Essay On Mood In The Tell-Tale Heart And The Raven

In his short stories “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Raven”, Edgar Allen Poe creates mood using repetition, alliteration, and imagery. Many literary elements contribute greatly to a writer’s mood and tone. Poe uses repetition to create mood and tone in his writing by crafting sentences that set the reader’s pace. This is best shown in this sentence from “The Raven”, “And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door.” Repetition is also well used in this excerpt from “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “I put in a dark lantern, all closed, closed so that no light shone out.” The repetition used in these two sentences sets a fast pace for the reader, encouraging them to read faster and create a suspenseful mood. The elements of tone and mood are very important to a writer’s work. Poe uses alliteration, an element of mood, to create

He expressed his sorrows in macabre stories, using imagery to show the reader the dark scenes he felt everyday. Poe conveys his experience with grief and loss in many of his stories, including this sentence from “The Raven”, “Vainly I had sought to borrow from my books surcease of sorrow - sorrow for the lost Lenore.”, in which Lenore refers to the narrator’s deceased lover. One quote from his writing which represents his feelings toward sickness and death comes from his 1842 story, “Masque of the Red Death”, “And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall.” It is also shown in “The Tell-Tale Heart”, when Poe writes, “All in vain; because Death, in approaching him had stalked with his black shadow before him, and enveloped the victim.”, once more depicting death in a dark and horrific fashion as a central plot element in the