THE RAVEN BY EDGAR ALLAN POE

SYNOPSIS

• ‘’The Raven” features two primary entities: the narrator, a young man whose grief over the loss of his love, “Lenore,” is palpable from the poem's opening lines, and the raven, whose sudden and foreboding presence evokes a succession of emotions from the narrator, from curiosity and mild amusement at the bird's first laconic responses to anger and despair at the realization that his beloved Lenore is now lost to him forever. Each stanza of the poem ends with a rhythmic refrain of “nothing more”—a benign assessment by the narrator that there are reasonable explanations for the strange occurrences of the evening—and progresses to the repetitious and increasingly ominous response of “Nevermore!” from the otherwise silent bird.

• The intensity of emotion rises with each refrain, culminating in the narrator's own tortured admission that “nevermore” can he be free of the shadow of grief and sorrow brought by the night's unwelcome visitor. The physical setting of the poem—a dark, December night in a library-like room—as well as repeated references to classical statuary, velvet cushions, rustling draperies, and the rapid beating of one's heart in response to fear of the unknown, are all familiar motifs in Poe's fiction and poetry, as is the archetype of the “anonymous young man” mourning the death of a beautiful young woman.

POETIC STRUCTURE• The poem is made up of 18 stanzas of six lines

each. Generally, the meter is trochaic octameter – eight trochaic feet per line, each foot having one stressed syllable followed by one unstressed syllable.

RHYTHM AND RHYME• The melancholy tone of "The Raven" relies as much on its musical sound

and rhythmic pattern as on the meaning of the words. To achieve his musical effect, Poe uses rhyming words in the same line (internal rhyme), a word at the end of one line that rhymes with a word at the end of another line (end rhyme), alliteration (a figure of speech that repeats a consonant sound), and a regular pattern of accented and unaccented syllables. This pattern uses a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable, with a total of sixteen syllables in each line. Here is an example (the first line of the poem):

.ONCE u PON a MID night DREAR y, WHILE i POND ered WEAK and WEAR y

• In this line, the capitalized letters represent the stressed syllables and the lower-cased letters, the unstressed ones. Notice that the line has sixteen syllables in all. Notice, too, that the line has internal rhyme (dreary and weary) and alliteration (while, weak, weary).

THEME

• In “The Raven,” Poe exploits several themes that are found throughout his creative works, including the tragic death of a beautiful woman at a young age, and the grief of the bereft young man whose affection for his lost love transcends the physical boundaries of death and life. In “The Raven,” the ebony bird stands as the embodiment of grief caused by loneliness and separation, referencing not only Poe's fascination with the imagery of young lovers wrenched from one another by death, but also the pain he experienced at a very young age with the untimely death of his mother.

LINKS

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Raven• http://www.cummingsstudyguides.net/Guide

s2/Raven.html#Setting• http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_the

me_of_The_Raven_by_Edgar_Allan_Poe• http://www.enotes.com/raven-criticism/rave

n-edgar-allan-poe• http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/po

e/raven.html• http://www.types-of-poetry.org.uk/20-epic-p

oems.htm• http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qi

d=20080107122613AAck9SC