The Raven

For decades we have all heard or read of the poam The Raven has become one of America's most famous poem . The life of Edgar Allan Poe, as with the lives of many geniuses, was filled with tragedies that all influenced his craft. Just before Edgar third birthday, he, his brother and his sister were orphaned. His mother died of tuberculosis and his father had abandoned his wife and children soon after Edgar was born . Edgar was too young to be influenced by the death of his mother at the time it occurred, but later reflections in adulthood led him to grieve for how much better his home life would have been if he had never had to live with a foster family. Even at the age of six, Edgar was so afraid of the dead or dying that he panicked whenever he passed a cemetery, believing the ghosts and bodies would come after him . His mother's death by the dreaded disease of the time, tuberculosis, would be a common source of death in others who would matter much later in Edgar's life. -

The Raven" was first published in the New York Evening Mirror on January 29, 1845, and received popular and critical praise. The narrator feels so grieved over the loss of his love that he allows his imagination to transform the bird into a prophet bringing news that the lovers will "Nevermore" be reunited, not even in heaven. In "The Philosophy of Composition," Edgar own essay about "The Raven," he describes the poem as one that reveals the human penchant for "self-torture" as evidenced by the speaker's tendency to weigh himself down with grief.

The opening lines identify the speaker as someone who feels tired and weak but is still awake in the middle of a gloomy night. He passes the time by reading a strange book of ancient knowledge. The first line of the poem contains alliteration of w in "while," "weak," and "weary" to produce the effect of unsteadiness. This line also sets the poem's rhythmical pattern and provides the first example of the use of internal rhyme in "dreary" and "weary."