The Raven (Illustrated) - Эдгар Аллан По

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and the plumage — it being understood that the bust was absolutely suggested by the bird — the bust of Pallas being chosen, first, as most in keeping with the scholarship of the lover, and secondly, for the sonorousness of the word, Pallas, itself.

      About the middle of the poem, also, I have availed myself of the force of contrast, with a view of deepening the ultimate impression. For example, an air of the fantastic — approaching as nearly to the ludicrous as was admissible — is given to the Raven’s entrance. He comes in “with many a flirt and flutter.”

      Not the least obeisance made he — not a moment stopped or stayed he,

       But with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door.

      In the two stanzas which follow, the design is more obviously carried out:—

      Then this ebony bird, beguiling my sad fancy into smiling

       By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,

       Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,” I said, “art sure no craven,

       Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore —

       Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore?”

       Quoth the Raven —“Nevermore.”

      Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,

       Though its answer little meaning — little relevancy bore;

       For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being

       Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door —

       Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door,

       With such name as “Nevermore.”

      The effect of the denouement being thus provided for, I immediately drop the fantastic for a tone of the most profound seriousness — this tone commencing in the stanza directly following the one last quoted, with the line,

      But the Raven, sitting lonely on that placid bust, spoke only, etc.

      From this epoch the lover no longer jests — no longer sees anything even of the fantastic in the Raven’s demeanour. He speaks of him as a “grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore,” and feels the “fiery eyes” burning into his “bosom’s core.” This revolution of thought, or fancy, on the lover’s part, is intended to induce a similar one on the part of the reader — to bring the mind into a proper frame for the denouement — which is now brought about as rapidly and as directly as possible.

      With the denouement proper — with the Raven’s reply, “Nevermore,” to the lover’s final demand if he shall meet his mistress in another world — the poem, in its obvious phase, that of a simple narrative, may be said to have its completion. So far, everything is within the limits of the accountable — of the real. A raven, having learned by rote the single word “Nevermore,” and having escaped from the custody of its owner, is driven at midnight, through the violence of a storm, to seek admission at a window from which a light still gleams — the chamber-window of a student, occupied half in poring over a volume, half in dreaming of a beloved mistress deceased. The casement being thrown open at the fluttering of the bird’s wings, the bird itself perches on the most convenient seat out of the immediate reach of the student, who amused by the incident and the oddity of the visitor’s demeanour, demands of it, in jest and without looking for a reply, its name. The raven addressed, answers with its customary word, “Nevermore”— a word which finds immediate echo in the melancholy heart of the student, who, giving utterance aloud to certain thoughts suggested by the occasion, is again startled by the fowl’s repetition of “Nevermore.” The student now guesses the state of the case, but is impelled, as I have before explained, by the human thirst for self-torture, and in part by superstition, to propound such queries to the bird as will bring him, the lover, the most of the luxury of sorrow, through the anticipated answer, “Nevermore.” With the indulgence, to the extreme, of this self-torture, the narration, in what I have termed its first or obvious phase, has a natural termination, and so far there has been no overstepping of the limits of the real.

      But in subjects so handled, however skillfully, or with however vivid an array of incident, there is always a certain hardness or nakedness which repels the artistical eye. Two things are invariably required — first, some amount of complexity, or more properly, adaptation; and, secondly, some amount of suggestiveness — some under-current, however indefinite, of meaning. It is this latter, in especial, which imparts to a work of art so much of that richness (to borrow from colloquy a forcible term), which we are too fond of confounding with the ideal. It is the excess of the suggested meaning — it is the rendering this the upper instead of the under-current of the theme — which turns into prose (and that of the very flattest kind), the so-called poetry of the so-called transcendentalists.

      Holding these opinions, I added the two concluding stanzas of the poem — their suggestiveness being thus made to pervade all the narrative which has preceded them. The under-current of meaning is rendered first apparent in the line —

      Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!”

       Quoth the Raven “Nevermore!”

      It will be observed that the words, “from out my heart,” involve the first metaphorical expression in the poem. They, with the answer, “Nevermore,” dispose the mind to seek a moral in all that has been previously narrated. The reader begins now to regard the Raven as emblematical — but it is not until the very last line of the very last stanza that the intention of making him emblematical of Mournful and never ending Remembrance is permitted distinctly to be seen:

      And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting,

       On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;

       And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon that is dreaming,

       And the lamplight o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;

       And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor

       Shall be lifted — nevermore.

      The Raven by Sarah Helen Whitman

       Table of Contents

       As a valentine for E. A. Poe

      Raven, from the dim dominions

       On the Night's Plutonian shore,

       Oft I hear thy dusky pinions

       Wave and flutter round my door—

       See the shadow of thy pinions

       Float along the moon-lit floor;

       Often, from the oak-woods glooming

       Round some dim ancestral tower,

       In the lurid distance looming—

       Some high solitary tower—

       I can hear thy storm-cry booming

       Through the lonely midnight hour.

       When the moon is at the zenith,

       Thou dost haunt the moated hall,

       Where the marish flower greeneth

       O'er the waters, like a pall—

       Where the House of Usher leaneth,

       Darkly nodding to its fall:

       There I see thee, dimly gliding—

       See thy black plumes waving slow—

       In its hollow casements hiding,

       When their shadow yawns below,

       To the sullen tarn confiding

       The dark secrets of their woe:—

       See

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