On the afternoon of January 29th, 1845, Nathaniel Parker Willis, editor of the New York Evening Mirror, introduced to the world one of the most haunting poems ever written by an American author. “The Raven,” as Willis noted, “is the most effective single example of fugitive poetry ever published in this country. It is unsurpassed. . . for its subtle conception, masterly ingenuity of versification, and consistent. . . imaginative lift.” The initial publication of “The Raven” created a sensation in every literary circle throughout America and brought fame and recognition for Edgar Poe, the poverty-stricken author and the source of some of the most terrifying tales ever put to paper. Charles Fenno Hoffman, a reviewer for the Mirror, later described “The Raven” as “a prime example of deep despair brooding over wisdom,” and following this, James H. Brooks, editor of the Morning Express, supported Hoffman’s views by adding that “The Raven” reminds one of deep settled grief, bordering on sullen despair.” Despite the accurate impressions of these reviewers, Poe’s meticulous application of poetic metaphor conjures up images far more compelling than mere grief or despair and stands today as one of the great symbolic masterpieces of American poetry produced in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Like many of his works of versification, Poe’s inspiration for “The Raven” lies in his childhood while under the care of Frances and John Allan in the antebellum South of Richmond, Virginia. In 1815, when Edgar was six years old, the Allan household maintained a parrot that could recite the English alphabet and many years later Poe mentioned to his friend and colleague Cornelius Matthews that the spirit of a talkative raven had haunted him all his life. “That bird, that imp bird pursues me, perpetually,” he said. “I cannot rid myself of its presence. I hear its croak. . . the flap of its wings constantly in my ear.” Thus, Poe’s choice of a raven as his messenger of doom and the articulator of the haunting “Nevermore” is a representation of his own personal demons as shown by his confession to Mathews. The “Ghastly grim and ancient Raven” is also a reflection of the poem’s unidentified narrator who undoubtedly is Poe himself–a grieving, elocuting hero who succumbs to a fatal flaw in his personality via the ominous bird from some very dark and unknown land, perhaps Hell itself.

The poetical tone of “The Raven” revolves around sadness and melancholy which Poe called “the most legitimate emotions” in poetry. After much contemplation on a central theme for the poem, Poe decided to utilize “the most melancholic of all topics,” namely death and oblivion, the final lifting of the veil which comes to all of us. Poe also decided that, as a character, the ominous bird must be emblematic, a symbol of “mournful and never-ending remembrance.”

“The Raven” opens with one of the most memorable lines of any American poem–”Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary/Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,” which indicates that the narrator is an emotionally burdened scholar who, as Poe scholar Thomas Ollive Mabbott observes, “often turned from one volume to another and back again,” due to his spiritual restlessness. As the narrator ponders over the numerous tomes before him, he suddenly hears “a tapping/As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door” (line 4) which upsets his meditations and prompts him to reflect on this occurrence as “Only this, and nothing more” (line 6).

According to Poe biographer Arthur Hobson Quinn, the “rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore” (line 11) in the second stanza is a reference to Jane Stanard (1793-1824), the inspiration for the classic poem “To Helen. Stanard, the mother of Edgar’s boyhood friend Robert Stanard, was sixteen years Poe’s senior in 1823, yet he loved her “passionately and devoutedly” as mentioned in a letter to his longtime supporter George Eveleth in 1845. After Stanard’s death in 1824 from an apparent brain tumor, Edgar visited her grave at Shockoe Hill Cemetery for months on end, often spending hours there in a state of utter grief. Thus, the narrator’s Lenore, at least in the domain of his lonely chamber, remains “Nameless here, forevermore” (line 12).

“And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain” (line 13) in the third stanza conveys the narrator’s emotional connection to the color purple

as a symbol of mourning for a loved one who has passed into the eternal night of the grave. The metaphorical movement of the curtains by gentle breezes at the window represents the spirit of Lenore attempting to make her presence known to the narrator, who “to still the beating of my heart” (line 15) regards the rapping at his door as merely “This. . . and nothing more” (line 18), a sign of his conscious acceptance that the rustling is nothing but the wind and not the invisible fingers of his long-lost Lenore.

In the fourth stanza, as a result of the rustling of the curtains and the tapping at his door, the narrator rises from his seat near the fireplace. The door pivots open and he finds “Darkness there, and nothing more” (line 24), a revelation of his dark, wandering imagination, due to his melancholy over the loss of his beloved Lenore.

