The Five Stages of The Raven

Edgar Allen Poe was a master of his craft, creating Gothic literature that still fills up curriculum in schools all around the world, the most famous of these is widely considered to be The Raven. The Raven is a narrative poem with two main characters; a red eyed raven and a narrator that is mourning the loss of his love, Lenore. The raven mysteriously shows up and the main character questions the fowl about things concerning his deceased wife, only to get the same repeated response: “Nevermore” (52). The narrator’s emotions and feelings towards the bird drastically alter within the short period of time that the poem occurs, until it seems he is driven to madness. The poem ends with the silencing of the man with the raven using his home as a permanent perching place. Despite the years of discussion over this work of literature throughout the years and many programs it has been involved in, it is still widely debated what the raven in the story actually represents. Within the poem his attitude towards the bird shifts into five different emotions, each one correlating with a stage of grief. The fact that Poe wrote it in this matter shows that the raven is supposed to represent grief, therefore the narrator is expressing his five stages at this physical manifestation of the grief itself. The first stage of the five is denial. Denial is something we all go through as human beings. Even on a small scale we like to deny when we hear any sort of bad