The Raven / by Edgar Allan Poe

This popular narrative poem is written in the first person. ‘The Raven‘ personifies the feeling of intense
grief and loss, while other symbols throughout the poem reinforce a melodramatic mood that
emphasizes the main character’s grief and loss. ‘The Raven’ explores the world of emotional wars that
individuals face in all walks of life; specifically, the fight one can never ignore, the fight of control over
the emotions of grief and loss. These battles are not physical, but leave scarring and bruising just as if
they were. Poe has produced a wonderful piece of work that resonates with the feelings and
experiences of every reader that comes across this poem.

‘The Raven’ is commonly considered to be Edgar Allan Poe’s poetic masterpiece. It details a
harrowing night in the speaker’s life that includes incessant knocking and a talking raven that only
says one word–“Nevermore.”

❖ General
‘The Raven‘ by Edgar Allan Poe is a dark and mysterious poem in which the speaker converses with a
raven.
Throughout the poem, the poet uses repetition to emphasize the mysterious knocking occurring in the
speaker’s home in the middle of a cold December evening. The speaker tries to ignore it and convince
himself that there’s no one there. But, eventually, he opens the door and looks into the darkness,
wondering if it could be his beloved, Lenore, returned to him. No one is there but a raven does fly into
his room. It speaks to him, using only the word “Nevermore.” This is its response to everything the
speaker asks of it.
Finally, the speaker decides that angels have caused the air to fill in density and wonders if they’re
there to relieve him of his pain. The bird answers “Nevermore” and it appears the speaker is going to
live forever in the shadow of the bust of Pallas above his door.

• Popularity: Written by Edgar Allen Poe, “The Raven” is an excellent narrating poem, first published
in 1845 in The New York’s The Evening Mirror. Since then, it has won accolades for the poet for its
musicality, supernatural atmosphere, and odd narration. The poem shows the fear, uncertainty, and
loneliness of a person who is a victim of unfortunate circumstances.
 ❖ Structure and Form

‘The Raven’ by Edgar Allan Poe is a ballad made up of eighteen six-line stanzas. Throughout, the poet
uses trochaic octameter, a very distinctive metrical form. He uses the first-person point of
view throughout, and a very consistent rhyme scheme of ABCBBB. There are a large number of words
that use the same ending, for example, the “ore” in “Lenore” and “Nevermore.” Epistrophe is also
present, or the repetition of the same word at the end of multiple lines.

• “The Raven” as a Melancholic Poem: This poem is about a person, who is traumatized by the
death of his love. The speaker tries to escape from his despair through reading. He is disturbed by
tapping on the door and window by the raven. Knowing that the raven can speak, he asks questions
about Lenore and few more points to which the Raven, replies “Nevermore.” This reply leaves him
heartbroken and infuriates him. He continues to feel the anguish for his loss. Hence, the melancholy
feeling runs throughout the poem.

❖ Plot Summary

An unnamed speaker sits in his chamber on a dreary December night, reading old, esoteric books. He
dearly misses his love, Lenore, who presumably died recently, and he hopes that reading will distract
him from his loss. He has nearly fallen asleep when he suddenly hears someone—or something—
knocking on the door. He’s instantly uneasy but reassures himself that it’s probably just a visitor. He
calls out, apologizing for his delayed response. However, when he opens the door, no one is there. He
whispers, “Lenore,” to the darkness outside but hears only his words echo back at him. Ominously, the
knocking continues, this time from the window. The speaker assumes it is the wind but still feels
uneasy. He opens the window shutters, and a raven hops in, perching on a bust of the Greek goddess
Pallas Athena above the chamber door. The sight of the bird relieves the speaker momentarily. He
jokingly asks the bird’s name. To his utter shock, the raven cries out, “Nevermore.”

The speaker is stunned and unsure of the raven’s meaning. He regains his composure and whispers
that the bird will fly away soon. The raven responds again, “Nevermore!” Still trying to console himself,
the speaker theorizes that the bird must have an owner who taught it to say that one hopeless word.
Curious, the speaker moves his chair in front of the raven. He lounges in the chair, pondering the
raven for a few moments. He thinks about how Lenore will never again lounge upon this chair. He
admonishes himself—God has granted him this one respite from his guilt, and still he thinks of Lenore.
He tells himself to forget Lenore. As if in response, the raven says again, “Nevermore.” Now the
speaker addresses the bird, calling it “evil” and a “prophet.” He asks if he will ever find relief. The
raven says, “Nevermore.” He asks whether he will hold Lenore when he reaches Heaven. The raven
replies, “Nevermore.” Enraged, the speaker orders the raven to leave him alone in his chamber. He
accuses the raven of lying and shouts for it to get out. Without moving at all, the bird repeats its sole
refrain—"Nevermore.” The speaker concludes that the raven still sits upon the bust of Pallas Athena,
casting a shadow over his soul that will always linger.
❖ Analysis of Literary Devices in “The Raven”

literary devices are used to bring richness and clarity to the texts. Edgar Allan Poe has also used
various literary devices to make his poem extraordinary and to help readers interpret the poem. Here
is the analysis of some of the devices used in “The Raven.”

