The Metaphor In Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven

Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven” was published in January 1845, it is about a man who is visited by a raven late one night. Poe shows that the unnamed narrator hears some tapping at the door late one night, assumes that it’s a visitor, and doesn’t bother to get up because he’s too depressed about his wife Lenore who recently died. Since the noise from the door continues, he decides to check on it, but when he opens the door there is no one there. Even though he saw nothing outside his door, he whispered into the darkness, “‘Lenore?’ / This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, ‘Lenore!’” (Poe 28-29). He becomes scared and runs back inside his room and closes the door. The narrator explains that he is terrified and tries to convince …show more content…
Being that there was still an ongoing noise at the door, the narrator goes back to opening the door and a raven flies in and sits, “upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door,” (Poe 41). This is significant because Pallas is the Greek god Athena, which represents wisdom and the ideal women. The narrator is both terrified and angry, so he asks the bird it’s name and the bird responds with “Nevermore” (Poe 48). This is the most important anaphora that Poe uses at the end of various stanzas. The narrator tries to reason the logic of the situation by saying that the raven surely learned the word from their owner. The narrator then believes he is surrounded by angels and asks if they have brought nepenthe, which is the medicine for sorrow in Greek mythology. The narrator asks the raven if he will see Lenore again, to which the raven responds with, “Nevermore.” The narrator lastly asks the raven to leave, “Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore! / … / Take they beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!” (Poe …show more content…
The narrator is terrified when he whispered the name Lenore into the hallway and, “an echo murmured back the word, ‘Lenore’” (Poe 28-29). Although he knows that it was an echo, he is overcome with terror, as if Lenore’s presence was there. And the narrator knows that he is not going to be able to forget Lenore, so he asks the raven “quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!” (Poe 83) showing he is desperate to forget about Lenore and to not be depressed, but he knows it can’t happen. Poe also stresses the way the raven entered the room, “with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door,” (40) which shows the bird coming in as if royalty was entering a room in a dramatic way. When the narrator screams at the bird, asking what it wants and where it came from, the raven replied with “Nevermore” (Poe 48), which is the first time the bird speaks and it terrifies the narrator. Poe developed this poem in an ABCBBB rhyme scheme and rhymed some of the words in each line with its ending word. Poe relies on the meter to accent on the ‘O’s in each word to create a more grim