Poe's "The Raven"

“The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe is an ominous tale of a man obsessed with his lost love Lenore and with death itself.  We could only assume that his lost love was a woman named Lenore because Poe wrote a poem by the same name a couple years earlier.  The narrator (who we assume is Poe) is a man that is in a grim and depressed state and on one evening, while he is lamenting the loss of Lenore and trying to forget his state by reading, he is disturbed by a rapping at his chamber door.  We soon come to learn that the tapping was a black bird that flies through his window and perches on the bust of Pallas (the goddess Athena).  Why does the raven perch of the bosom of the goddess Athena?  The bird himself is the messenger of Phoebus, another name for Apollo (Ovid 532).  What does the bird stand for in the whole context poem?  And what does the raven mean in terms of being a trickster and how does that fit into an archetypal scheme?         

       

                        The raven is the black bird that is not like its cousin the crow, even though they both belong to the family corvus.  Ravens only travel in two’s, not in packs like crows do.  Crows travel in murders and frequent local dumpsters and any other place people leave food.  Ravens on the other hand tend to keep to themselves and not deal with humans (McNamee 223).  The solitude of the raven and their lack of human contact only lends to their enigmatic nature and to the mythology surrounding them.     

                         The raven is a prophetic bird and as we see in Greek mythology does the bidding of Apollo, serving as his messenger and his spy.  We see this in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.  From the Greco-Roman pantheon - as the story goes with the white raven and Apollo, the god of music, prophecy and many other things sent the stately white raven to spy on his lover Coronis.  The white raven reported back to Apollo that Coronis had betrayed him to a “lad of Thessaly.”  When Apollo learned the news of Coronis he went into a fit of rage and took his bow and pierced the chest of Coronis with his arrow.  The god however, in his own regret of what he had done, turned his anger onto the raven and burned the raven’s white feathers to the black color that we are all familiar with today.  In this same story, Athena removes her protection from the bird for being a chatty and naughty bird (Ovid 596, 612). 

            The story of the fall of the raven yields some context to Poe’s poem.  The raven of course in Poe’s poem is the representation of Apollo, delivering the omen to the narrator.  This prophetic omen that is delivered by the bird is done only in one word, “nevermore.”   

             “Nevermore,” is the word the bird says to the narrator of the poem.  Nevermore will the narrator know life in this world, because he is about to be delivered figuratively or symbolically to the next.  The words from the raven send the narrator into a craze and he speaks in the first line of both stanza fifteen and sixteen ““Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil!—‘” (Poe 1045,1046).  The narrator sees the bird as an ill omen that has come to deliver him to the next life.  He knows that the omen is true whether the bird is supernatural or not.  Moreover, we see speaker’s life being taken to the next world as it is symbolized in the last two lines of the stanza of the poem which reads:

And the lamp-light 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! (Poe, 1046)

            The last portion of the ending showing us, the reader, that the speaker is no longer in this world but in the shadow of the raven.  In between worlds. Taking part in change. Or on the proverbial “road trip.”

            In his work on “Structuralism,” renowned Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss sees “mediation” as a function of the trickster, a mediator, half way in between two polar terms, like life and death (Levi-Strauss 226).  Moreover, from the perspective of Levi-Strauss (224) we see the raven as a mediator in Poe’s poem.  Even though the black bird does deal in death he is not the exact representation of it, nor is a representation of life.  In the case of “The Raven,” the black bird is that window, the in-betweenness that we see Poe has between this world and the next.  Moreover, the function of the raven’s shadow serves as a container per say from the world of above to the world of Pluto.    

The raven carries this symbolism cross culturally as noted in the article “Explicating Poe’s Raven From a Psycho Linguistic Perspective” by Abu-Melhim Abdel, published in Studies in Literature and Language in 2013.  A portion of Adbel reads:

The actual Raven is a reference to death and almost a grim reaper.  Many cultures

believe that having a black bird in your house is an omen of death, and since this [Poe’s  The Raven] is a British tradition ad Poe did receive a part of his education in England…        The Raven seems to be a potential covering for death, because it knocks on his door and

he allows it in, symbolizing he is allowing it to enter his life.  When he is talking to it he is

trying to come to terms with death (Abdel 117).   

