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The Raven
"...Night's Plutonian shore!" The main literary techniques here are allusion and metaphor. Pluto is the god of the dead in Roman mythology. The allusion to Pluto evokes both a sense of deep night...
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The Raven
There are several ways in which the poem reflects its period. The first is that the setting points to a fairly limited chronological range. A poor student who nonetheless could afford many books is...
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Romeo and Juliet
There are common themes of deep, obsessive love and unimaginable loss in the poem “The Raven” and the play Romeo and Juliet. They are both dark, brooding pieces. The speaker in "the Raven" is a...
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The Raven
In Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven," a melancholy student is visited by a raven who utters the famous, cryptic phrase, "Nevermore." Though the student reasons that the bird probably learned the phrase...
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The Raven
One of the most memorable things about Poe's "The Raven" is the repetition of the word "nevermore" at the end of nearly every stanza. The bird probably only knows that one word, but it becomes a...
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The Raven
"The Raven" is about a man who is grieving over the death of his lost lover, Lenore, and how he plunges deeper and deeper into depression. Poe uses suspense to help readers empathize with the man's...
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The Raven
"The Raven" presents the psychological truth that human beings are always trying to mitigate or palliate our fear that death really is the end. The narrator begins the poem by describing his...
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The Raven
One way to interpret characters in poetry is to analyze them both with a literal eye as well as a figurative one. In Poe's "The Raven," a man sits grieving in his chamber over his lost love,...
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The Raven
For the first half of the poem, the raven seems to be a literal bird that comes into the narrator's chamber when he flings open his window. The man is able to take some pleasure from the unusual...
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The Raven
One example of alliteration, the repetition of an initial consonant sound, occurs when the narrator says, "Deep into the darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, / Doubting,...
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The Raven
The events of the poem take place late in the year, in "bleak December" (line 7), and at "midnight" (1). Both midnight and December are often symbolic of death, especially in works by Edgar Allan...
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The Raven
The narrator of the poem hears a knocking at his door, but it is December, and right around midnight, so it seems unlikely that this knocking would be coming from some natural source. He has been...
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The Raven
The student’s question—what is a description of the power of landscapes in Edgar Allan Poe’s poem The Raven—can, perhaps, best be answered with reference to a broader examination of this...
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The Raven
When the bird first steps through the window into his room, the narrator calls it "a stately raven of the saintly days of yore" (line 38), and he specifically talks about the way it conducts itself...
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The Raven
In "The Raven," Edgar Allan Poe employs a Gothic ambiance to explore themes of grief, negativity, and depression. As the poem opens, the narrator is at home alone at night feeling sad and lonely....
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The Raven
"The dirges of his hope" in this poem means "the sad songs sung to express that hope itself has died" or, more simply, "the sad sounds made by a hopeless man." Let's explore that idea. Dirges are...
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The Raven
The speaker in "The Raven" asks the bird if there's anything that will ease his heartache, and if there's any chance he'll see his lost love in the afterlife. Let's check out the details of these...
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The Raven
One way that we learn about our narrator is through his use of allusions. Allusions are references to other texts, places, people, or events that bring richness and nuance to a text. In this...
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The Raven
We don't actually know for sure why the bird has come. It could simply be that he is just a bird who can see lights on and so taps at the window to be let in; if he is a tame bird who belongs to...
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The Raven
In the fourth stanza, the narrator undergoes a bit of a change in courage. In the third stanza, he says, he is filled with "fantastic terrors," likely referring to his fears about who could be...
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The Raven
Aidenn is the Arabic word for Paradise; one might consider its similarity to the word Eden (like the Garden of Eden in the book of Genesis in the Old Testament of the Bible), a word that also...
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The Raven
One could argue that English language poetry has changed drastically in the years since 1845 when Edgar Allan Poe wrote "The Raven," and that therefore this classic piece of American poetry should...
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The Raven
Gothic fiction is typically characterized by mystery as well as elements of the supernatural, and "The Raven" in many ways contains both. First, the fact that the poem begins on a "midnight...
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The Raven
In this line, the speaker "wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust, and door" in order to consider the bird. The bird conducts himself like a lord or lady and speaks the word...
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The Raven
The raven in this poem is very mysterious for a number of reasons. First, the fact that he appears to rap at the narrator's door at midnight is both odd and unsettling, especially considering that...
