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Elements Of Horror And Emotion In Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven

Decent Essays
Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven combines elements of horror, sorrow, and the supernatural, while being driven by the atmosphere as its foremost vehicle to symbolically convey a struggle, which many of us identify with- coming to terms with loss. A distraught person whose beloved, Lenore, just died experiences the surge of an inescapable bitter truth, that comes in the form of a talking raven that just mutters one word: “Nevermore” (which was enough to send our narrator’s sanity, which was already on shaky grounds, into a permanent state of complete and helpless deterioration). The poem’s succession of events was carefully constructed and developed to deliver a tone that intrigues you and keeps you on the very edge of your seat, waiting…show more content…
Surprisingly, there was nothing but darkness in front of him upon opening; unsurprisingly, our easily frightened speak was simply scared out of his mind: He was bludgeoned with fear, frantically wondering and imagining the worst possible scenarios; ones of so large a gamut, and so horrifying or fantastical an ending, that he couldn’t imagine they had been dreamed by any other person. The fact that the darkness embodied with it complete silence didn’t help, and our speaker, in an attempt to break it off, and with sentiments of impassioned yearning clouding his (already poor) rational judgement, yelled “Lenore,” expecting her to appear in her ghost form. As one would expect, this turned out to be fruitless. But thereafter, the volume of the tapping increased, this time on the window lattice, and our jittery speaker had had enough, and so, garnering courage from the certainty (or rather wish) that it is the wind, he opened it, and there it was in front of him, the glorious raven we have been expecting. Our speaker describes the raven as large, majestic, bird, that resembles in its appearance ones that one would find long ago, in noble times. It refused to give deference or veneration to anyone, and kept shifting and moving around, before finally settling or perching on the bust of Greek Titan Pallas, god of battle and warcraft. This, at first, brought a much needed amusement to our speaker, due to the look on the raven’s face that resembled a serious and relentless regard towards etiquette and keeping up good behaviour, which, perhaps, comically reminded our speaker of the disciplined behavior of
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