Essay Comparing The Raven And The Tell Tale Heart

Dorothy Rowe once said,“Depression is a prison where you are both the suffering prisoner and the cruel jailer”. It’s true sometimes depression may lead to insanity. Both “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Raven” have a theme of depression to insanity. “The Tell-Tale Heart” is a short story about a narrator's perspective that kills an innocent old man since his eye is terrifying. “The Raven” is a poem about a speaker that grieves for his lost love Lenore. A raven that represents death shows up to his chamber door in the middle of the night. Edgar Allen Poe uses symbolism, metaphor, and imagery in “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Raven” to create a powerful short story.
Poe has a strong use of symbolism, using something or someone to represent an idea, in “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Raven”, which creates emotion and explain a story. In "The Tell-Tale Heart" the beating of the heart symbolizes the narrator’s guilt. As the narrator is in the room with the police, he hears “a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton….was the beating of the old man's heart,”(Poe 1). The narrator starts to feel guilty

for his actions, and starts hearing the watch from under the floorboards. The narrator claims he has “heard all things in the heaven and in the earth” (Poe 1). “The Raven” symbolises the Night’s Plutonian Shore. The bird moves from its first to the second “and the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting on the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door,”(Poe 104). as the embodiment of grief caused by loneliness and separation. Pallas is Athena, the greek goddess of Wisdom. The bust of Pallas symbolizes the speaker's love of learning and education.
Poe uses metaphors, a figure of speech that compares two unlike things, to point out minor points throughout the story. In “The Tell-Tale Heart” the narrator is in the old man's room plotting his death and is looking around the room "a simple dim ray, like the thread of the spider," (Poe 1). The dim ray is being compared to a thread of a spider. In “The Raven” metaphor is “And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming.” (Poe 92). In the quote Poe is comparing the raven's eyes to a demons.
In “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Raven,” Poe has a strong use of imagery, a language that appeals to the senses which lets the reader imagine in their heads as they read along.

Although the narrator has just killed the old man to get relief the mood is tense, “the dead hour of the night, amid the dreadful silence of that old house, so strange a noise as this excited me to uncontrollable terror,”(Poe 1). The use of auditory image is appealing to the reader because the whole house is silent although he has just killed a man. In “The Raven,” Poe uses imagery by describing the setting of the poem. As the speaker was in his chamber the mood was very serious and dreary, “the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain….filled….with fantastic terrors never felt before,” (Poe 13-14). The imagery shows not only the scene, but also the

narrator.
In “The Tell-Tale Heart” the uses of symbolism, metaphor, and imagery construct a compelling short story. In “The Tell-Tale Heart” Poe uses symbolism to give the readers an explanation for a beating heart that symbolizes a narrator's guilt, while metaphors point out little details throughout the story, and imagery creates a clear image in a reader's mind for a sense of the old man’s death. Both stories have a theme of depression can turn to insanity because, the narrator and speaker are depressed, which makes one kill a man and the other talk to a bird.