Raven an Analysis of Edgar

¶ … Raven

an analysis of edgar allan poe'S

THE RAVEN

Without a doubt, Edgar Allan Poe's poem the Raven, published in 1845, is his most famous work of verisimilitude and is now considered as a masterpiece of 19th Century American poetry. As George W. Woodberry once remarked, "No great poem ever established itself so immediately, so widely, and so imperishably in the minds of men," a reference to the poem becoming an instant hit with the reading public upon its publication (Mabbott, 350). The subject of the Raven has come under much discussion but can be described as "Despair brooding over wisdom" (Mabbott, 351) in which an unknown narrator (possibly Poe himself) grieves over the lost of a beloved woman named Lenore while sitting in a room at midnight.

As he ponders this ambiguous lost love, a raven appears at the open window and commences to increase the narrator's despair by repeating perhaps the most famous line in any American poem -- the dreaded "Nevermore," in indication that the narrator will never see his beloved Lenore again, not even in death. As Poe points out in his essay "The Philosophy of Composition," the Raven "is emblematic of undying remembrance" or in other words, serves as a symbol for grief which will never be taken away (Mabbott, 351).

The poem itself is composed of nineteen stanzas with six lines per stanza and contains many examples of assonance or the repetition of vowel sounds which creates a type of internal rhyming (e.g., "bleak December" and "Night's Plutonian shore") and alliteration or the repetition of consonants at the beginning of a phrase or a series of words (e.g., "rare and radiant maiden" and "dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before"). Also, the first stanza ends with "Only this and nothing more," and the second stanza "Nameless here for evermore" as does the third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh or some variations of it, but the eighth stanza introduces the quote from the raven "Nevermore" which continues with the remaining stanzas. Obviously, Poe chose to use "Nevermore" or a variation of it in order to create a deep sense of despair and doom. Poe also utilizes what is known as onomatopoeia which refers to a word or several words that imitate a particular sound, in this case being tapping and rapping ("Suddenly there came a tapping/as of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door"), although not as much as in his later poem the Bells.

One other important aspect of the Raven deals with the question of whether "the sorrow of the poet was described objectively by Poe or whether he was dramatizing a real love" (Quinn, 442), meaning that Poe might have been describing a real person via "Lenore" which could have been his wife Virginia Clemm Poe who in 1845 was extremely ill from consumption or tuberculosis. As Arthur Hobson Quinn relates, Poe's personal dread "of the loss of Virginia... had become a spiritual offspring" and his primary inspiration "was the abstract love of a beautiful woman," but whether "she was actually dead or whether Poe feared her inevitable doom" is not known (442-443).