Untreated Grief In The Raven By Edgar Allen Poe

Untreated grief can erode sanity. This is shown in The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe by saying, “-here I opened wide the door;-/ Darkness there, and nothing more”, the narrator reveals his insanity by the wandering of his imagination. His strong desire for Lenore to return has caused his mind to envision his love returning to his life. In the same manner, the narrator says, “‘respite and nepenthe, from thy memories of Lenore’” (Poe 4). The inability to cope with his grief in the loss of his love has reached an extreme, especially since he would rather drink a potion that causes all of his worries to disappear than to cope with the sorrow that he feels. When the news was received from the raven, he reacted by saying, “‘Get thee back into the tempest and Night’s Plutonian Shore’” (Poe 5). This reply stood simply to emphasize his weakness in handling the grief that stemmed from the loss of his love. Poe strengthens the ideas behind the

themes The Raven by including how the death of Lenore and the grief that comes along with it affects the narrator's life.
Grief can consume a person’s life if allowed. Grief is defined as deep sorrow, especially that caused by the death of someone, which is exactly what the narrator is experiencing. This grief is shown by saying “‘I was napping and so gently you came rapping’” (Poe 2). Although the raven is at his door, he seems to believe that Lenore, his dead wife, could be coming back to save him from the unbearable grief that he has been left with. Continuing with his struggle to let go of the past, the narrator states, “On the morrow he will leave me, as my Hopes have flown before” (Poe 3). Through saying this, the narrator reminisces on how Lenore is gone, taking his “Hopes” with her in her departure, and has left him unable to move past this sorrow, nor feel future pain. He believes all things are the same; therefore, the raven will leave him just as everything else in his life has done to him. In order to symbolize this grief the narrator feels, he introduces a raven to come to the narrator’s door, causing him to say, “‘Take thy beak from out of my heart, and take thy form from off my door’” (Poe 5). Poe strategically placed a raven at the narrator’s door to symbolize the grief that haunts him, even in the most peaceful of times. His grief is unavoidable, since he cannot find a way to cope with the sorrow he has been left with. In using personification, symbolism, and other literary devices, Poe outlines the effects that grief can have on the life of a person who is unable to control it.
Both of the themes in The Raven deal with how grief can affect a person if one does not find ways to control it.

The raven symbolizes grief that refuses to leave the narrator alone, even through his darkest of times. Since he is unaware of how to cope with the grief that came from the loss of Lenore, his love, his untreated grief seems to consume his life in eroding his sanity. This insanity is shown by his hallucination of the first knocking on the door. Later, his reaction to the raven shows that his grief is, in fact, unbearable. The main lesson Poe wants to convey to his readers is how necessary it is to find ways to deal with the grief that comes along with events in your life. The idea of grief is a main idea of literature written in the Gothic Romantic style, especially since many of these pieces incorporate a dark, gloomy setting, as well as curses and intense emotions. Through his use of word choice and literary devices, Poe demonstrates the gloomy setting and how the narrator’s strong feelings of grief continues to affect his

life.