Reflection: "The Raven"

“The Raven” has been seen as the reason that Edgar Allan Poe became as famous as he is now. Throughout the poem, there are many spots that make it obvious this is a writing of the Dark Romanticism time period.

The poem starts out by setting the scene: a dark and sad night (Poe 1). The main character is absently and sadly reading many books of “forgotten lore” (Poe 2). The character was about to fall asleep, a tapping noise startled him awake. He attributes the noise as a stranger “rapping” at his “chamber door” (Poe 4). The line “’’Tis some visitor,’ I muttered, ‘tapping at my chamber door - / Only this, and nothing more,’” shows the character is trying to calm himself down by rationalizing that it is just a visitor and he has no need to be startled (Poe 5-6). The next stanza reveals that it is in December and refers to it as “bleak.” This in and of itself shows a characteristic of the Dark Romanic writing style because if it would have been a classical Romanic writing, winter would have been described as a beautiful season as good as the rest of them, but since this was a Dark Romantic writing, it describes it in a melancholy and sad way, indicative of the writing style (Donohue 1). He is sad and all he wants is for another day to begin, as he wastes his time “vainly” reading books to distract him from his “sorrow” (Poe 9-10). It is then revealed that the source of his sorrow is his “lost Lenore,” which the reader can infer that Lenore is a lost love of the character.


The next stanza begins the building action of the poem. It talks of how even the random rustling of the curtains is creeping him out and how he has to keep repeating himself that it is only a visitor to try and calm himself down (Poe 13-18). Repetition is displayed throughout the rest of the poem, giving it a unique rhythm. With his fear growing, he finally calls out and breaks the silence by apologizing to the visitor he was sure was there just before opening the door, but when he does open the door, there is only darkness (Poe 19-24). If this happened to me, I would be seriously freaked out. This sense of fear is very much a sense of the Dark Romanticism writing style.


From there, he returns to his chamber, his fear causing him to imagine terrible things; feeding back onto itself; growing until he broke the unnatural-seeming silence with the name “Lenore” hoping it was her returning, but all he got was an echo, another example of repetition (Poe 25-30). He closes the door and continues to ponder the strangeness of the situation, when he hears the tapping again, and this time he places it at his window, not his door (Poe 31-36). When the window opens, in comes the ominous raven of the poem. The raven is a “stately raven of the saintly days of yore” which seems to refer back to a mythology of some sort, keeping to that Romantic writing style. The raven perches on the bust of Pallas, another name for Athena, the goddess of wisdom, which is another allusion to mythology (Poe 37-42).




The rest of the poem describes how the character keeps asking the raven questions, but the only answer he gets is “nevermore” (Poe 48). At first he thinks that the raven is only repeating the word from memory, but then he starts asking questions to see if he is actually answering them. When if he would ever see Lenore again, but the bird, of course, answered “Nevermore” (Poe 96). At this, he calls for the raven to leave, but the obstinate raven replies “Nevermore” (Poe 102). The repetition he used earlier to calm himself was now being used to “torture” him. It almost seems to the reader that the main character is asking the questions he is just to get the answer obvious answer “nevermore.”

Bloom, Harold, ed. "'The Raven'." Edgar Allan Poe, Bloom's Major Poets. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishing, 1999. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc.
Donohue, Joseph W. Jr. Dramatic Character in the English Romantic Age. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1970