Diction In The Raven

The Raven is a very famous poem written by Edgar Allan Poe. It was first published in 1845. In Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven, the speaker is depressed about his lost love Lenore. This poem offers a look into the effects of depression after the great loss of a loved one. The poet uses imagery and effective diction to convey the speaker’s horror at the raven’s presence, and his grief for his dead Lenore. Poe structurally builds the reader’s tensions by rhythmically increasing the narrator’s plea to ‘leave my loneliness unbroken’. The poem is a dark reflection on the lost love, death and loss of hope the speaker is experiencing. It dramatizes the emotions of the poet, who has lost his beloved, and tries to distract himself from his sadness. His solitude is disturbed by a single visitor a Raven. Through this poem Poe uses symbolism, imagery and tone to enforce his theme of sadness and loss.

The Raven is a popular poem, known for its pleasing and dramatic qualities. The meter of the poem is mostly trochaic octameter, with eight

stressed-unstressed two-syllable feet per lines. Combined with the ABCBBB end rhyme scheme and the repeated use of internal rhyme, the trochaic octameter and the persist of "nothing more" and "nevermore" give the poem a tuneful tone especially when I read it out loud. Comprising of eighteen six-line stanzas. The Raven is told retrospectively by a first-person narrator. We are just learning about Rhyming Trochaic Octameter in class. I noticed that the last line of each stanza is a lot shorter, with only seven syllables. If you look closely, you can see that the second, fourth, and fifth lines only have fifteen syllables. Poe leaves off a syllable. That way the "or" sits out there by itself, separated from the other syllable, making it stand out. The repetition of "nevermore" gives a circular sense to the poem and contributes to what Poe termed the unity of effect, where each word and line adds to the larger meaning of the poem. The point of this is that he's trying to make his poem as musical, charming, and as mesmerizing as possible. All of this complicated rhyme and rhythm aims at drawing you more completely into the world of the poem.
The musicality of the rhyme also helps one to memorize the poem. This helps keep the poem in your head after you've finished reading it, lingering in your thoughts just as the narrator's thoughts are haunting him. My older brother Garrett actually had to memorize and recite this poem in 5th grade. He can still recite certain parts of this poem. That is why I chose this poem to write my paper on. I think it is a crucial poem to have read and explored. It offers an insight into how one deals with grief and I think Poe demonstrates this repeatedly throughout this poem.
The story is quite simple it is a young student that is reading one stormy night in his chambers, thinking about his beloved deceased Lenore. He hears a tapping at his window and opens it to admit a raven, seeking shelter from the storm. The raven can speak only one word, “nevermore.” When the student decides to ask the raven questions, its reply of “nevermore” makes him sad. The narrator appears in a typically Gothic setting with a lonely apartment, a dead fire, and a "bleak December" night while tiredly studying his books in an attempt to distract himself from his sadness. Lenore is the focus of the speaker's sadness. He brings her up repeatedly throuout, and even when he tries to think about something else, he always ends up back thinking of Lenore. Regardless, we don't actually learn that much about Lenore or who she was to him exactly in the poem, he just repeats her name. The raven is not only the title of the poem, but even once we've heard all about Lenore, and the guy in his chamber, it's definitely the image of the raven that is most in our minds. It was a pretty great choice on Poe's part, a bird that looks like a part of the black night it came out of, a little scary.
Poe's choice of a raven as the bearer of ill news is fitting for a couple reasons.

Poe sought only a dumb beast that was capable of producing human-like sounds without understanding the words' meanings. Once you have read The Raven out loud, you probably will be at ease to the idea of a talking raven. But think about it, if I ever heard a bird talk, I would freak out from shock. At the very least, I think it screams supernatural. The speaker thinks a lot about where this bird is from, whether it's a demon, or even a prophet. He also ponders deep issues, such as the afterlife and the existence of God. Due to the late hour of the poem's setting and to the narrator's mental turmoil, the poem calls the narrator's reliability into question. At first the narrator attempts to give his experiences a rational explanation, but by the end of the poem, he has ceased to give the raven any interpretation beyond that which he invents in his own

head.
I enjoyed reading this poem a great deal. Poe is trying to interpret the pain and suffering you go through when you lose someone close to you. Using imagery, rhyme, effective diction and many more tools he portrays this emotion and brings to life this poem. I found the poem to be depressing but the rhyming and word choice made it also seem delightful and tuneful. His use of Lenore, the women he is mourning over, is presented in a way that sparks emotion from the reader. Driving home the feeling of grief, loss and depression he expresses throughout the poem.