Gaurav Sagar's Reviews > The Raven

The Raven is a piercing piece by Edgar Allan Poe who I am reading for the very first time. I read it with holding the breath in an unnamable, haunting feeling due to the eerie atmosphere created by the poet through the verses. It’s a dreary, windy winter night with only a flicker of an old lamp burning like a symbol of hope, you feel the crushing effect on your heart, which is pounding heavily, of such a gothic setting, the horror gets intensified when the poundings on the rags of your old door, hit our soul than anything else. The unnamed narrator sits upon one such late December night, mourning over the loss of his beloved, Lenore, suddenly, someone tries to snatch even his procession of grieving from him as if he can’t even lament over his loss when he hears the prospects of thunderous intrusion from someone through the door.


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Who could it be? Someone insane, someone known or the God himself to assuage him to withstand his great loss or the devil who wants him to suffer as if he doesn’t have right to express his sorrow or some prophet who may prophesize something about his beloved- Lenore. The narrator contemplated with bated breath over the possibilities and horrors of the probable uninvited guest to eventually find out that it was an ebony, lustrous, shimmering ‘raven’ who appears to be a prophet of the God, the prophet who seems to be in some divine space, unaffected by mere mortals, speaking with angelic demeanor only one word- ‘Nevermore’.


The narrator incessantly ponders upon the probable meanings, allusions of the word uttered by the ‘raven’, the very meaning of the raven’s existence seems elusive too to him. There is a multitude of possibilities of the word- ‘Nevermore’ which the narrator explores throughout the poem, it fills his heart with warmth and geniality that whether he would be able to see his beloved Lenore again in the afterlife- heaven. The narrator asks the raven with full of hope and belief about it but the godlike raven seems to be in a heavenly expanse, responding enigmatically to the heart-wrenching but innocent queries of the narrator with only ‘Nevermore.’


‘The Raven’ is a great example of narrative poetry, in which a story is being told, often having a narrator and giving voice to him/ her and other characters too, the entire story is generally being written in a metered verse. The poem is a profound study of loneliness, grieving, insanity, melancholy, prophecy, and more than anything else it is about madness. It is essentially about the exploration of the fact that sometimes logic could not justify our intense and deepest feelings such as grief and mourning.


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The opium of hope which one carries throughout one’s life, our narrator perhaps also relies on it to recover from the heart-breaking loss of his beloved and to get some solace from his unremitting suffering, even if in the afterlife but, as usually happens in life, his founding of any hope and longing is crushed to nothingness, thrusting him from grief and despair to anguish and desperation. The battle a man fights may not be as gruesome as physical ones but leaves bruises and wounds deeper than physical battles seem to be capable of, perhaps deep down the heart of an individual. The raven seems to have parlance of a devil emerging from heaven or hell, robs the narrator of any traces of normality and eventually, madness takes over, surmising that time is the only healer in life and nothing else may be capable to provide comfort and solace to a man from his sufferings.


The raven may say to be a symbol to represent the actual reality in life though it may utter only one word, in a sense that one needs to accept and which our narrator seems to deny- the loss of Lenore, we see that the narrator moves from his endless rumination over the loss of his beloved maiden to manifestation of evil. Ravens are generally considered in various civilizations to have connotations of death, as the narrator himself notes when he refers to the bird as coming from “Night’s Plutonian shore,” or the underworld. The raven emphasizes the fact that the narrator may never meet his love, neither in this world nor in any other as she has become ‘nameless’ and formless, she ceases to exist and the narrator is condemned to live in this world realizing and recognizing its reality by leaving out any seeming elixir of impossible hope.


How difficult is it to make peace with life, to accept life as it is? More often than not, we see that people tend to live with their sufferings as if they find some unseen comfort in them but our brains behave differently than we think and our grief, loss, and sufferings make it act in funny ways some of which may be completely insane and full of madness. It reminds me of The Body Artist by Don DeLillo, I read recently, and which is also a profound study of how we react during intense grief and loss underlining the fact that often madness wins over sanity and our narrator of the poem here is no exception to that.


It was my first read of Edgar Allan Poe and I thoroughly enjoyed it and looking forward to reading more of him. Highly recommended for everyone.


4.5/5