Whitney Comp 2 31 March 2012 Explication of “The Raven” “The Raven” is a poem written by Edgar Allan Poe in the mid 1800s. The poem was written about a man having difficulties dealing with the death of his lover, Lenore. “The Raven”, is a mysterious poem that has a cold setting, symbols, auditory imagery, unusual rhyming style, and a calm but weird mood. Through the eighteen stanzas, the first stanza sets the scene. It is a late December night the last moment of the final month of the year, and the weather is depressing.
The bird’s darkness matches the morbid and depressing tone of the poem and represents lost love and death and symbolizes "Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance. The beginning of this poem largely highlights the elements of darkness and death as Poe describes the atmosphere by employing techniques such as metaphors, alliteration and the use of ironic words to create symbolism. The phrase ‘Midnight dreary’ suggests that it is a dark, cold and wet night and midnight is also related to evil so this indicates that there is evil activity that is about to happen. ‘Bleak December’ symbolizes the lifeless month due to the season of winter which represents death. The metaphor ‘each separate dying ember, wrought its ghost upon the floor’ is used contribute to the mood.
“The Raven” expresses Poe’s grief at the loss of Virginia Clemm portrayed as Lenore. He was distraught and tried “to borrow / From… books surcease of sorrow… for the lost Lenore” (lines 9-10). Poe could not get over the death of
In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” and “The Fall of House of Usher,” Poe wrote constantly of the motifs of the heart, as well as that of madness and insanity. These two works feature elements of lost love and the pain one can feel as a result of a traumatic loss. In the powerful poem “The Raven,” the story tells of a distraught lover; the reader follows the man’s decent into a world of madness. As he displays the loss of his love, Lenore, as the story continues he goes through a world of pain, he sits in a room shut off from the world he once knew, feeling lonely and heartless. As we follow the narrator’s fast decent into madness and loneliness, he keeps mentioning how heartless he realizes now that his lover is gone.
The Raven would have to be Poe’s greatest and most well known poem. With two of his fiancés dying of tuberculosis, this poem resembles the pain and insane-type qualities of the main character that he shared with Poe. The main character is mourning the loss of his beloved Lenore, resembling Poe’s loss of his three fiancés. The raven constantly mutters “nevermore” meaning that the narrator will never see his beloved Lenore, sending him into a depressing tailspin. Poe experienced a similar pain, using alcoholism to escape from all his pain and torment.
The last few paragraphs bring deaper feelings of the story to the readers eyes. They do so by explaining how Bruno's father and older sister truley felt about him. Gretel loved her little brother very much and after he went missing she cried for days in her bedroom. Father also missed him very much. Although he had an odd way of showing how he truley felt he was very broken hearted when he disapeared.
Anderson shows that war has a damning effect on war journalists as well as soldiers, and that their loved ones and families are also heavily affected. One of these effects on the characters is that they lose a sense of hope and as a result, always expect the worse. Talzani depends on fate to answer the toughest questions in his life and to comfort him by covering up horrors in his past by blaming it on the power of fate, which is out of his control. Dr Talzani admits, ‘would you believe that sometimes I am so tired, or the cave is so dark, I’m not even sure of the colours I give them’. To make himself feel better he embodies a fatalistic view which is that ‘there is no pattern to who lives or dies in war’.
The Holocaust ruined numerous lives, including that of Evelyn Roman, who wrote “Aftermath”: a sorrowful poem that described her feelings about the concentration camps. Wiesel and Roman both share different and insightful outlooks about their experiences in the toughest part of their lives. They still remember a great deal of details “fifty years after the fact…” that they wish could vanish in an instant (1). Wiesel and Roman wondered every minute why they endured those experiences: no human deserves the horror they survived. Knowing that someone actually lived these stories made it almost unbearable to
Through her death, it is revealed in Macbeth his care and love for his wife. Her death was at a terrible time, and Macbeth wishes she died later, when it was possible to mourn her, as he said: “She should have died hereafter / There would have been a time for such a word.” (5.5.19-20). It is revealed how desolate and miserable Macbeth’s life will be when he says, “To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day” (5.5.21-22). This line is significant because Macbeth expresses that his life will have no meaning. So even if he somehow avoids his fate, and still remains king, he will not be truly happy without the companionship of his wife.
Not only are their lives wasted, gone without the holy ritual of funeral, but the lives of their loved ones at home are also ruined. This poem starts off at a quick pace, and then continues to decelerate throughout the poem, drawing to a slow, solemn and sombre close. Throughout this poem the traditional feel of an elaborate ceremonial of a Victorian style funeral is constantly compared and contrasted to the ways in which men died in the war. The title 'Anthem for Doomed Youth,' with anthems usually being associated with love and passion, is very deliberately ironic. It is a way in which Owen shows how ridiculous he really thought the war was.