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Every writer wants to have a writing of his or hers be a best seller from the instant he submits it to the printer. Very few people ever accomplish this feat. Edgar Allan Poe, however, seemed to have a knack for making popular poems and tales. One of his works, The Raven, was an instant success with all kinds of people (Mabbott 350). Although a few writers would agree with T. S.
Eliot when he said that Poe's writing has a pre adolescent mentality (Kennedy 111), this poem is thought by many more people to be Poe's magnum opus; a very in depth and provocative poem which delves into the human mind. This poem achieves its prime rank of his works because of the way Poe fashions it to be veritably flawless in writing technique. He creates a lugubrious, yet paranoid, mood which sets the tone for the whole poem. He also uses stark antithetical contrasts to show differences between expectations and reality. Poe then adds the sense of an unstable minds paranoia into the mix. These three ingredients: mood, antithesis, and the insanity of a paranoid mind are integrated to form the perfect recipe for a successful and popular work; The Raven.
Edgar Allan Poe's use of mood is essential to the quality of The Raven. From the start of the poem Poe sets a dank and dreary setting by using key words in his poetry. Phrases such as midnight dreary and bleak December illustrate this as the narrator relates his actions on a dark winters night. As the narrator, a student of an anonymous identity, sits reading old books of knowledge, he hears a tapping sound. He goes to the door of his room and is greeted by darkness.
He then ventures to the window and opens the shutters. A clumsy raven suddenly flaps into the room and lands on top of the bust of Athena Pallas, the Greek goddess of knowledge. The student initially acts in a light-hearted manner upon the ravens entrance and goes about making sport out of the unexpected visitors presence (Davidson 87). In jest he asks the raven its name, and the fowl responds with the single word, Nevermore. The narrator jokingly finds it queer that a raven would go by a name such as Nevermore. He figures that the raven must have belonged to a master who had fallen on bad times, and thinks it amusing almost to the point of being comical that this one word was the only utterance in this awkward fowls repertoire.
The narrator begins reminiscing about his lost love, Lenore, after this, the mood of the retelling undergoes a sudden shift (Davidson 87). From a jovial attitude, the narrator now sinks into a abnormal state of being overly paranoid to the point of insanity. There is a sense of fear created at this point in the poem. It is not a fear like that of someone who is hiding in the dark with a knife, but a fear of something which is unnaturally abnormal (Gates). This fear is what drives the poem and creates such a masterpiece due to the perfect setting of mood.
Along with mood, there is also a strong use of the literary device, antithesis. This is used in The Raven to show that the narrator undergoes a substantial changing of temperament in the course of the story. He begins his tale with a relatively good disposition. He views actions such as opening the door and finding nothing but darkness and the entrance of a raven into his small chamber as being amusing (Davidson 86). Later in the poem he suddenly shifts into a dark, morbid fear of things he must have seen every day. These opposites show the unstableness of a delirious mind.
Antithesis in The Raven also shows a stark contrast between objects and the students expectations. These expectations which he conjured in his unstable mind also are far different than the reality which faces him in the form of a raven. For instance when the student opens the window, he envisions the apparition of his love, Lenore. The ghost he expected was much different from the raven which he finds.
The ghost he thought he would find would have been of a pale white color, while the raven was jet black. The ghost would have been floating in flowing, soft motions, while the raven was ungainly and awkward in its movements (Davidson 86 - 87). This contrast demonstrates just how wild the imagination of the student becomes. The student expresses an unmistakable converse between the outward expression of his sorrow and his inner torment. He spends his time at study busying himself with old books trying to forget his lost love, but his inner conscience will not let him prevail in this endeavor. His continually contemplating subconscious constantly reminds him of what he has lost with memories and visions.
When he asks questions to the raven, his subconscious almost thinks for him, making up questions for the raven which have answers that he does not want to hear, but knows the answers to already (Davidson 89). By asking whether or not he could see his lost love again, the student tried to fuse two opposites: worldly lust and the sacredness of death (Freedman 146). Lenore's death had not affected the student initially. He had played it off by preoccupying himself and it is not until his terror increases that the reality of her death really hits him (Davidson 89). On the outside he initially seems to be cool headed and quite in control of his emotions, later the turbulence caused by Lenore's death wells up from inside him and he begins to scream at the raven, a completely irrational move, which indicates that he has lost all sense of restraint. [In the narrators life] there is a perpetual war between sentience within and insentient chaos in the outer world; there is not even the comfortable illusion of ultimate sentience in or beyond death (Davidson 89 - 90). This conflict is evident in the poem.
