Happy Halloween! I invite you to listen to my recitation of “The Raven” before you listen to my final episode of “Poe-logue to Halloween.” I hope you enjoy learning about the genius and legacy of “The Raven.”
The visual arts have the Mona Lisa, classical music has Beethoven’s Fifth, and poetry has . . . what else but “The Raven"?
Art and music lovers can argue about whether da Vinci’s and Beethoven’s masterpieces are really the greatest of their types. Poe’s poem about an “ominous bird of yore” probably isn’t even in the running, to be honest. All of these works, however, are instantly recognizable by many people, including those who otherwise do not care much about paintings, classical music, or poetry. In creating something so pervasive, so appealing, so iconic, Poe surely did something extraordinary.
He also, probably unconsciously, created a work that nicely embodies the most salient aspects of his literature and personality. “The Raven” is quintessentially Poe.
For starters, it is carefully crafted—although maybe not so much as he claimed in his essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” where he explained his ostensible reasons for giving the poem the number of lines it has, for choosing the word “Nevermore,” and so on. Simply maintaining his pattern of internal and end rhyme took some work. (Try it and see how far you get.) Then there’s the insistent rhythm, the result of what must have been some painstaking deliberation in choice of vocabulary and syntax. Poe was nothing if not a craftsman when it came to literature, and “The Raven” is a tour de force of craftsmanship.
It also manifests both his most pervasive theme and his go-to motif. That theme is loss, and it runs through “Annabel Lee,” “Ulalume,” “Ligeia,” “Berenice,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Black Cat,” and other works. Sometimes, loss takes the form of death, but Poe’s characters also experience the loss of status, sanity, and more. In “The Raven,” the speaker has been thinking of the “lost Lenore,” but, in an ironic twist, he must keep those things he would prefer to lose: the memory of her and the haunting presence of the raven. Poe masterfully captures the persistence of both in these stanzas:
Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer Swung by angels whose faint foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor. “Wretch,” I cried, “thy God hath lent thee — by these angels he hath sent thee Respite — respite and Nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore! Let me quaff this kind Nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!” Quoth the raven, “Nevermore.” [. . .] “Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!” I shrieked, upstarting — “Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore! Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken! Leave my loneliness unbroken! — quit the bust above my door! Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!” Quoth the raven, “Nevermore.”
Poe’s go-to motif in “Ligeia,” “William Wilson,” “MS. Found in a Bottle,” “The Black Cat,” The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and other works is the presence—or, at least, the hint—of the supernatural. In “The Raven,” the bird may appear to have some inexplicable knowledge of the lost Lenore, as well as a way to communicate this knowledge to the speaker.
Here, however, we see something else that is quintessentially Poe. In the 11th stanza, the speaker surmises what is obvious to any rational mind: the raven keeps saying “Nevermore” because it has learned this word from a human being.
To those of us in touch with the real world, it’s pretty clear that birds do not converse with a word "so aptly spoken,” as a human can do, much less communicate profound truths from the great beyond. That the speaker understands as much is clear in his own words:
"Doubtless," said I, "what it utters is its only stock and store, Caught from some unhappy master . . ."
And yet . . .
The speaker, by his own admission, goes on “linking / Fancy unto fancy” and convinces himself there is something supernatural going on here, saying he began to consider what the raven “Meant in croaking 'Nevermore.'” As I explained in the first column of this "Poe-logue to Halloween,” Poe had a strange predilection toward self-sabotage in his own life. He also dramatized what he called “The Imp of the Perverse,” or just “Perverseness,” in stories such as “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.” In “The Raven,” he returns to this bizarre phenomenon. The speaker not only allows himself to believe that the raven has a supernatural ability to speak the truth, but—and this is key—also goes on to ask all the wrong questions of the bird. Think of it this way: if you are convinced that a raven is going to say “Nevermore” because it is merely repeating a word it learned from its master, then you probably don’t want to ask questions such as whether you will ever embrace your lost love again—but, of course, that’s exactly what the speaker does. He’s torturing himself.
There’s much more I could say about this fascinating poem, but let me end on another link to Poe’s life. Like some other under-appreciated geniuses, such as Emily Dickinson and Vincent van Gogh, Poe was not highly regarded in his own lifetime. It was only after his death that people came to recognize the brilliance of, say, “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Purloined Letter.” Here, too, “The Raven” is emblematic. After writing this masterful poem—a poem that would become one of the most famous ever written, memorized by some and recognized by just about everyone else—Poe struggled to find a publisher. One offered to give him $15 out of charity. He eventually did publish it—to great acclaim, as it turned out—but earned far less than it was worth and then, true to form, blew an opportunity to capitalize on its popularity by failing to write a new poem for a public event in Boston and instead reciting an old, long, practically unreadable (and unlistenable) poem until the audience began to thin. He then followed up this debacle by insulting his audience and, for good measure, the entire city of Boston.
These events call for an extra stanza to “The Raven," and so I offer this as one possibility:
For my conduct now I’m sorry, and, alas, I start to worry That I've landed, so sadly stranded, up a creek without an oar. Might there be some way of stopping, ah, my sad career from dropping And then, at last, bursting, popping, like a bubble upon the floor? Is there some way to keep myself from dying heartsick, drunk, and poor? Quoth the raven, “Nevermore.”
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