Raven

I remember having read The Raven some time ago, but I had never really known much about it. Now I realize all the poetic techniques he uses to capture the reader. He creates a scary and weary mood at the beginning of the poem by describing this tapping at his bedroom door. He goes on by saying that he was almost asleep, so he is not really sure of whether he even heard it. It makes the reader wander if everything that was about to happen was even real or just a dream. He uses a lot of repetition and these lines stuck out to me. “Eagerly I wished the morrow;--vainly I had sought to borrow From my books surcease of sorrow--sorrow for the lost Lenore” We hear the repetition of the letter “s” and it creates a sound that is actually a little creepy. I have to use my imagination of course and that was one of the aspects that Dark Romantics focused on.

When he starts speaking to the raven, I actually feel bad for him. He wants this raven to give him answers and the only answer he is getting is a no for everything. “"Wretch," I cried, "thy God hath lent thee--by these angels he hath sent thee Respite--respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore! Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!" Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."” He asks the raven if he will ever rid himself form the memories and the pain he bears for the loss of Lenore, and all the raven can say is “Nevermore.” It feels like the narrator is trying to find some comfort with this raven and the raven just makes him feel worse by saying that the pain he feels will never go away.

The Raven is a good example of an Anti-Transcendentalist writing because it is speaking about a person who is half-asleep. We do not know really for sure that he is not dreaming all of these things. Transcendentalist believed that their intuition was the voice of God and that everything they did was because of God. They believed everything was good. In the poem, here comes this raven who is speaking to the narrator about how the pain he feels will not go away. I think this poem is Edgar Allan Poe’s way of saying, everything is not good and everything we do is not necessarily God’s doing. “Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."” Edgar Allen Poe’s life was not at all the life anyone would like to have lived. He had so many deaths that had occurred around him that he knew everything that happened was not necessarily God’s doing and that it was not good. He has all these sorrows to live with and if I were in his shoes, I would have probably been insane.