As he gazes into the darkness outside his door while “Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before” (line 26) in the fifth stanza, a calm desperation overcomes him and he whispers into the night “Lenore!” with the hope that she is truly there. But to his regret, the night only echoes back “Lenore!” amid the cold December darkness, a stark reminder of his “mournful and never-ending remembrance” which turns out to be “Merely this and nothing more” (line 30).

As he discovers and accepts the situation, the narrator in the sixth stanza turns back into his sullen chamber with “all my soul within me burning” (line 31), an allusion to his regret for failing to see Lenore amid the blackness of the evening. But then he hears “a tapping, somewhat louder than before” (line 32) which compels him to move to the window lattice “and this mystery explore” (line 34). With continued suspicion that the spirit of Lenore does indeed dwell just beyond the threshold, he laments and sighs that surely “Tis the wind and nothing more” (line 36).

In the seventh stanza, the ominous bird enters the chamber through the open window “with many a flirt and flutter” (line 37) and perches atop a bust of Pallas “just above my chamber door” (line 40), or a bust of Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom. As the Gods have decreed, Athena’s heavenly consort on Mount Olympus is an owl, the very bird which Poe had initially considered as his messenger of doom before settling on a raven. Therefore, the bust of Pallas symbolizes the bird’s timeless ability to foretell the future, much like Athena’s gift of prophesy bestowed upon her by Zeus. While the narrator’s despair is deepened by the raven’s uncanny invocation of “Nevermore,” the line “Not the least obeisance made he; not an instant stopped or stayed he” (39) implies that the bird’s only true purpose for being in the chamber is to pay homage to time as it continues its linear path between eternity and nothingness.

As the bird sits upon the bust of Pallas and forces the narrator into “beguiling my sad fancy into smiling” (line 43) in the eighth stanza, he then makes the odd observation “Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou. . . art sure no craven” (lines 45-46), a symbolic reference to a cowardly knight of medieval lore whose head was shaved due to his lack of courage on the battlefield. Yet the bird, as far as the narrator is concerned, is surely no “craven,” or a person without courage. Thus, the raven is a metaphorical contradiction with traits of bravery and cowardice, a knight in black armor with the heart of a weakling.

The bird is also a symbol of “the Night’s Plutonian shore” (line 48), being Pluto, the Greek god of the underworld, an emblem of darkness, death and desolation. The narrator supports this, for he considers the bird to be “Ghastly, grim and ancient” (line 46). When he charges the bird as to “what thy lordly name is” (line 48), the raven croaks “Nevermore!” (line 49) which epitomizes the eternal and the preternatural realms of Time itself.

In the ninth stanza, the narrator bemuses with “Much I marveled this ungainly fowl” (line 50) via the bird’s discourse of “Nevermore” which at first does not register any kind of meaning in the narrator’s mind. He admits that word has “little meaning–little relevancy” (line 51), which shows his ignorance of it as a sign of perpetual damnation. The narrator also refers to himself as a “sublunary being” (line 52) or one who dwells in the ordinary terrestrial world while under the spell of Selene, the moon goddess.

In the tenth stanza, while the bird sits “lonely on the pallid bust” (line 56), the narrator becomes obsessed with “That one word,” the proverbial “Nevermore” as if “his soul. . . he did outpour” (line 57) with the mere mention of it. He then mutters to himself “Other friends have flown before/On the morrow he will leave me, as my Hopes have flown before” (lines 59-60). This indicates that he expects the bird to eventually fly away and return to the place of his origin, which at this point remains unclear. These “other friends” are obviously related to the women in Edgar’s life who left him prematurely through death–his natural mother Elizabeth Arnold Poe, Frances Allan, his foster mother and Jane Stanard. It is interesting to note that Poe’s wife Virginia, at the time “The Raven” was published, was dying from tuberculosis. Therefore, the bird symbolizes the narrator’s hopelessness and his inability to maintain life-long romantic attachments due to the inevitability that all those he loves and adores will someday fly away into the realms of the unknown.

As he contemplates the bird’s presence in his chamber, the narrator in the eleventh stanza ponders “Doubtless. . . what it utters is its only stock and store” (line 64), a reference to the bird’s former “unhappy master” (line 65) who taught the bird to recite “that sad answer, Nevermore” (line 67). At this point in the poem, our melancholic narrator is linking one idea with another in order to formulate a logical reason why this ebony visitor continues to croak “Nevermore,” a possible sign, he assumes, of the bird’s former owner who must also have been melancholy over the passing of a beloved other.