• Metaphor: The first metaphor used in this poem is the thirteenth stanza “To the fowl those fiery eyes
now burned into my bosom’s core.” The second is used in the last stanza “And his eyes have all the
seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming.” The poet here compares Raven’s eyes with fire and demon.
• Personification: Personification is a device that gives human attributes to non-living things
or animals such as “Quoth the Raven “Nevermore” where the Raven is given the ability to speak.
• Allusion: Allusion is a brief and indirect reference to important texts, events, and For example,
“Perched upon a bust of Pallas” shows the reference to Pallas which is one of the names given to an
ancient Greek Goddess Athena, a goddess of wisdom, handicraft, and warfare.
• Simile: The simile used in this poem is “On the morrow he will leave me, as my Hopes have flown
before” here the poet compares his hope to a birds flight. It is often misunderstood as the Raven’s flight.
• Imagery: Poe has skillfully used imagery to create images of the feeling of pain, horror, and grief
while reading the poem. The following phrases “the silken”, “sad”, “uncertain” and “rustling of each
curtain” are the best examples of imagery.
• Alliteration: Alliteration is used to create musical effects in a literary piece. It is the repetition of the
same consonant sounds in the same line such as /s/ in “from my books surcease the last sorrow-
sorrow for the lost Lenore”, /w/ and /n/ sounds in “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered
weak and weary.”
• Assonance: Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds occurring closely in the same line such as
the sound of /e/ in “dreary, weak and weary” and the sound of /o/ and /ee/ in “dreaming dreams no
mortal ever dared to dream before.”
• Consonance: It refers to the repetition of consonant sounds that come in quick occurrence in the
same line such as /p/ and /d/ sounds in “I nodded nearly napping suddenly come a tapping” and /o/
sound in “On this home by Horror haunted—tell me truly, I implore.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
❖ Analysis of Poetic Devices in “The Raven”

Poetic and literary devices are the same, but a few are used only in poetry. Here is the analysis of
some of the poetic devices used in this poem.

• Stanza: A stanza is a poetic form of different numbers of lines. There are 18 stanzas in this poem,
and each stanza has six lines.
• Rhyme Scheme: The whole poem follows the ABCBBB rhyme scheme and AA, B, CC, CB, B, B
for internal rhyme patterns. Examples of internal rhyme are the use of word “dreary” and “weary” in
the same line. The use of “lore, door and again door” at the end of the second, fourth and fifth lines
is end rhyme pattern.
• Repetition: There is a repetition of the line, “Quoth the Raven “Nevermore” in the text which has
enhanced the musical quality of the poem.
• Refrain: The lines that are repeated at some distance in the poems are called a refrain. The line
“Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore” is repeated in the same words. Therefore, it has achieved the status
of a refrain of this poem.
Analysis of Main Ideas

o The Speaker

An unnamed speaker sits in his chamber on a dreary December night, reading old, esoteric books.
He dearly misses his love, Lenore, who presumably died recently, and he hopes that reading will
distract him from his loss. He has nearly fallen asleep when he suddenly hears someone—or
something—knocking on the door. He’s instantly uneasy but reassures himself that it’s probably just
a visitor. He calls out, apologizing for his delayed response. However, when he opens the door, no
one is there. He whispers, “Lenore,” to the darkness outside but hears only his words echo back at
him. Ominously, the knocking continues, this time from the window. The speaker assumes it is the
wind but still feels uneasy. He opens the window shutters, and a raven hops in, perching on a bust of
the Greek goddess Pallas Athena above the chamber door. The sight of the bird relieves the
speaker momentarily. He jokingly asks the bird’s name. To his utter shock, the raven cries out,
“Nevermore.”
The speaker is stunned and unsure of the raven’s meaning. He regains his composure and whispers
that the bird will fly away soon. The raven responds again, “Nevermore!” Still trying to console
himself, the speaker theorizes that the bird must have an owner who taught it to say that one
hopeless word. Curious, the speaker moves his chair in front of the raven. He lounges in the chair,
pondering the raven for a few moments. He thinks about how Lenore will never again lounge upon
this chair. He admonishes himself—God has granted him this one respite from his guilt, and still he
thinks of Lenore. He tells himself to forget Lenore. As if in response, the raven says again,
“Nevermore.” Now the speaker addresses the bird, calling it “evil” and a “prophet.” He asks if he will
ever find relief. The raven says, “Nevermore.” He asks whether he will hold Lenore when he reaches
Heaven. The raven replies, “Nevermore.” Enraged, the speaker orders the raven to leave him alone
in his chamber. He accuses the raven of lying and shouts for it to get out. Without moving at all, the
bird repeats its sole refrain—"Nevermore.” The speaker concludes that the raven still sits upon the
bust of Pallas Athena, casting a shadow over his soul that will always linger.

o Lenore is gone forever.

