The Raven Edgar Allan Poe Analysis

You’re sitting alone in the obscurity of night; reading a book, and nodding in and out of consciousness. Suddenly out of the deafening silence, you hear a rapping, a tapping at your door. Startled, you arise from your dreamy stupor to answer the rapping, the tapping. You open the door to find no one is there. Was it imagination? Is it insanity? With your mind racing, you think of your lost lover. Were they coming back to you? Did they long for you from beyond the grave like you did for them every second of every day? This, I imagine, is what was going through Edgar Allan Poe’s mind as he composed “The Raven.” The narrator, whose name is unknown, is living his own nightmare. His lost lover, Leonor, had previously passed; he has grieved every …show more content…
When he said “Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!” the phrase “The Night’s Plutonian shore,” intrigued me. The night can symbolise a variety of things. In this story in particular, it symbolises mystery, danger, and fear. It set’s up the atmosphere of the story. This is not a happy story; it’s actually kind of sad. On the other hand, I knew that Pluto was the Roman’s name for the greek god Hades, so Plutonian means to be affiliated with Hades or the underworld; hell. When I think of the shore, I think of the ocean; which is vast and seemingly never ending. With this information, I concluded that from this one phrase, we know that it wasn’t just a dreary gloomy night. It was a vast never ending ocean of hellish darkness and fear. The raven in itself also is a big symbol in the story. For one, it is the title of the story, so it must have some …show more content…
The Raven entered the room majestically like royalty or a saint in the old days. Poe then goes on to say “Not the least obeisance made he;” the raven showed no recognition or gesture of respect towards the narrator. The Raven just burst into the room like it was no one 's business, not wasting any time at all. Finally, he goes onto say that he came “with the mein of a Lord or lady,” so like royalty. Poe is comparing the Raven to a queen or a saint, which is how he could have thought of Leonor. Leonor was his lover, so I would assume that he would think very highly of her, so he is saying the Raven is basically Leonor or Leonor’s spirit, which would make sense in the paranormal aspect of this