At first the speaker does not take the Raven very
seriously. He assumes it is a tame bird that somehow escaped from its owner and is only
seeking temporary shelter. He describes it in a facetious
manner.
Not the least obeisance made he; not a
minute stopped or stayed he,
But with mien of lord or
lady, perched above my chamber door--
He
actually smiles at the bird and jokes with
it:
Then the ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy
into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the
countenance it wore...
Tell me what
thy lordly name is...
He assumes that the Raven
will leave him eventually, and he is still feeling some amusement in the middle of the
poem:
But the Raven still beguiling all my sad
soul into smiling...
But he begins to speculate
about what, if anything, the bird means by ""Nevermore." The narrator is beginning to
take the black bird more seriously. The Raven is not a symbol of a lost maiden but a
symbol of death and always had been a symbol of death since the saintly days of yore.
When we are young we are immortal because we do not know we are mortal. When it occurs
to us that some day we are going to die we think it is funny because that event is so
far off that the day will never arrive--or maybe somebody will invent an immortality
pill before our turn comes! The poem is about the way we view death throughout our
lives. At first it seems amusing, then intriguing, then a little frightening, then
ominous, then like a big black cloud hanging over us and everyone else, including those
we love, and making life seem meaningless and horrible.
The
Raven makes the speaker remember his lost Lenore, whom he had hoped to meet again in a
later life. Actually the speaker had been half-hoping that the tapping he heard at his
window might be the ghost of Lenore, which is why the only word spoken when he looked
out the window "was the whispered word, "Lenore?" The name is followed by a question
mark to show that the poet is wondering if he is being visited by his dead paramour.
When the Raven tells him he will see her "Nevermore," he reacts with
anger.
"Prophet!" said I, "thing of
evil!--prophet still, if bird or devil--
He asks
if there is balm in Gilead? This is a way of asking if there is any truth to the
customary, conventional religious answer to the mystery of death, specifically as
contained in the Bible. Is there really any hope of resurrection? And the Raven tells
him "Nevermore," meaning that death is nothing but eternal oblivion without any
hope.
He tries to expel the Raven from his
home.
"Be that word our sign of parting, bird or
fiend!" I shrieked, upstarting--
This is the
speaker's way of saying that he will simply refuse to think about the subject of death.
After all, what good is there in thinking about something so unpleasant? But the bird
refuses to leave. This is how the shadow of death stays with us as we grow old. We have
given up hope and can only await our final
hour.
And my soul from out that shadow that lies
floating on the floor|
Shall be
lifted--nevermore!
Edgar Allan Poe was
preoccupied with death, as shown, for instance, in "The Masque of the Red Death," in
which he dwells on the idea that death is inescapable, and in the story "Ligeia," in
which he includes the poem "The Conqueror Worm" and has his heroine express the horror
and desperation which apparently haunted Poe himself and made him such an unhappy
person.
"O God!" half shrieked Ligeia, leaping to
her feet and extending her arms aloft with a spasmodic movement, as I made an end of
these lines --"O God! O Divine Father! --shall these things be undeviatingly so? --shall
this Conqueror be not once conquered? Are we not part and parcel in Thee? Who --who
knoweth the mysteries of the will with its vigor? Man doth not yield him to the angels,
nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble
will."
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