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Literary Elements In Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven

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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…

Then, it finally comes, the most pivotal word in the poem, the one most associated (besides “raven”) with it, the one that best concretizes the idea behind it, the raven mutters “Nevermore.” This is where the poem starts incorporating the element of dark fantasy, the passage to which had been set up by the preceding development of an unsettling atmosphere surrounding an increasingly unaccepting-of-reality and despaired person, both classical components of dark fantasy. Understandably, our speaker was flabbergasted; and at first struggled to understand the relevancy of what the raven said because he thought it was answering his question. (Little did he know how relevant it will become once he projects it onto his reality.) He was also able to see the comicality of it by cracking a little joke. But the more time he spent interpreting it the more worried he got- particularly about the sincerity and weight the raven put in his utterance of “Nevermore.” After that we get a little background of the speaker in his one-sided dialogue with the raven, whom he had begun to regard as friend, and was able to obtain a soon-to-be-destroyed slight relief from the state of languishing desolation he had been in before its arrival. This didn’t hinder him from lamenting his galling fate by indicating that all of his hopes …show more content…

He took a chair and sat right in front of it, and made it his purpose to understand what “nevermore” meant. Our speaker, moreover, modified his perception of the bird, and instead of identifying it as the graceful and stately bird, he called it “ungainly,” “grim,” and “ominous.” It is perspicuous that our speaker had started to suspect that the raven’s “nevermore” was a delineation of his wretched state of affairs with the dead Lenore. As a result, the image of the raven was altered in his mind to convey a gloomy, unpleasant, creature that came carrying with it bad news, as opposed to the majestic and regal new friend he had initially viewed it as. Furthermore, a reader of the poem could easily recognize that, from his interactions and fixation with the raven, our speaker has quite a penchant for becoming besotted with

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