Happiness Nevermore
The crushing weight of painful memories imprisons the soul with endless sorrow and despair. In the narrative poem, “The Raven,” written by Edgar Allan Poe, the raven is symbolic. During the night, while the narrator is reading in an attempt to forget his sorrow for the loss of his love, Lenore, a strange, black raven flies through his window and perches above his bedroom door. The narrator proceeds to ask the raven several questions and the raven surprisingly answers each question with the word “nevermore.” The raven causes the narrator despair by reminding him that he will nevermore be with Lenore. Despite the narrator commanding the raven to leave him, the raven remains sitting above his bedroom door and eventually, its shadow encircles the narrator’s soul. Many writers often use birds as symbols of hope, freedom, and light. However, in “The Raven,” Edgar Allan Poe uses the image of the raven in a different way.
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While the narrator is sitting in Lenore’s previous velvet seat, he declares that the raven’s “fiery eyes now burned into my bosom’s core” (74). The bosom’s core is referring to the core of his life, which is his heart. The raven’s flaming eyes burned deep within the narrator’s heart. This line of the poem is comparing the raven’s eyes to the mournful memories of Lenore. In reality, the raven’s eyes did not physically burn the narrator. Instead, the memories of Lenore burned deep within the narrator’s heart. The flaming eyes of the raven that burned the narrator’s heart reveal that the memories of Lenore are excruciatingly painful for him. The loss of Lenore completely decimated the narrator. The raven’s eyes burned into the narrator’s heart are symbolic of the painful memories of Lenore that permanently burned into his heart. The memories of a deceased loved one are indelibly engraved within the heart. The heart indelibly engraves the memories of a deceased loved