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Its use of language, alliteration, internal rhymes, and archaic vocabulary, enhances the Gothic tenor of the piece and has led to numerous parodies. It is best remembered for its varied and repeated key line, "Quoth the Raven: 'Nevermore.'" It has a metrical construction that is mesmeric in quality, as shown in its famous opening lines:
All 18 verses have the same form, as the narrator's night terrors increase.
The poem, like other works by Poe such as " The Black Cat", " The Imp of the Perverse " and " The Tell-Tale Heart", is a study of guilt or "perverseness" (in Poe's own words, "The human thirst for self-torture"). Although we are told in those stories that the narrators have killed someone, in "The Raven" we are only told that the narrator has lost his love, Lenore (imported from an earlier poem, " Lenore" ( 1831) which was itself a massive reworking of " A Paean "; both are also about the death of a young woman). His reaction to the loss has been colored by mysticism ("volume of forgotten lore"), and we know he is filled with fear at receiving a visitor (perhaps Lenore herself, "the whispered word 'Lenore'"), before he even sees the mysterious raven ("from the night's plutonian shore"--Pluto being the god of hades, implying that the Raven is from Hell), with its single word of judgment, "Nevermore."
"Guilt" should not be taken here in either the standard legal or moral senses. Poe's characters usually do not feel "guilt" because they did a "bad" thing--that is, the story is not didactic (in his essay " The Poetic Principle " Poe called didacticism the worst of "heresies"); there is no "moral to the story". Guilt, for Poe, is "perverse", and perverseness is the desire for self-destruction. It is completely indifferent to societal distinctions between right and wrong. "Guilt" is the inexplicable and inexorable desire to destroy oneself eo ipso.
The Student (an often-used name for the narrator, since he is introduced as poring over "many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore") quickly learns what the bird will say in response to his questions, and he knows the answer will be negative ("Nevermore"). However, he asks questions, repeatedly, which would optimistically have a "positive" answer, "Is there balm in Gilead? Is Lenore in Aidenn ( Heaven)?" To each question the Raven's predestined reply is "Nevermore", which only increases the narrator's anguish--there is no balm in Gilead, Lenore is not in Heaven etc, and these negative answers are instigated by the narrator himself, by his repreatedly questioning the bird, who acts only as he has been trained to act "by some unhappy master".
The themes of self-perpetuating anguish and self-destroying obsession over the death of a beautiful woman are in themselves the most poetic of topics, according to Poe (see his essay " The Philosophy of CompositionThe Philosophy of Composition is an essay written by Edgar Allan Poe that elaborates a theory about how good writers write when they write well. Poe recounts the process by which he wrote his most famous poem, " The Raven" to illustrate the theory. The es"). The torture which the bird has brought to the narrator was already in the narrator's ruminating character--the bird only brought out what was inside. The raven itself is a mechanical process: deterministic, preordained, one word being the bird's "only stock and store." The Student throws himself against this process in a form of masochism , and lets it destroy him and consume him ("my soul from out that shadow shall be lifted--Nevermore!")
Why or how Lenore was lost, we do not know, but the narrator is torn between the desire to forget and the desire to remember. Death without cause is standard for Poe (See " Ligeia ", " Eleonora ", " Morella ", " BereniceBerenice has been the name of several Ptolemaic queens in Cyrenaica and Egypt and several Herodian Jewish princesses in Judea. Berenike is the Macedonian form of the Greek name Pherenike''. Ptolemaic Berenices Berenice I was first the wife of Philip, an o", " The Fall of the House of UsherThe Fall of the House of Usher is a short story in the horror genre written by Edgar Allan Poe in 1839, and included in a collection of his stories entitled Tales of the Grotesque and of the Arabesque published the same year. In the story the narrator des", " The Oval PortraitThe Oval Portrait is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe involving the disturbing tale of a portrait in a chateau. The story revolves around a man staying the night in an old manor house. He notices a terribly life-like portrait of a beautiful young woman in, " Annabell Lee ", " Lenore", " A Pćan ", " The Bells " and others). The female beauty dies without cause or explanation--or she dies because she was beautiful. In the end, the narrator clings to the memory, for that is all he has left. What the raven has taken from him so cruelly is his loneliness--but this cruelty he brought upon himself, for he cannot resist the urge to interrogate the raven. He is fascinated by this "No" machine--and constantly asks it questions hoping it will say "yes" (forevermore). Every time he asks the answer will be the same. The raven will stay.
Although the bird seems a hallucinationA hallucination is a false sensory perception in the absence of an external stimulus, as distinct from an illusion, which is a misperception of an external stimulus. Hallucinations may occur in any sensory modality visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory,, it is in fact real (whether hallucination or not), with real black feathers and a real croaking of the single word, "Nevermore."
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