The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe: A Summary of the Poem and Its Meaning
What The Raven is about
"The Raven" is a narrative poem by the American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in January 1845. It runs on a single, simple situation. A man sits alone in his chamber late on a bleak night in December, reading old books he calls "forgotten lore". He is trying to distract himself from the death of a woman he loved, named Lenore. Then he hears a tapping at his chamber door.
There is nothing there. The tapping comes again, a little louder, and this time he realises it is at the window. When he opens it, a raven flies into the room. The bird ignores him completely and settles on a bust of Pallas above the door, where it stays.
What follows is a one-sided conversation. The man, half amused by how solemn the bird looks, asks it its name. The raven answers "Nevermore". It is the only word it says, and it says it to everything. The man is startled that the bird can speak at all, then tells himself the creature must have picked the word up from some "unhappy master" and knows nothing else. All the same, he pulls his chair in front of it and begins to ask it questions. The questions get worse as he goes on. He is the one choosing them, and he knows what the answer will be each time.
The poem is short, intensely musical, and built out of heavy rhythm, internal rhyme and alliteration. Poe based its complex metre on Elizabeth Barrett's poem "Lady Geraldine's Courtship". The talking bird itself was inspired in part by a raven in Charles Dickens's 1841 novel Barnaby Rudge.
The main characters
There are only two figures in the room, and one of them is a bird.
The narrator. He is never named. He is often identified as a student, surrounded by books, awake at midnight, worn down by mourning. He narrates in the past tense but the poem makes clear he is speaking from a position he has not escaped. His voice moves from curiosity to amusement to reasoning to fury, and the shift happens quickly.
The raven. It does almost nothing. It enters, perches, and repeats one word. Whether it is a genuine supernatural visitor, a trained bird with a limited vocabulary, or something the narrator's mind has made use of is left open. The narrator calls it a "thing of evil" and a "prophet" in the same breath. Its position on a bust of Pallas, goddess of wisdom, is one of the poem's many folk, mythological, religious and classical references.
Lenore. She never appears. She exists only as a name the narrator keeps returning to, which is part of the point.
How it ends
Skip this section if you want the poem to unfold for you.
The narrator's mind drifts back to Lenore. He feels the air thicken and imagines the presence of angels, and wonders whether God is sending him a sign that he should forget her. The raven says "Nevermore", which he takes to mean he will never be free of his memories. Enraged, he finally asks the question he has been circling: will he be reunited with Lenore in Heaven? The answer is the same. He calls the bird a liar and orders it back to the "Plutonian shore". It does not move. At the moment of the poem's telling, the raven still sits on the bust of Pallas, casting a shadow on the chamber floor, and the narrator says his soul shall be lifted out of that shadow "nevermore".
The themes
Grief that refuses to resolve is the engine of the poem. The narrator asks questions he already knows the answers to, and each answer makes things worse. That is the cruelty of it. The bird is not torturing him so much as supplying a blank word he fills with his own despair.
Madness sits alongside the grief. The poem never confirms whether anything supernatural is happening. The reader watches a mind construct a prophecy out of a single syllable and then rage at it for being true.
Love and loss are the fuel, and the supernatural is the atmosphere: midnight, December, dying embers, a shadow on the floor, a bird that will not leave.
Why it still matters
"The Raven" made Poe famous in his lifetime, though it brought him very little money. It was first attributed to him in print in the New York Evening Mirror on 29 January 1845, and it was reprinted, parodied and illustrated almost immediately. Poe later claimed, in his 1846 essay "The Philosophy of Composition", that he had built the poem methodically, by design, to work on critics and ordinary readers alike.
Critical opinion on its literary standing has always been split. Its hold on readers has not been. It remains one of the most famous poems ever written in English, and its central image, a black bird on a pale bust repeating one word, is recognisable to people who have never read a line of it.
