Lenore The Raven

The Raven is a poem where love is shown as the cause for a man’s mental demise and road to madness due to his inability to let his lover’s death go. In the beginning of this poem, the Speaker tells the reader that he was not feeling right and that it was a dark and dreary night. This is crucial to the plot of the poem because of the depressing setting it creates for the character. Even in the second stanza the Speaker is still going into great detail on the description of his atmosphere. The Speaker uses words such as: dark, dreary, bleak, weak and weary- to invoke unhappy or depressing imagery in the reader’s mind to put across the overall depressing mood and tone of the poem. The second stanza is not all about the setting, for it is in the second stanza that the

After he realizes she cannot be there, he shuts the door only to have it knocked on again. Only this time when he opens the door, the Raven himself flies into the room. The Speaker then goes onto having a conversation with the bird as if the Raven were an actual human being. It is in the last few stanzas where the reader can see the mental demise of the Speaker. As the Speaker talks with the Raven the only answer he can get from the bird is “Nevermore”, and knowing this he continues to ask the Raven questions about his future, all of which the bird replied with “Nevermore”. The conversation between the man and the bird gets increasingly heated as the Speaker goes mad during the course of the talk, and the final straw was when the bird answered “Nevermore” to the Speaker’s inquiry if he would ever get to hold Lenore again – in this life or the next. In the last few lines of this poem, there is a sudden shift in tense, where it goes from past tense to present tense. The Speaker is incapable of getting rid of the Raven, therefore being forever reminded that he will never see Lenore