                        Further, Abdel is assuming that because Poe received his education in Britain that the author writes the black bird as a bad omen.  However, omen does not always have to take on a negative nature and death does not always have to mean a trip to the underworld as noted in the Native American tradition: 

Raven is the powerful figure who transforms the world. Stories tell how Raven created the land, released the people from a cockle shell, and brought them fire. Raven stole the light and brought it out to light up the world. Yet Raven is a trickster—often selfish, hungry, and mischievous. He changes the world only by cleverly deceiving others in his never-ending quest for food (“Raven the Trickster).

            Further, in the Native American tradition, we see the raven as a trickster figure.  The omen is not always an ill but transformative.  It is symbolic of change. 

            To understand this transformation, this death, we have to look deeper into the deities at work in “The Raven,” and find their places.  The poem itself is a continuation of the poem “Lenore” by Poe.  In the poem “Lenore,” we do not see Lenore gliding up to heaven, but “glid[ing] down the stygian river” (Poe 804).  The river styx is referenced in Lenore and is harkened to later in the phrase “plutonian shore” in “The Raven.”  Thusly, Lenore herself in Poe’s “The Raven,” is representative of the other world.   

            Moreover, the poem shows the deities Apollo, Athena and Pluto.  The raven is representative of Apollo and his prophecies and the mediator between life and death.  The statue of Athena is where the bird perches and is the symbol of wisdom and life, particularly Poe’s life.  And Pluto by way of reference is given life with the phrase “Plutonian shore” where Lenore has already gone.  Further it can be seen that death is completely symbolized in the whole of the poem.  Athena represents the wisdom and life of the author.  Lenore represents death and Pluto.  The raven is the messenger and trickster, the representation of going from this life to the next.  The raven is the juxtaposition.  

  

            Richard Godden (1002) in his article “Poe and the Poetics of Opacity: Or, another Way of Looking at that Blackbird” reminds us that there is a tendency to link the entire poem to this “Lenore” when he writes regarding the word “ominous…[and] it’s repetition in the stanza twelve literally marks the spot where the narrator initiates the process by which ties bird to missing mistress.”  Godden does link the bird to Lenore, but he assumes to much of so little which seems to be nonsense.  Godden does this in his article as well as linking Lenore to a slave that Poe had an infatuation with rather than working with what is already there.  It makes no sense, especially when reading Ovid, knowing that Poe had placed Greco-Roman gods into his work and also understanding that the raven is a trickster.  It seems literature is littered with many authors who completely miss the symbolism because of infatuation with the words themselves. 

            Stepping back from the whole, the raven does paint a picture of the psyche of the author.  The raven, Lenore, Athena, and Apollo are not necessarily exacts of what is real and what is not, as our ancestors used to believe.  Rather in their archetypal nature they pull together and show us that the writer is thinking about death and uses the symbols of death and dying to symbolize change.  It is not death that has constellated itself in Poe’s thinking which is the raven, the trickster, the symbol of going from one place to another; it is rather the complete representation of what we all fear the most – change.

 Works Cited

“Raven the Trickster.” American Museum of Natural History, AMNH, 11 Nov. 2018, https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/totems-to-turquoise/native-american-cosmology/raven-the-trickster.

Abu-Melhim, Abdel. "Explicating Poe's Raven from a Psycho-Linguistic Perspective.” (Edgar Allan Poe)(Critical Essay)." Studies in Literature and Language 7.3 (2013): 113-118. Web.

Godden, Richard. "Poe and the Poetics of Opacity: Or, another Way of Looking at that Blackbird." ELH

67.4 (2000): 993-1009. Web.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude, Claire Jacobson, and Brooke G. Schoepf. Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books, 1963.

McNamee, Gregory. "Raven Vs. Crow.” (Choice of Word in Edgar Allan Poe's Poem)(Fine Distinctions)(Critical Essay)." 91.4 (2015): 223. Web.

Ovid. Metomorpheses. Translated by Brookes More, Lazy Raven Publishing, 2017.

Poe, Edgar Allen. "Lenore." The Unabridged Edgar Allen Poe, edited by Tam Mossman, Running Press, 1983.

Poe, Edgar Allen. "The Raven." The Unabridged Edgar Allen Poe, edited by Tam Mossman, Running Press, 1983.