The Raven is a narrative poem by Edgar Allan Poe, published in 1845, famous for its dramatic, Gothic quality. The scene is set from the beginning: the unnamed narrator is in a lonely apartment on a “bleak December” night, with little more than a dying fire to light the room, when he hears an eerie tapping from outside his chamber door. Into the darkness he whispers, “Lenore,” hoping his lost love has come back, but all that could be heard was “an echo [that] murmured back the word ‘Lenore!'”. The tapping persisting, he opens the window whereupon the mysterious raven enters the room and perches atop a sculptured bust above his door.
The man asks the raven for his name, and surprisingly it answers, croaking “Nevermore.” The man knows that the bird does not speak from reason, but has been taught by “some unhappy master,” and that the word “nevermore” is its only response. Thus, he asks a series of questions, all eliciting the stock response at the end of each stanza.
Poe was very interested in expressing melancholy in poetic form. As he wrote in Graham’s Magazine in 1846: “Of all melancholy topics, what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?” – the answer, of course, Death. And when is Death most poetical? “When it most closely allies itself to beauty: the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world”. Hence, the poem is about the despair of a bereaved lover, and Poe’s use of the raven – that bird of ill-omen – does little to suggest that a happy outcome is forthcoming! Perhaps the raven stands for the narrator’s subconscious as he struggles with the concepts of death and finality.
There is a lilting rhythm in play; it’s melodic as well as dramatic (and since you ask, it’s in trochaic octameter, with eight stressed-unstressed two-syllable feet per lines). There is frequent use of internal rhyme, and much repetition of rhyming around the “or” sound (Lenore, door, lore, nevermore).
Who better to narrate this great poem than the prince of horror himself, Vincent Price? Here he is in wonderful Gothic form, narrating, indeed acting, this dark classic…superb.
