Insanity In The Raven

One will experience the death of a loved one throughout their lifetime. How one handles that death depends on the person. In Edgar Allan Poe’s poem, “The Raven”, a man is severely troubled by the loss of someone he held very dear to him and Poe writes of how one can be driven to the point of insanity due to losing someone they love. Overall, “The Raven” depicts a man who is in his home one night and is all alone. He first believes he hears knocking at his door, but when he goes to open the door there is no one there. He then hears knocking at his window and he believes it to just be the wind. When the man goes to the window, he sees a raven and he begins to believe the bird is able to speak and say, “nevermore”. In the last 2 stanzas, the man begins to have a breakdown and begins shouting at the raven who supposedly only says, “nevermore”. In “The Raven”, I see Poe’s attempt to depict the mind of someone slowly being driven mad by their own thoughts and the narrator’s fears of what he believes, to be constantly denied by this raven. In stanza 14 Poe writes, “Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil!—Whether Tempter sent, or …show more content…
Sound devices in “The Raven” are so numerous that I will use only a few. Throughout the poem, Poe uses alliteration and repeats the “o” sound as to emphasize the pain and grief this man feels when he awakes from his slumber. Poe also uses alliteration to describe the raven as an “…ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore” to incorporate a sense of irony in the man continuing to listen to such a bird he finds utterly disgusting. Poe also repeats the word, “nevermore” or words similar to it, at the end of every stanza in order to add a sense of absoluteness of the death being discussed in the