It seems as though the student can contain the deep welling of emotion inside of him. Then, just when the narrator seems as though he has dealt with Lenore's death he begins to contrive abnormally morbid questions to ask the raven. These questions torment the student and as the poem progresses, the narrator seems to plunge into an imaginary world where he delights in torturing himself (Davidson 85). This self torture brings to light the severity of the narrators mental condition because of his loss.
Not only did Edgar Allan Poe weave antithetical relationships into The Raven, but he also spiced the poem with the idea of an imagination which is so uncontrollable that it overrides the boundaries of decency and crosses into the territory of insanity. [This poem] is a symbolic destruction of the mind by the impact of reality upon it (Davidson 90). The poem begins with a student who is assumed to be in command over his subconscious. He is studying in a room which is filled with reminders of his love Lenore. These place him upon the brink of sanity; about to fall into the chasm of insanity.
By some force of will he remains sane despite the reminders, until the raven enters (Davidson 85). When he begins the story he is telling, the narrator is not even aware of the madness which he is afflicted with (Hoffman 76). He puts up a facade; pretending to be dominant over his feelings. The first question the student asks is followed by two others, intended to ease the conscience of the young student (Freedman 146). As the poem proceeds, however, the narrator becomes more and more unstable until his climactic end (Hoffman 76). As the students madness grows, Edgar Allan Poe simultaneously delves into the study of perversity through an eerie and yet almost comic view (Taylor NP).
During the poem, the narrator transforms the night storm, raven, and bust of Athena Pallas from ordinary objects into distorted and twisted visions created by his deranged mind (Davidson 88). The questions thought up by this man are equally demented. He makes questions parallel to his own thoughts. The answer of the raven was expected, if not indeed made into a necessity, to the student. He almost yearned for each monotonous reply and with every one he becomes even more mad (Davidson 88). This makes the raven itself is not necessarily the one to blame for the students madness.
The action and reaction within the poem is caused more so by the morbid questions which are thought by the student (Davidson 88). This shows that the students wildly unstable sub conscience mind became responsible for the utter madness which the student broke into during the poem. There are some reasons for the insanity which befell the student. There is a collision of the students inner and outer emotions. These emotions were so distinctly different that there could be no harmony between them. This created an inevitable madness to which the student, after a short period of mental stability, soon succumbs.
There is a struggle to regain the sanity which the narrator had initially. This encompasses the interrogation of the raven, which the student views and an omniscient profit. At the end of the struggle, reality conquers imagination and all that is left is the shadow upon the floor as the entire fantastic episode fades into memory (Davidson 92). This war between sanity and derangement is the idea which lies at the heart of Poe's poem: the minds loss of any hold on reality (Davidson 93) and the path back to a sound mind. There is no doubt that Edgar Allan Poe is endowed with considerable literary talent when it comes to writing poems. He makes The Raven with such passionate emotion and feeling that it seems that he is experiencing the poem as he puts it onto paper.
He clearly knows how to set a dismal, dark mood over a poem and also is very knowledgeable about literary devices and how to wield such deadly effective weapons. Into the veritable stew of regular ingredients necessary for a well made poem, Poe also adds a peppering of the morbid insanity of a young student. This incongruity makes the poem stand apart from others of his time because of its dealings with the inner workings of a young man who still pines for his lost love, but he cannot avoid turning insane under the poignant pressures of the pain. This anomaly, when joined with the melancholy mood and the stark contrasts depicted by the antithetical relationships, makes Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven a benchmark for perfection and a favorite of many readers. Works Cited Davidson, Edward Hutchins. Poe: A Critical Study.
Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1957. Freedman, William. Poe's The Raven. The Explicator Spring 1999: 146. Gates, Lewis Edward.
Edgar Allan Poe. in Studies and appreciations. (1900): 110 - 128. DISCovering Authors. Vers. 2. 0. CD-ROM. Detroit: Gale, 1996.
Hoffman, Daniel. Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe. Garden City: Doubleday, 1972. Kennedy, J. Gerald. Phantasms of Death in Poe's Fiction.
Modern Critical Interpretations: The Tales of Poe. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. 111 - 133. Mabbott, Thomas Online, ed.
Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe. 3 vols. Cambridge: Belknap, 1969. Taylor, Richard C. , and G. R. Thompson. Edgar Allan Poe.
in Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography: Colonization of America to the American Renaissance. (1988): 298 - 347. DISCovering Authors. Vers. 2. 0. CD-ROM.
Detroit: Gale, 1996.
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