by John Gray

Created on: May 31, 2010

The dark and haunting narrative poem “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe is one of those poems which has effortlessly absorbed itself into popular culture. Famed for its internal musicality and macabre imagery, it is a piece which seems to have a lasting impression upon all those who read it.

Like many things penned by Poe, “The Raven” shrouds itself in a dreamlike atmosphere from the start, as the character in the poem (possibly a student) clearly drifts within the realms of sleep. We are told from the third line that he “nodded nearly napping” which is a clear suggestion by Poe that we are to take what follows in the poem as a product of the dream world and the strange events which will occur in the poem, would seem to strengthen such a reading.

However it is the painful and longing cry of lament to “Lenore” which is echoed throughout the piece – the “lost Lenore”, the “radiant maiden” which offers the best clues to the student’s state of mind.  Perhaps it is the longing and painful loss of a loved one, combined with that of disruptive sleep and study of “curious volumes of forgotten lore” which brings forth the internal turmoil of our protagonist and offers some degree of explanation to events related within the poem?

The internal musicality is clearly apparent even within the first stanza. The almost overwhelming use of alliteration, onomatopoeia and internal rhyme in such uses of “nodded, nearly napping” and “rapping”, “tapping” and “napping” would otherwise in lesser poems seem overly contrived. However, in this poem, Poe seems to be able to get away with this level of musicality and instead of weakening the piece; it seems to lend itself well to Poe’s visionary world. Such overt internal rhyme also clearly lends itself well to oral renditions for which Poe himself was famed for relating.

In the second stanza Poe cleverly frames the piece as a memory and further invokes the bleakness of the hour by relating “Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December”. This line is also a great example of how Poe balances the weight of each line perfectly, the level of symmetry clearly apparent on both a visual and auditory level. It is also clear that Poe’s word choice shows the bleak state of the narrator as he sees death around him in all neutral elements. For example it is no coincidence

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