 | The Raven: Encyclopedia II - The Raven - Interpretation
The Raven - Interpretation
The poem, like other works by Poe such as "The Black Cat", "The Imp of the Perverse" and "The Tell-Tale Heart", is a study of guilt or "perverseness" (in Poe's own words, "The human thirst for self-torture"). Although we are told in those stories that the narrators have killed someone, in "The Raven" we are only told that the narrator has lost his love, Lenore (imported from an earlier poem, "Lenore" (1831) which was itself a massive reworking of "A Paean"; both are also about the death of a young woman). His reaction to the loss has been colored by mysticism ("volume of forgotten lore"), and we know he is filled with fear at receiving a visitor (perhaps Lenore herself, "the whispered word 'Lenore'"), before he even sees the mysterious raven ("from the night's plutonian shore"--Pluto being the Roman god of the Underworld - known as Hades in the Greek mythology - implying that the Raven is from Hell), with its single word of judgment, "Nevermore."
"Guilt" should not be taken here in either the standard legal or moral senses. Poe's characters usually do not feel "guilt" because they did a "bad" thing--that is, the story is not didactic (in his essay "The Poetic Principle" Poe called didacticism the worst of "heresies"); there is no "moral to the story". Guilt, for Poe, is "perverse", and perverseness is the desire for self-destruction. It is completely indifferent to societal distinctions between right and wrong. "Guilt" is the inexplicable and inexorable desire to destroy oneself eo ipso.
"The Raven" is also an excellent example of arabesque writing as well as grotesque. In addition to the narrator's physical terror throughout the poem, there is a great deal of psychologically disturbing sequences and images Poe describes.
The Student (an often-used name for the narrator, since he is introduced as poring over "many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore") quickly learns what the bird will say in response to his questions, and he knows the answer will be negative ("Nevermore"). However, he asks questions, repeatedly, which would optimistically have a "positive" answer, "Is there balm in Gilead? Is Lenore in Aidenn (Heaven)?" To each question the Raven's predestined reply is "Nevermore", which only increases the narrator's anguish--there is no balm in Gilead, Lenore is not in Heaven etc, and these negative answers are instigated by the narrator himself, by his repeatedly questioning the bird, who acts only as he has been trained to act "by some unhappy master".
The themes of self-perpetuating anguish and self-destroying obsession over the death of a beautiful woman are in themselves the most poetic of topics, according to Poe (see his essay "The Philosophy of Composition"). The torture which the bird has brought to the narrator was already in the narrator's ruminating character--the bird only brought out what was inside. The raven itself is a mechanical process: deterministic, preordained, one word being the bird's "only stock and store." The Student throws himself against this process in a form of masochism, and lets it destroy him and consume him ("my soul from out that shadow shall be lifted--Nevermore!")
Why or how Lenore was lost, we do not know, but the narrator is torn between the desire to forget and the desire to remember. Death without cause is standard for Poe (See "Ligeia", "Eleonora", "Morella", "Berenice", "The Fall of the House of Usher", "The Oval Portrait, "Annabel Lee", "Lenore", "A Pæan", "The Bells" and others). The female beauty dies without cause or explanation--or she dies because she was beautiful. In the end, the narrator clings to the memory, for that is all he has left. What the raven has taken from him so cruelly is his loneliness--but this cruelty he brought upon himself, for he cannot resist the urge to interrogate the raven. He is fascinated by this "No" machine--and constantly asks it questions hoping it will say "yes" (forevermore). Every time he asks the answer will be the same. The raven will stay.
Although the bird seems a hallucination, it is in fact real (this is not to say that the narrator does not hallucinate at all, though), with real black feathers and a real croaking of the single word, "Nevermore." Ravens can be taught to speak. Poe's raven is thought to have been inspired by the raven Grip in Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens. Dickens's bird has many words and comic turns, including the popping of a champagne cork, but Poe felt that Dickens did not make enough of the bird's dramatic qualities.
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 Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Interpretation", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki |
