“The Raven”, by Edgar Allan Poe has several component parts that give it life and allow the reader to recognize it as a classic. Poe’s writings are known for invoking feelings described as spookish, morbid, and ghastly through his Gothic style literature, and “The Raven” was no exception. After reading through the poem several times I believe the Raven represents the main character 's struggle to understand why the raven came to his home, the symbolic nature of the bird itself, and the discovery the Narrator found within himself from the raven.
The poem starts off telling us about a lonely, mourning man who, upon hearing a persistent tapping noise outside his home, opened his window to find a raven. When the bird flew through his window, he was amused by it, saying, “...this ebony bird…[beguiled]... my sad face into smiling”(Line 43). When he asked the bird if it had a name, it simply replied, “Nevermore”(Line 48). He was surprised that the bird actually spoke, and, “Though its answer [held] little meaning [to him]”(Line 50), he felt that no other living human being had ever been blessed with seeing a raven named Nevermore above their chamber door. After the initial shock of having a bird fly through his window wore off, he started to think about the phrase that the bird kept repeating, saying “...the Raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only /That one word, as if his soul in that one
…show more content…
The grim and gloomy feel that “The Raven” emits leaves the reader with a semi-hollow feelings of sorrow for the narrator and his struggle to make sense of this dark presence that is plaguing him. With the limited vocabulary the bird has its message is simple and all the interpretation is created in the narrator’s own mind. The raven, in one word, haunted the Narrator over his loss of his love Lenore and increased the mental suffering he was already dealing with. I guess we all have “ravens” in our own lives and it’s up to us to choose to be irritated by