("Nevermore"). However, he asks questions, repeatedly, which would optimistically have a "positive" answer, "Is there balm in Gilead? Will I meet Lenore in Aidenn ( Heaven )?" To each question the Raven's predestined reply is "Nevermore", which only increases the narrator's anguish. The themes of self-perpetuating anguish and self-destroying obsession over the death of a beautiful woman are in themselves the most poetic of topics, according to Poe (see his essay ", and lets it destroy him and consume him ("my soul from out that shadow shall be lifted—Nevermore!") Why or how Lenore was lost, we do not know, but the narrator is torn between the desire to forget and the desire to remember. Death without cause is standard for Poe (See " Ligeia ," " Eleonora ," " Morella ," " Berenice ," " The Fall Of The House Of Usher ," " The Oval Portrait ," " Annabel Lee ," " Lenore ," " A Pæan ," " The Bells ," and others). The female beauty dies without cause or explanation—or she dies because she was beautiful. In the end, the narrator clings to the memory, for that is all he has left. What the raven has taken from him so cruelly is his loneliness—but this cruelty he brought upon himself, for he cannot resist the urge to interrogate the raven. He is fascinated by the bird's repeated, desolate reply. The narrator repetedly asks it questions in the hope that it will say "yes" (forevermore)—or perhaps out of a morbid desire to be again told "no." Although the bird seems a Hallucination , it is in fact real (this is not to say that the narrator does not hallucinate at all, however), with real black feathers and a real croaking of the single word, "Nevermore." Ravens can be taught to speak. Poe's raven is thought to have been inspired by the raven Grip in '' Barnaby Rudge '' by Charles Dickens . Dickens's bird has many words and comic turns, including the popping of a champagne cork, but Poe felt that Dickens did not make enough of the bird's dramatic qualities. PUBLICATION HISTORY . The translation by Stéphane Mallarmé was published in 1875.]] Following its publication in the ''Evening Mirror'', "The Raven" appeared in numerous periodicals across the country, including ''The American Review'' (February 1845), '' New York Tribune '' (February 4, 1845), '' Broadway Journal '' (vol. 1, February 8, 1845), '' Southern Literary Messenger '', (vol 11, March, 1845), '' London Critic '' (June 14, 1845), '' Literary Emporium '' (vol 2, December, 1845), '' Saturday Courier '', 16 (July 25, 1846), and the '' Richmond Examiner '' (September 25, 1849). "The Raven" was also published independently in 1845 and has appeared in numerous anthologies, starting with ''Poets and Poetry of America'' in 1847. Later works paired "The Raven" with premier illustrators. Notably, in 1858 "The Raven" appeared in a British Poe anthology with illustrations and translation by the Symbolist Stephane Mallarmé {Link without Title} . DERIVED WORKS Main article: Derived Works Of The Raven The poem has been frequently Parodied and plentiful of references to it can be found both in literature and Popular Culture . REFERENCES The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Poems, edited by Thomas Ollive Mabbott, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. EXTERNAL LINKS
|
|
|