By the end of the poem, the speaker realizes how fully cut off he is from Lenore, both physically and
spiritually. When the speaker first discusses Lenore in Stanza 2, he notes that, in his world, she’s
now forever “nameless,” indicating that she has died. When he hears the knock on the door, he
describes himself as “dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.” That is, he harbors
an impossible hope that Lenore has returned from the grave. In Stanza 13, he again thinks of how
he will never see her again, focusing on her physical absence by considering that she will never
again “press” into the velvet of his chair.
From here, the speaker’s thoughts turn to spiritual matters, namely angels and seraphim, as he
imagines forgetting Lenore, shutting himself away from memory. Although the speaker cannot
forget, as the raven echoes, he believes himself spiritually alienated from Lenore. When the raven
tells him he will never embrace Lenore in Heaven, it implies that the speaker is damned. Because
the raven only appears to say one word, it remains ambiguous whether this curse merely reflects
the speaker’s darkest fears or whether the raven truly knows his grim fate. Either way, the speaker
ends the poem with the belief that he has lost Lenore in both this life and the next.
 o The speaker’s grief will never fade.

The poem follows the speaker as he comes to terms with the fact that Lenore’s memory will always
haunt him. Although he states at the beginning of the poem that he’s reading books to distract
himself from memories of Lenore, this approach clearly hasn’t worked because when he first opens
the door to investigate the tapping, he calls out her name. In Stanza 2, the speaker states that
Lenore will forever be nameless in his world, implying that he cannot even bear to mention her
name; however, he repeats her name over and over throughout the poem, highlighting the futility of
forgetting her. Even the novelty of seeing a talking raven in his room cannot fully distract him, as we
see in Stanza 13, when he thinks about how Lenore will never sit in the chair in his chamber again.
After admonishing himself to forget Lenore, the speaker takes advantage of the raven’s refrain to
wallow in his grief, asking questions that he knows the bird will have one response to: “Nevermore.”
This demonstrates that the speaker doesn’t truly desire to forget Lenore. He opts to dwell in his grief
and uses the raven’s presence to do so.

In addition to the events of the poem highlighting the endlessness of grief, the poem’s structure
urges the reader to remember Lenore’s name. In the rhyme scheme—ABCBBB—the B rhyme that
repeats for more than half of each stanza is always “Lenore” or a word that rhymes with it. The
sound of her name echoes throughout the poem, reminding the speaker and the reader of the
unending nature of the speaker’s grief. Ultimately, by the end, the speaker knows that he will forever
have the cloud of Lenore’s loss hanging over him.

o Madness triumphs over sanity.

Throughout the poem, the speaker’s grief and guilt overcome his rational thought, drowning out his
sanity. At the beginning, the speaker appears rational, yet melancholy. He is reading books, which
is usually an act of expanding one’s mind, and sits in a room that has a bust of the Greek goddess
of wisdom on display. We can infer that he is a person who values rational thought and education.
Furthermore, throughout the early stanzas, the speaker attempts to find rational explanations for the
eerie sounds he hears—telling himself it’s a visitor or the wind. These are signs of a mind still
operating on the basis of logic. Although asking a bird its name seems odd, the speaker’s
amusement and relief suggests that he initially begins talking to the bird as a kind of joke.

However, the raven’s first word represents a turning point for the speaker. Once the bird says,
“Nevermore,” the speaker asks increasingly desperate questions that he has no evidence the bird
will have the true answer to. Indeed, as far as he knows, the bird can repeat only one word, implying
that the speaker imbues this word with his own dark meanings. Finally, he calls the bird a liar for
repeating the very word he knew it would say, projecting his own guilt and fear onto the raven. At
the end of the poem, the dark, ominous bird, associated with death and perched upon the bust of
Athena, serves as a visual representation of madness and grief clouding sanity and allowing the
very worst and darkest recesses of the mind to take over.
 ❖ Themes
o The Isolating Power of Grief
The poem explores how grief can overcome a person’s ability to live in the present and engage with
society. Over the course of the poem, the speaker’s inability to forget his lost love Lenore drives him to
despair and madness. At the beginning, the speaker describes himself as “weak and weary,”
suggesting that his attempts to distract himself from Lenore’s memory by reading have only exhausted
him. Although he is initially amused by the raven, the raven’s word “nevermore” soon reminds the
speaker of how he won’t ever see Lenore again. The power of this revelation moves him so deeply that
he believes the air has grown “denser,” making it more difficult to breathe and emphasizing that
Lenore’s presence in his memory completely changes his perception of reality. Though the speaker
tries to convince himself that he should forget his grief, the raven’s refrain takes him back to the reality
of his loss, again taking him out of the present moment. When he tells the raven to leave his loneliness
“unbroken,” he’s emphasizing that his grief has caused him to shut himself off from the world, but,
paradoxically, he’s not truly alone because the memory of Lenore keeps him company.

