Edgar Allan Poe

“ 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 tone of the highest Beauty is one of Sadness. The most melancholy of topics is Death. This must be allied to Beauty. "The death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world,—and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such a topic are those of a bereaved lover." These last expressions are quoted from Poe's whimsical analysis of this very poem, but they indicate precisely the general range of his verse. ”

“ Still, one of these lyrics, in its smaller way, affects us with a sense of uniqueness, as surely as the sublimer works of a supernatural cast,—Marlowe's "Faustus," the "Faust" of Goethe, "Manfred," or even those ethereal masterpieces, "The Tempest" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream." More than one, while otherwise unique, has some [10] burden or refrain which haunts the memory,—once heard, never forgotten, like the tone of a rarely used but distinctive organ-stop. Notable among them is Bürger's "Lenore," that ghostly and resonant ballad, the lure and foil of the translators. ”

“ Of all these mystical cadences, the plaint of The Raven, vibrating through the portal, chiefly has impressed the outer world. What things go to the making of a poem,—and how true in this, as in most else, that race which named is bards "the makers"! A work is called out of the void. Where there was nothing, it remains,—a new creation, part of the treasure of mankind. And a few exceptional lyrics, more than others that are equally creative, compel us to think anew how bravely the poet's pen turns things unknown ”

“ Clasp the sensitive hand of a troubled singer dreeing thus his weird, and share with him the clime in which he found,—never throughout the day, always in the night,—if not the Atlantis whence he had wandered, at least a place of refuge from the bounds in which by day he was immured.
To one land only he has power to lead you, and for one night only can you share his dream. ”

“ If he had designed the complete work in advance, he scarcely would have made so harsh a prelude of rattle-pan rhymes to the delicious melody of the second stanza,—not even upon his theory of the fantastic. Of course an artist, having perfected a work, sees, like the first Artist, that it is good, and sees why it is good. ”

“ The harm of such analysis is that it tempts a novice to fancy that artificial processes can supersede imagination. The impulse of genius is to guard the secrets of its creative hour. Glimpses obtained of the toil, the baffled experiments, which precede a triumph, as in the sketch-work of Hawthorne recently brought to light, afford priceless instruction and encouragement to the sincere artist. ”

“ He confessed himself the bird's unhappy master, the stricken sufferer of this poem. But his was a full share of that dramatic temper which exults in the presage of its own doom. There is a delight in playing one's high part: we are all gladiators, crying Ave Imperator! To quote Burke's matter of fact: "In grief the pleasure is still uppermost, and the affliction we suffer has no resemblance to absolute pain, which is always odious, and which we endeavor to shake off as soon as possible." Poe went farther, and was an artist even in the tragedy of his career. ”

“ Here are the perturbed ones, through whose eyes, like those of the Cenci, the soul finds windows though the mind is dazed; here spirits, groping for the path which leads to Eternity, are halted and delayed. It is the limbo of "planetary souls," wherein are all moonlight uncertainties, all lost loves and illusions. Here some are fixed in trance, the only respite attainable; others
"move fantastically
To a discordant melody:"
while everywhere are
"Sheeted Memories of the Past—
Shrouded forms that start and sigh
As they pass the wanderer by." ”

“ By that Heaven that bends above us—by that God we both adore—
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore—
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore. ”

“ But the Raven, sitting lonely on that placid bust, spoke only
That one word, as if its soul in that one word he did outpour
Nothing farther then he uttered; not a feather then he fluttered—
Till I scarcely more than muttered: “Other friends have flown before—
On the morrow he will leave me, as my Hopes have flown before.”
Then the bird said “Nevermore.” ”

“ I suppose that an artist's love for one "in the form" never can wholly rival his devotion to some ideal. The woman near him must exercise her spells, be all by turns and nothing long, charm him with infinite variety, or be content to forego a share of his allegiance. ”