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The Raven
Edgar Allan Poe's poem, "The Raven", is focused on an inner conflict, the struggle of the narrator against his own sorrow and depression at the death of Lenore. The poem opens by describing the...
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The Raven
My impression of the narrator is that he is a man who has recently lost his beloved, a woman he calls "Lenore," and in enduring her death, he is coming face to face with both it as well as his own...
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The Raven
When the poem begins, the narrator is awake and poring "Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore" (line 2). It is midnight and he is, as he tells us, attempting to distract himself...
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The Raven
First, who is "rapping" at the narrator's door (21)? Is it Lenore's ghost? If so, why has she returned? If not, who then? If it were the raven, then he, presumably, would have entered when the...
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The Raven
When the raven flies into the narrator's study, he alights on a bust of the Greek goddess, Athena. The poem's narrator says that the raven entered "with mien of lord or lady, perched above my...
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The Raven
Some descriptive words about the bird in "The Raven" include grim, stern, ebony [black], ancient and ghastly. The bird is also described more than once as still and unmoving, standing without a...
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The Raven
Let’s set the scene of the famous Poe poem, “The Raven.” The narrator is in his dark living room alone by a fire that is going out reading old and forgotten books. The flames of the fire...
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The Raven
The physical setting of this poem is the narrator's den. He describes this room only as a "chamber," but because it houses books and a bust of Athena, it seems to be a study of some kind (line...
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The Raven
Edgar Allan Poe uses both internal and external rhyming patterns in “The Raven.” In general, internal rhyme occurs when the middle word of a line rhymes with the ending word of the same line....
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The Raven
Alliteration refers exclusively to the repetition of the initial consonant sound of words. The initial lines of this stanza read, "And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain /...
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The Raven
Alliteration is the repetition of initial consonant sounds in words that are close to each other in the text. Here the words "nodded, nearly napping" all begin with the /n/ sound, and the three...
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The Raven
In the poem "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe, the narrator gets an unexpected visit from a raven. Surprisingly, the raven can speak, but the only word it seems capable of uttering is "Nevermore." The...
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The Raven
First in answer to this question, I would say that the Raven does not really need to be explained. The poem is an example of The Gothic, a genre that features fantastical elements much more...
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The Raven
In Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven” he describes the embers as “dying” for a number of reasons. He uses the lines: Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December; And each...
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The Raven
Many words could be used to describe the mood in Edgar Allan Poe's brilliant poem "The Raven." In a single word, it can be considered "Gothic," which you can read more about in the link below. More...
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The Raven
The conflict that exists within the speaker who has lost his love, Lenore, is resolved when he finally despairs of ever being reunited with her. The forlorn lover utters these lines at the poem's...
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The Raven
That is an interesting question. I've never imagined questioning whether or not the bird was actually a real bird. I have always thought it was a real bird that actually flew into the speaker's...
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The Raven
In this poem, there is a great deal of sound repetition, and this repetition has a number of interesting effects on the reader. For example, there is the poem's perhaps most immediately...
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The Raven
In "The Raven," Edgar Allan Poe reveals one of the greatest traits of human nature is the capacity to love, just as the speaker clearly deeply loved the late Lenore. Poe also shows that with love...
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The Raven
The speaker in "The Raven" is agonizing over the death of a beloved maiden named Lenore. He finds it so painful to remember her that he is struggling not to think about her. But he keeps...
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The Raven
Although Edgar Allen Poe does use internal rhyme and alliteration in the poem “The Raven,” the word “nevermore” is a refrain. The word is repeated eleven times in the latter stanzas of the...
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The Raven
In “The Raven,” Edgar Allan Poe uses motif to create the mood of melancholy and longing. A motif is a repetitious idea, sound, or image in a piece of literature. Poe repeats the sounds in the...
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The Raven
This poem is a fascinating example of first-person narration, as well as powerful exploration of the human capacity for self-induced suffering. The narrator is grieving a lost love, Lenore, and...
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The Raven
You will find allusions to the works of Edgar Allan Poe in many "modern works" including contemporary poems, plays, films, comic books, and cartoons. An allusion is a reference to something, in...
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The Raven
The speaker's explanation changes during the course of the poem -- from a rational explanation to a supernatural one. At the beginning, the speaker's explanation is rational and conventional: He...
