Term Paper on the Raven and Thirteen Ways
of Looking
(First
3 Pages)
One of
Poe’s finest poems, publicized only a few years before his death, was “The
Raven.” The poem starts with a man falling asleep, when a loud noise starts at
his door. He lets it go, reckoning it to be a guest, not certain if he heard it
in the first place. He starts meditating of the woman he has lost for always,
Lenore. Finally, he opens the door, for the knock comes again only louder, but
there is no one there. He murmurs quietly into the darkness, but there is no
answer. The tapping starts again as he crawls into bed, this time the knock is
at the window. He goes to it; there stands a raven. ‘The Raven,’ has the image
of a bird of bad omen, continually repeating the one word ‘Nevermore’.
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The miseries in Poe’s life are emulated in his poem, ‘The Raven,’ and can be
predominately seen through the contrast between the loss of his wife, and the
narrator’s loss of Lenore. The obvious tone in ‘The Raven’ apparently depicts a
very painful condition of mind, an intellect susceptible to madness and the
chasm of melancholy brought upon by the death of an adored lady. The similarity
of Poe’s own personal dilemmas with those of the narrator in “The Raven,” and
the repetitive verse by the raven, makes the reader conscious of Poe’s
distinguished tone of grief. The narrator’s sorrow for the lost Lenore is
comparative with Poe’s own anguish concerning the death of his wife. These
ghostly recollections bring out a state of anxious prospect in the reader to
know and be refreshed of the amazement that the narrator and consequently Poe
himself are experiencing.
After Virginnia’s chronic death, Poe tried to alleviate his woes by drinking. A
parallelism is carved in ‘The Raven’ between the supercilious actions of the
raven towards the narrator and the scorn of alcohol towards Poe. The raven
patronizes that Poe will never see his lost love again when uttering, forget
this lost Lenore. Alcohol taunts Poe into incessant depression and provoked him
to have a life-long problem with alcoholism, which eventually led to his death.
In a similar manner to which alcohol delved Poe’s inner wreckage, the raven
brings out the narrator’s most intimate fears that he will never feel his Lenore
again. Through focusing on the raven and its scrappy ‘Nevermore,’ a realization
is advanced that highlights a dejected and sorrowful state of mind. Through ‘The
Raven,’ Poe makes his personal hell become peculiarly swaying and genial for
everyone. Poe’s haunting descriptions, shaky parallelism between his life and
the poem, and shocking continuation of a melancholic tone, draws the reader into
domain of madness, which at once explores the soul.
The blackbird is the only element in nature, which is aesthetically in accord
with dismal light and bare limbs. That is, we may say, an obvious sort of
language, adverse to harmony is used so memorably. There are thirteen ways of
looking at a blackbird, since thirteen is the whimsical number. This poetry is
one of voice change and insinuation. The articulations are the heard euphony. It
is, rather one of those things that relate the man and the woman. Between the
man’s mood and his surroundings is the blackbird, the mysterious subject of the
mood, which is man’s reply to nature. Between the man of Haddam and their
imaginary golden birds is the blackbird, one on which they fabricate their
intrigue of immortality. Between the haunted man and his protective glass coach
is the dismay of the blackbird, which lies at the bed of even our powerful
verbal defenses, those beautiful glass coaches of euphony and purity. It is,
ultimately, the canon of our final relation to the universe, our urge. The most
general explanation of mental images in cognitive science today, and the one
depicted in this poem is that such images, whether originated from sensations or
memories, make use of some of the same neuronal equipment that is used for
exhibiting or depicting the images of emotional recorded scenes.
The poem embraces a continuity of great novelty and even dispersal and unified.
It can be only depicted by the appearance of a referential blackbird in every
section. Each of the thirteen sections illustrates a fragmented bearing that
relates it to poetry of the period and may distract us from the fact that the
framework itself devises a very effective sense of location or setting. That is,
it propounds a celestial context and implies the extent of this context for the
sequence it enfolds. It repeats the sense completed of a solid geographical or
natural landscape. The referentially of the setting might be thought of as
preexisting since there is a simulation of innocence coupled with numbness, as
though nature's handy perches were simply traditionally givens. They volunteer
themselves as the place for ‘the only moving thing’ to begin a series of
movements that finally brings them to a halt. But of course, this profession
banks on a basis of ontological wholeness, somewhere in nature.
.....
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