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Loss In When Great Trees Fall, And The Raven

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“Perhaps they are not stars in the sky, but rather openings where our loved shine down to let us know they are happy.”- Inuit Saying. Loss can be very difficult to deal with and even more difficult to recover from. The authors of both When Great Trees Fall, by Maya Angelou, and The Raven, by Edgar Allan Poe, know this and show it in their pieces. The Raven, by Edgar Allan Poe was written in 1845 is about a man who has lost his love and is visited by a raven. The raven reminds him of his lost loved one and he suffers. When Great Trees Fall, by Maya Angelou was written in 2006 is about the effects of someone’s death on others. The authors believe that loss can take a part of our life away and that it’s very hard for people to get that back. …show more content…

It can tear a person up from the inside until they are unrecognizable. Both authors of the poem know this, but they also know that if you recover from loss, then the memory of that person will make you stronger. The poem, When Great Trees Fall, by Maya Angelou talks about how “reality, bound to them, takes leave of us,” (When Great Trees Fall) when someone passes. This means that the person who lost someone can be broken on the inside so much that they cannot be repaired. Edgar Allan Poe talks about the same thing in his poem by having the character crying out to the raven that, “thy God hath lent thee—by these angels he hath sent thee. Respite—respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore;” (The Raven) The man talking to the raven felt extreme sorrow, so he thought that God sent the raven in order to make him suffer through the memories of his lost one. The themes of both poems are very similar, but they are also a little bit different from each other. The Raven talks mostly about the pain of a loss and it talks very little about recovery. When Great Trees Fall talks mostly about the recovery of loss and how, “Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration. Our senses, restored, never to be the same,”(When Great Trees Fall) When Great Trees Fall includes recovery in their theme consistently, while The Raven does not incorporate recovery in their theme

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