by Marijane Suttor

Created on: July 10, 2008   Last Updated: April 04, 2012

"The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe is a timeless classic that is part of popular culture. It is quite remarkable that a poem that received so little financial success for Poe himself has become such an accepted part of American culture. In literature there are references by Stephen King in "Insomnia" and in Lemony Snicket's "A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Vile Village, the tree in the center of the village is covered with crows and is called the Nevermore Tree. And of course, the real claim to broad cultural appeal is television and cartoons. "The Raven" has been quoted or parodied by everyone from The Simpsons to Garfield. In the Addams Family, Morticia tells "The Raven" to Pugsley as a bedtime story and in "The Munsters" the cuckoo clock is a raven that squawks "Nevermore!"

"The Raven" is so often analyzed, studied, and parodied that it starts to become almost a cartoon version of itself. In truth, "The Raven" is a solid piece of literature with an original storyline that leaves the reader puzzling and thinking while at the same time incorporating classic poetic elements.

Edgar Allan Poe took 18 stanzas to express the story of the raven in a narrative poem. Poe is strict in his meter and has an ABCBBB rhyme scheme in the six line stanzas.

In stanza 1, Poe begins the poem with the main character being drowsy, nearly falling asleep at midnight. One wonders why the character is up at this time of night unless he is troubled by something. It appears he was reading as a way of taking his mind off of his problems. He indicates the he is weary, which one can infer that there is a repetitive sadness that is not just the result of one bad day.

Beginning in stanza 1 and continuing on through stanza 18, Poe makes consistent and abundant use of internal rhyme. It is this use of internal rhyme that gives the poem a quality that is easily remembered as well as giving it an impression of a spell, which is an early representation of the supernatural in the poem. Some examples of internal rhyme in stanza 1 include: dreary/weary and rapping/tapping/napping.

The main character hears a tapping at his chamber door. He immediately excuses it away as nothing, just the wind and nothing more. At this point the character has his sanity. He realistically understands that it is probably his imagination getting the best of him.

In stanza 2, it is reflection. He remembers it was on a bleak December night in which he tried to forget his grief over losing his love, Lenore. In his attempt

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