“ It would be well if other, and famous, poets could be as sure of making their changes always improvements. Poe constantly rehandled his scanty show of verse, and usually bettered it. The Raven was the first of the few poems which he nearly brought to completion before printing. It may be that those who care for poetry lost little by his death. Fluent in prose, he never wrote verse for the sake of making a poem. When a refrain of image haunted him, the lyric that resulted was the inspiration, as he himself said, of a passion, not of a purpose. ”

“ Close acquaintance tells in favor of every true work of art. Induce the man, who neither knows art nor cares for it, to examine some poem or painting, and how soon its force takes hold of him! In fact, he will overrate the relative value of the first good work by which his attention has been fairly caught. The Raven, also, has consistent qualities which even an expert must admire. In no other of it's authors poems is the motive more palpably defined.. "The Haunted Palace" is just as definite to the select reader, but Poe scarcely would have taken that subtle allegory for bald analysis. ”

“ Through all is dimly outlined, beneath a shadowy pall, the poet's ideal love—so often half-portrayed elsewhere,—the entombed wife of Usher, the Lady Ligelia, in truth the counterpart of his own nature. ”

“ Each seems without a prototype, yet all fascinate us with elements wrested from the shadow of the Supernatural. Now the highest imagination is concerned about the soul of things; it may or may not inspire the Fantasy that peoples with images the interlunar vague. ”

“ His artistic introduction of a third rhyme in both the second and fourth lines, and the addition of a fifth line and a final refrain, made the stanza of The Raven. The persistent alliteration seems to come without effort, and often the rhymes within lines are seductive; while the refrain or burden dominates the whole work. Here also he had profited by Miss Barrett's study of ballads and romaunts in her own and other tongues. A "refrain" is the lure wherewith a poet or a musician holds the wandering ear,—the recurrent longing of Nature for the initial strain. ”

“ Beauty pure and simple, and the perfect excellence thereof, he rarely seemed to comprehend.
Yet there is beauty in his designs for the "Ancient Mariner," unreal as they are, and a consecutiveness rare in a series by Doré. The Rime afforded him a prolonged story, with many shiftings of the scene. In The Raven sound and color preserve their monotone and we have no change of place or occasion. What is the result? Doré proffers a series of variations upon the theme as he conceived it, "the enigma of death and the hallucination of an inconsolable soul." ”

“ The secret of a poem, no less than a jest's prosperity, lies in the ear of him that hears it. ”

“ Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. ”

“ Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer
Swung by seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor.
"Wretch," I cried, "thy God hath lent thee—by these angels he hath sent thee
Respite—respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore!
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore." ”

“ And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;
So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating
"'T is some visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door
Some late visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door;—
This it is, and nothing more." ”

“ The Raven also may be taken as a representative poem of its author, for its exemplification of all his notions of what a poem should be. These are found in his essays on "The Poetic Principle," "The Rationale of Verse," and "The Philosophy of Composition." Poe declared that "in Music, perhaps, the soul most nearly attains the great end for which, when inspired by the Poetic Sentiment, it struggles—the creation of supernal Beauty.... Verse cannot be better designated than as an inferior or less capable music" ”

“ His invention, so rich in the prose tales, seemed to desert him when he wrote verse; and his judgment told him that long romantic poems depend more upon incident than inspiration,—and that, to utter the poetry of romance, lyrics would suffice. Hence his theory, clearly fitted to his own limitations, that "a 'long poem' is a flat contradiction in terms." The components of The Raven are few and simple: a man, a bird, and the phantasmal memory at a woman. But the piece affords a fine display of romantic material. What have we? The midnight; the shadowy chamber with its tomes of forgotten lore ”

“ Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!”
Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.” ”

“ Poe created the fifth line of his stanza for the magic of the repetend. He relied upon it to the uttermost in a few later poems,—"Lenore." "Annabel Lee," "Ulalume." and "For Annie." It gained a wild and melancholy music, I have thought, from the "sweet influences, of the Afric burdens and repetends that were sung to him in childhood, attuning with their native melody the voice of our Southern poet.
"The Philosophy of Composition," his analysis of The Raven, is a technical dissection of its method and structure. ”