The Raven Notes

The Raven Notes

The Raven

The narrator

Characters

Lenore

Poe’s unnamed narrator is a scholar who is mourning the death of his beloved, Lenore. He is alone in his house on a cold December midnight, trying to distract himself from his thoughts of her by reading old books. The narrator is a scholar, learned and reasonable, yet his logic and knowledge do not much help him to recover from the impact of Lenore’s death or to escape his desperate hope to see her again. His desperation leads him to emotional extremes, from depression to near euphoria and finally to depression once the Raven pronounces that he and Lenore will be apart forever. It is never made clear whether a supernatural Raven actually visits him and drives him to an ultimate despair, or whether his own obsessive doubts lead him to imagine the Raven, but in either case the Raven overthrows the narrator’s rational mind.

Lenore, the narrator’s lost love, may be a representation of Poe’s own deceased wife Virginia. While Lenore never actually appears in the poem and nothing is revealed about her other than her status as the narrator’s beloved, her presence looms over the text, as the narrator cannot prevent himself grieving her passing and wondering if he might be able to see her again.

On a cold night, at midnight, the narrator is sitting by himself, “weak and weary,” reading an old book full of “forgotten lore” and nodding off. When he is suddenly awakened by something knocking at his door, he assures himself that it’s “nothing more” than a visitor. The narrator then explains that he remembers that all this happened back in December. As the fire slowly dies, each dying ember like a “ghost,” he wishes for the night to pass so that he might escape from his sorrow over Lenore, his dead beloved. To distract himself from thinking about her, he says, he has been reading, but without success. When the curtains rustle, the narrator is suddenly frightened. Once again he tells himself that it’s merely a visitor, and “nothing more.”Finding some measure of courage, he calls out to whoever is knocking at the door of the room, and apologizes that he was taking so long to come to the door because he was napping. The narrator opens the door, only to find that nobody is there. He stands at the entrance to his room, staring into the darkness, equally hopeful and fearful, “dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.” He whispers “Lenore” into the darkness and hears in response only an echo – Lenore! – and “nothing more.” Suddenly, the narrator hears a knocking at his window, and he opens it. The Raven flies in, perching atop a bust of Pallas above the door. At first, the narrator finds the bird’s “grave and stern decorum” amusing, and asks it for its name. To his bemusement, the bird responds “Nevermore.” The narrator remarks to himself that what the Raven says must be “stock and store,” words picked up by copying those from a previous master. But, unable to contain his curiosity, he grabs a velvet chair and sits directly in front of the bird, trying to understand what this “ominous bird of yore” means by “Nevermore.” All the while, he imagines that Lenore might be near. The narrator then perceives that the air has become “denser, perfumed from an unseen censer,” and says it must indicate the presence of “Seraphim,” or angels, sent from God to help him recover from his grief over losing Lenore. He wonders if he might be able to “quaff this kind nepenthe” — to forget about her entirely. The Raven, however, answers “Nevermore.” Growing more anxious, the narrator asks the Raven if there is “balm in Gilead” —if heaven will give him some hope of seeing Lenore again. The bird, as usual, responds “Nevermore.” The narrator asks again if he and Lenore might meet once more “within the distant Aidenn,” or Eden, but again the bird responds “Nevermore” in response. Now furious and heartbroken, the narrator screams at the bird to return to “the Night’s Plutonian shore!” and never return. But the bird does not depart. As the poem ends, the narrator is overcome by despair, while the Raven “never flitting, still is sitting” on the bust of Pallas. The narrator concludes by saying he continues to live in the bird’s inescapable shadow.

As with many other of Poe’s works, “The Raven” explores death. More specifically, this poem explores the effects of death on the living, such as grief, mourning, and memories of the deceased, as well as a question that so often torments those who have lost loved ones to death: whether there is an afterlife in which they will be reunited with the dead.

At the beginning of the poem, the narrator is mourning alone in a dark, cheerless room. He portrays himself as trying to find “surcease of sorrow” by reading his books. One might read this as an effort to distract himself and thereby escape the pain of the death of a loved one. One might also interpret the narrator’s reading of books of “forgotten lore” to indicate that he is looking for arcane knowledge about how to reverse death. In either case, his reaction to the death of a loved one is rather typical: to try to escape the pain of it, or to attempt to deny death.