The Raven

There are two major avenues for interpreting “The Raven.” The first reads the poem as wholly literal: a raven appears in (or is summoned to) the chamber of a grieving man. The raven may be a supernatural being; ravens have historically been seen as birds of ill omen in various cultures, and in western culture are often linked with the Devil. In his grief the speaker is reading books of “forgotten lore.” Could they be related to witchcraft or magic? Perhaps he is trying to mitigate his sadness by reading spells to summon the dead. Perhaps he has succeeded; we never learn who first knocked “gently […] faintly” at the chamber door. Poe keeps the reader on tenterhooks about the supernatural possibilities in stanza 5 with the spoken word “Lenore,” which ends the line. Until the next line’s phrase “This I whispered,” we aren’t sure who has spoken: the speaker, or someone else.

It is also possible to read the poem literally and to understand the raven as merely an animal rather than a supernatural presence. Even the most fantastical elements of the raven’s arrival—that it knocks on the window, that it enters the room and refuses to leave—would not have been too outlandish to the nineteenth-century reader, who would have been familiar enough with animals trying to escape the winter cold. In this reading, the speaker’s fragile mental state sees him devolve from understanding that the raven is just a creature, whose call sounds like a human word, to hallucinating that it mocks and torments him with its refrain.

Alternately, “The Raven” can be interpreted as a highly symbolic, wholly psychological poem about a man conquered by grief or mental illness. As mentioned above, the Romantics were fascinated with the human mind and Poe, in particular, with abnormal psychology. The speaker’s grief could be for the loss of a physical woman (“Lenore”), or perhaps for the loss of an ideal, the hope or creativity which had previously kept him even-keeled.

In his essay on the creative process behind the writing of “The Raven,” Poe described the raven as “emblematical of Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance” (Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Philosophy of Composition.” The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven Edition, Volume 5. New York: P. F. Collier and Son). In the poem, he suggests that the speaker’s obsessive curiosity about the bird coupled with the memory of his loss is deeply damaging to him. His obsession escalates to the point where he is unable to venture outside his “chamber”—that is, outside of his own mind—and his increasing repetitions as the poem progresses (e.g. “Prophet! [..] thing of evil!” [stanzas 15 and 16], “Leave” [stanza 17]) depict an unravelling mental state.

In either interpretation, the speaker is overwhelmed and rendered helpless by his experience—whether real or imagined. The word “still” in the last stanza can be equated with an emotional (or even physical) death. The speaker is trapped, either in a living nightmare or in the psychological process of grief, never to be released.