Similarities Between The Raven And The Cross Of Snow

The Raven’s primary color is black which represents death, darkness and grief which the narrator feels after the loss of his beloved Lenore. The poem is very dark as he wallows in his grief unlike The Cross of Snow. The Cross of Snow is also about the death of a loved one and the grief the narrator feels. The primary color is white used to represent the purity of the narrator’s lover and his love for her. Even though this poem is not as dark as The Raven, both works express the grief of losing someone they love but they each take it a different way. In the Raven, Poe uses his single effect theory to create a melancholy affect. He also uses words and phrases to establish the tone and mood. Poe uses phrases such as “What this grim, ungainly,

ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore” (71) to express his dark tone. The Cross of Snow expresses grief in a different way though. At first the narrator describes his wife as gentle and saint like. Then in the second half of this poem Longfellow writes about the grief he feels and “Such is the cross I wear upon my breast / These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes / And seasons, changeless since the day she died.” (12-14). The Raven and The Cross of Snow have two distinct structures. The Raven is very long which adds to the effect of the narrator wallowing in his grief. There is more repetition in this work than in The Cross of Snow to show that the narrator is becoming more obsessed and his mind keeps running through the same phrases throughout the piece. The word nevermore is used many times in The Raven because the narrator keeps asking the raven if he will ever see Lenore again when the answer is always nevermore which he soon will become obsessed with and become angry with the bird. The Cross of Snow is not as intense as The Raven and is much shorter. The Cross of Snow is in the form of an Italian sonnet and for the most part follows the rhyme scheme abba.