37 pages • 1 hour read
The Raven
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Themes
Grief and the Burden of Memory
Early in “The Raven,” the speaker frames the entirety of the narrative as a memory (“Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,” stanza 2). “The Raven” is, quintessentially, a poem about the burden of memory. It opens with the speaker reading to distract himself from thinking about Lenore (“vainly I had sought to borrow / From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore,” stanza 2), but his grief only intensifies and deepens as the poem progresses. The inescapable rapping at his chamber door may represent the intrusive thoughts associated with losing a loved one. While many love poems highlight the joys of romance, Poe’s highlights the reverse: that the memory of love lost can inflict insurmountable psychological harm.
Even if Lenore is not taken as a real person—and many scholars agree, it is safest to read “The Raven” not as an autobiographical poem, but rather as a Romantic exploration of human nature—Poe’s point is still applicable. Obsessive lingering on something long gone, like a lost loved one or even the friends and hopes the speaker describes in stanza 10, can only be harmful to the psyche.
At the same time, there is a certain hopelessness to the poem’s ending. Was there ever any chance for the speaker? Any decision he could have made which would have affected the outcome? The shadow of the raven, or the presence of his grief, will never truly leave his soul, no matter how much time has passed.
Death and Victorian Love
Death lurks in every element of “The Raven.” The poem takes place in December, and winter is often associated with the absence of life. The chamber fire is burning out; dying embers cast their “ghost” upon the floor. The main feature of the poem is, of course, the death of the mysterious Lenore.
In his personal life, Poe was no stranger to loss. He struggled with the early death of his mother, Eliza Arnold Poe, and with the death of his older brother Henry in 1831, with whom he had been especially close. He had been cut off from his first girlfriend, Sarah Elmira Royster, in 1826 (though he would be reunited with her later in life). In writing “The Raven” he may even have thought of his wife Virginia, who had already been diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1862.
It is more likely, though, that Poe took his inspiration from Victorian love poetry, which often centered on mourning, death, and remembrance. For the Victorians, high mortality rates made grieving the deaths of family members a mainstay of life. In creating elaborate rituals and strictly enforced social codes for mourning, family members demonstrated their loyalty to their loved ones and, by extension, to the past. In the Victorian mind, what could be more romantic than eternal dedication and memory? In “The Philosophy of Composition,” Poe’s essay on the creative process behind writing “The Raven,” he famously claimed that “the death […] of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world” (Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Philosophy of Composition.” The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven Edition, Volume 5. New York: P. F. Collier and Son). Several of his other poems center on this theme, including “The Raven,” “Annabel Lee,” “Eulalie,” and “Ulalume.”
Classics and the Irrational
Romanticism represented a pushback against the Enlightenment, a seventeenth-century intellectual movement which prized rationality and the setting aside of superstition. Bucking this tradition, Romanticism focused instead on more subjective, “irrational” elements: emotion and the inner life of the mind. Poe certainly shares these interests with his fellow Romantics. He is deeply fascinated with human psychology and the inner self. That being said, he does not stray as far from the Enlightenment ideals as other Romantics: Above all, Poe prizes rational order over emotional chaos.
At first this may seem counterintuitive: Poe’s stories are always emotionally fraught affairs, with little rationality to be found. But Poe spotlights the benefits of rational thought by showing the absolute terror caused by the alternative, a world ruled by irrational emotion. His emotionally driven protagonists stand as in stark opposition to those who think things through logically and reasonably.
Poe may have developed this value system from the Greek and Roman authors he studied. From the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle to the Roman epicists Virgil, Lucan, and Statius, classical thinkers were highly interested in the eternal struggle between order and chaos. Poe’s self-identification as a Southerner also tips us off to his fondness of antiquity; neoclassicism, a sort of hero worship of Greco-Roman culture, was all the rage in the South in the early nineteenth century, and was reflected not only in its architecture, but its social structures.
Poe’s use of Greco-Roman mythology in “The Raven” fits neatly into this classical dichotomy between order and chaos. The raven perches on a bust of Pallas Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom and the arts. In doing so, Poe depicts an irrational element literally obscuring human wisdom and the arts—that is, an agent of chaos blocking out the embodiment of human rationality, which leads to helplessness and despair for the speaker.
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By Edgar Allan Poe