And now, with the raven “beguiling all my sad soul into smiling” (line 68), the narrator in the twelfth stanza wheels “a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust, and door” (line 69) and commences to “linking fancy unto fancy” (line 70) with the hope of determining exactly what the bird means by the repetitious “Nevermore.” His view of the bird as “grim, ungainly, ghastly (and) gaunt” (line 71) reflects his puzzlement over the personality of the bird as an unyielding visage of foreboding evil.

As he reclines “on the cushion’s velvet lining” (line 76) in the thirteenth stanza, his mind turns to thoughts of his long-lost Lenore while the “fiery eyes” of the bird burn “into my bosom’s core” (line 74). His remorse that “she shall press. . . ah, nevermore!” (line 79) the same velvet cushion under the lamplight indicates that Lenore is long dead and that the scent of her person still lingers on the cushion, much like the light being thrown upon it from a nearby oil lamp. The color of velvet, whether purple or red, also symbolizes blood, an association with the dreaded disease of consumption which took the lives of Elizabeth Arnold Poe in 1811 and eventually Virginia Clemm in 1847, two years after “The Raven” was first published in the Evening Mirror.

In the fourteenth stanza, the atmosphere of the chamber suddenly alters and becomes “denser, perfumed from an unseen censer” (line 80), a sign of Lenore’s spirit inhabiting the chamber. He then determines “thy God hath lent thee–by (the) angels he has sent thee” (lines 82-83) which shows that the raven is now a messenger from Heaven sent to comfort him in his sorrow for the lost Lenore. Consequently, he attempts to drown these sorrows with “respite and nepenthe” (line 84) which Mabbott defines as a drink “of sovereign grace, devised by the Gods. . . to assuage the heart’s grief.” But as the narrator wishes to “quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore” (line 85), the bird replies with the odious “Nevermore,” sealing the narrator’s fear that his sorrow will never be lifted and his desire to forget Lenore will forever remain unfulfilled.

The bird has now taken on the visage of a “Prophet. . . thing of evil” in the fifteenth stanza, a “prophet still, if bird or devil!” (line 87) due to his grief being unaffected by the nepenthe. He pleads with the bird to tell him “on this desert land enchanted–On this home by horror haunted” (lines 89-90) whether or not there is “balm in Gilead” (line 91), a legendary compound which relieves and heals the pains of the soul, a comforter for the ills manifested by the raven’s unsettling repetition of “Nevermore.”

The narrator then confronts the bird in the sixteenth stanza with the question “Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn” I shall ever “clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore” (lines 95-96). This reference to Aidenn is a term for the Garden of Eden, but when the bird replies in the negative, the narrator realizes that Lenore is dead forever, in body and spirit and that she resides in neither Heaven nor Hell. This enrages him in the seventeenth stanza to the point of declaring “be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!” (line 99), for he is now sickened by the bird’s presence in his chamber. He orders it “back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!” (line 100) and to “take thy beak from out my heart!” (line 103) which symbolizes the penetration of his heart with a black arrow unlike that of Cupid or Eros. When the bird reiterates “Nevermore,’ the dreaded fact that Lenore will eternally haunt his soul is thus set in stone.

In the final stanza, the narrator relinquishes his fate by stating “the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting, on the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door” (lines 105-06) and that his eyes “have all the seeming of a demon that is dreaming” (line 107); therefore, the bird’s true identity is that of a messenger of doom, akin to the albatross in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” which Edgar dutifully read as a child in Richmond. With the lamplight “streaming” and the bird’s “shadow on the floor” (line 108), the narrator succumbs to his destiny and admits that his tortured soul “from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor/Shall be lifted–nevermore!” (lines 190-10), a doppleganger emblem–both the bird and the narrator are one, eternally melancholy and damned to Hell.

According to the American poet William Carlos Williams, “The Raven” is a poem which associates “words with figures. . . which Poe carried over to his new purpose–to find a way to tell his soul.” Thus, “The Raven” stands as a stark reminder of the sadness and grief that exists in the hearts of men perpetually filled with “quiet desperation.” The true irony of this poem lies in the fact that George H. Colton, editor of the American Review of New York City, paid Poe “not over $20” for this masterpiece of verse, the only payment Poe ever received, for there were no royalties or copyright laws. The spirit of Edgar Poe’s savage muse, however, continues unabated, and the raven, his alter-ego, even after one hundred and fifty years, still is sitting on the pallid bust of Pallas just above his chamber door, gazing mournfully at the distant Aidenn and the night’s Plutonian shore.