Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven - Essay Example

This essay discusses that in Edgar Allan Poe’s work “The Raven”, to the narrator’s surprise, the raven has the ability of speech, and when he tries to engage it in the talk, the raven responds with the word “nevermore” to every question. The narrator assumes that the raven has only one word in its vocabulary that it has learned from its sad master but later concludes that the raven is prophetic, bearing distressing news for him- he suspects it for evil.

Edgar Allan Poe was writing in the Romanticism period, which prided in strong emotions as the creative source of beauty as opposed to reason and the rationalization. In this regard, a lot of emphases was laid on emotions such as fear, admiration, anxiety, and repugnance; this provided the contextual setting of the poem, “The Raven”. This is evident in the poem as the writer narrates a horror story in the form of a poem, where he depicts the narrator’s reaction to the death of his lover as that of utter grief that the narrator moans ceaselessly.

He says “…vainly I had sought to borrow From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore” This poem thus depicts the inability of the narrator to move on and get over the loss of his lover Lenore, a situation that makes him sad and depressed. He later concludes that he will never be able to move on as the raven, which metaphorically represents his sorrow would never leave too.. This can be evidenced in the narrator's attempts to rationalize the meaning of the raven’s repeated response ‘nevermore’; he concludes that it is unrelated to his despair (Lorcher), and later through monologue that is full of exclamations.

The narrator’s agony over his loss is further heightened by the Raven’s negative confirmation that he will never meet Lenore even in the afterlife; this further highlights the fear of death, that one has no salvation even in death. The poem has a trochaic meter structure that has eight stressed-unstressed feet in every line, and a regular end rhyme scheme of abcbbb; the poem also prides itself on various other instances of internal rhyme and repetition i.e. “nevermore” and “nothing more” are refrains in the poem.

The entire effect achieved through these techniques highlighted above is to give the poem rhythm and musicality when read aloud. The sound ‘o’ is emphasized in the words ‘Lenore’ and ‘nevermore’ to emphasize on the melancholic atmosphere in the poem, thereby highlighting the narrators despair, that there will be no end or consolation to his grief (Freedman 147). The character of the raven in the poem is highly effective in that it forebodes ill omen, evil and death (Varnado 36), which matches the mood and tone of the poem; the black feathers of the raven have traditionally been associated with bad luck or ill omen.

This serves to highlight the narrator’s agonizing predicament, “there is no balm in glead” (Poe 22) and he will never get over his sorrows. The raven character is also effective due to its inability to comprehend the meaning of what it says; this makes the narrator to agonize