Theme Of Depression And Depression In The Raven By Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe experienced personal tragedies in his life which influenced his writing. His works were considered gothic and usually contained a melancholy and depressed tone. Most of his works also dealt with the theme of death, usually of a woman in the narratives. This style of writing most likely stemmed from the loss of his young wife Virginia. Poe became extremely depressed after her death due to his grief and feelings of loss over Virginia. Poe wrote “The Raven” with his usual melancholy style and incorporated his feelings of grief into the poem’s narrator as well. The feelings of grief evolve in the poem into madness as the depression takes over the narrator. In “The Raven,” Edgar Allen Poe uses symbols, rhyme, and point of view to …show more content…
The main method Poe uses to convey the feelings of grief and depression in the poem is through the use of symbols. The first symbol Poe uses in the poem is the narrator’s lost love Lenore who the narrator fixates on in his grief. Lenore is obsessed over throughout the poem as an idea rather than a person due to the fact that she is barely described beyond how she is “the lost Lenore” (“The Raven” 688). In the haze of his grief and depression, Lenore the person is forgotten and only the concept of Lenore is left in his thoughts. Over the course of the poem, Lenore ascends from being a dead woman to “a sainted maiden” on par with the angels of heaven through the lens of the narrator’s grief over her loss and unwillingness to let her go (“The Raven” 690). The namesake of the poem, the raven, is another symbol of how grief and depression can take over a person until there is only madness left. The raven’s entrance and perching “upon a bust of Pallas” foreshadow how it will affect the narrator’s mind …show more content…
First person lets the audience experience the narrator’s thoughts and feelings as he experiences them. The narrator in “The Raven” goes through so many emotions in the poem, from frantic one moment to spacey in the next, and the audience goes through these emotions right alongside him. A connection between the narrator and reader is made when the author uses this point of view in his work. First person also helps to make the narrator more believable as a man who just lost Lenore and how his emotions are all over the place and his mental state is dangerously unstable. The first person helps the reader see how the narrator develops throughout the poem from a grieving man to someone spiraling into a maddening depression over the loss of a loved one. The audience becomes involved with the narrator’s transition from stable to unstable through the use of this point of view. Shouts of grief and terror at the raven seem more genuine in this perspective since it comes directly from the narrator