Lost Love In The Raven And Ethan Frome

The feeling of lost love is an intense, terrible feeling that often can dominate people's lives. As such it has been a common topic in much of literature. “Annabel Lee,” “The Raven,” and Ethan Frome are popular examples of literature that deal with lost love. Each piece explores the emotions that losing someone close brings and the effect it can have on someone’s life. Each story demonstrates lost love in their own unique way.

Firstly, “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe is a classic poem about the sorrow one man feels over the death of his significant other, Lenore. His sorrow and loneliness is represented by an unsettling raven. The raven confidently enters the study of the narrator “with mien of lord or lady,”(Poe, 7). The raven imposes himself into the narrator's personal space, representative of how misfortune

This novel is different from the previous two pieces because instead of exploring the death of a loved one, it is about a different kind of lost love. The novel is about a man named Ethan Frome who is discontent in his marriage with his wife Zeena. Instead, he falls for Zeena’s cousin, Mattie. It is eventually revealed that Mattie also likes Ethan, and when they realize that they cannot be together, they attempt to commit suicide. Neither of them die, however, and Mattie becomes permanently paralyzed. It is emphasized throughout the novel that Ethan wants to leave his boring town and live a fulfilling life, away from his sickly parents and eventually his sickly wife. When he meets a girl, his true love, who might be able to take him away from everything, she ends up becoming ill as well. Ethan could never escape the mundane, and in the process loses his love. This form of lost love is unlike the lost love in Poe’s works. Instead of a loved one dying, Ethan Frome explores what happens when what is attractive about someone is lost and that person instead becomes a hinderance, a separate kind of lost