o Psychological Terror
Despite the poem’s strange atmosphere, everything that happens could actually have a rational
explanation. The speaker begins the poem in an unsettled state, trying to distract himself from his grief,
and the “quaint and curious volume” he reads could certainly put him in a dark and suggestible state of
mind that the dreary December night only enhances. Ravens can imitate human speech, and a raven
could theoretically make a noise similar to the word “nevermore.” However, the events of the poem are
undeniably ghostly, and the bird’s refrain perfectly suiting the speaker’s mental state seems too
coincidental, hinting at the presence of something supernatural. This ambiguity demonstrates both the
mind’s capacity to terrorize itself and the fact that psychological hauntings can disturb and destroy as
much as physical danger. Whether we believe the bird can only repeat one word or whether it delivers
a prophecy of doom, hearing “nevermore”—a word that emphasizes the eternal nature of the speaker’s
grief and loss—is what ultimately leaves the speaker mentally wrecked.

o Hopelessness
The poem emphasizes the hopelessness of the speaker’s situation—he will never again reunite with his
beloved Lenore, physically or spiritually. As the poem progresses, the speaker finds three possible
comforts to his grief that he quickly realizes will never come to pass, leaving him without hope of relief.
First, when he hears the tapping on the door, the speaker allows himself some hope that he will see
Lenore again, as evidenced when he opens the door and calls her name into the darkness. Hearing
only his voice echo back at him quashes this hope, and the raven’s repetition of the word “nevermore”
further emphasizes that the speaker has physically lost Lenore forever. Next, the speaker takes the
bird’s appearance as a sign that perhaps he can forget Lenore and find relief in forgetting. Again, the
word “nevermore” dashes this hope as earlier in the poem. Finally, the speaker asks the raven about
seeing Lenore in Heaven, which the raven again rejects. The bird’s refrain, “nevermore,” is an
inarguable absolute, meaning that nothing can change about the speaker’s situation. Because the
speaker only asks the raven questions about Lenore after he establishes that the bird will always say
“nevermore,” his pleas for mercy act as a self-fulfilling prophecy of despair. He has placed himself in a
position where he will only receive an answer that dooms him to endless sorrow, emphasizing that he
has created his own hopelessness.
 ❖ Symbols
Literary Devices Symbols

There are three primary symbols in “The Raven”: the raven, the bust of Pallas, and the speaker’s
chamber. All of these symbols work together to form a portrait of the speaker’s grief.

o The Raven

The titular raven represents the speaker’s unending grief over the loss of Lenore. Ravens
traditionally carry a connotation of death, as the speaker himself notes when he refers to the bird as
coming from “Night’s Plutonian shore,” or the underworld. The raven’s constant refrain of
“nevermore” reminds the speaker of the finality of Lenore’s absence, that he will never see her again
in this life or the next, and the impossibility of forgetting her. Therefore, the primary action of the
poem—the raven interrupting the speaker’s seclusion—symbolizes how the speaker’s grief intrudes
upon his every thought.

At the end, when the speaker describes the raven’s shadow as hanging over his soul, he refers to
the way his grief clouds his very existence.

o The Bust of Pallas

“Pallas” refers to the Greek goddess of wisdom, Pallas Athena. The bust of Pallas that the raven
perches upon represents sanity, wisdom, and scholarship. When the raven perches upon this statue
of Athena, it visually represents the way the speaker’s rationality is threatened by the raven’s
message.

The bird’s refusal to move from the statue to either leave the chamber entirely or perch anywhere
else in the room further demonstrates how the speaker’s grief is immovable and gradually blocking
his rational thought.

o The Chamber

The chamber is the setting of this poem, and it symbolizes the speaker’s attempt to shut himself
away from his grief. Although he’s not entirely successful at reading to distract himself from thoughts
of Lenore, it is not until he opens the door to check on the knocking that he actively allows himself to
pursue thoughts of her.
In this light, the raven entering his chamber symbolizes the way grief has invaded the speaker’s life.
Even his solitary chamber is not impenetrable or secure against the madness that results from the
loss of his beloved.