[In the following essay, Graham presents a brief examination of Poe's use of voice and language structure to evoke mood, tone, and meaning in “The Raven.”]

What I have beside me is a “page,” by Edgar Allan Poe, for three, four, possibly more speakers. The most recessed of them, the “raven” itself, speaks the most radical truth regarding all that springs from any engagement with utterance (which is of course an engagement with temporality's inevitable ongoingness—be it syntactical or emotional): “nevermore.”

The letter points to changes in the opening of stanza eleven, but subsequent revisions to that stanza are worth glancing at, as they seem to be born with instructive inevitability out of the revision this letter contains. The poem in question, Poe's “The Raven,” not only concerns itself with the issue of timelessness—there are few poetic occasions in which freedom is, formally, so limited—(further thematized by its famous refrain)—but the notion of “refrain” itself carries a double—two-facing—valence: a term for a subtractive-self-restraining action, yet also a term for additive repetition. “Burden,” critical to what sets the action of this stanza in motion, is also used, in music, to refer to a refrain.

So it is against the final “nevermore”'s injunction, devoid of an other side—site without option—unavailable to revision or alteration—that the variety of human strategies such a ferocious finality elicits unfolds. And one can see this page as a text filled with scrupulous and deeply moving amplitudes—a set of dance steps really—seeking all ways around that never more. An attempt to subtract not only from the absoluteness of its value, but even, paradoxically enough, to subtract finality from it by the very process of imbedding it in the aliveness of futurity.

First of all, this is a page of more. More words where there had been a stilled, set number. More implication where there had been a determined one. The “more” of substitution—(“startled at”)—which will not abandon, which in fact restates, its prior version—(“wondering at”). So that in the face of the apparent “never more” finality of a changed-to, chosen term, this page still allows a prior “never more” to ring. The rightness of one term (startled) is heard against the prior (always seemingly final) “rightness” of another station of mind (wondering). On this page (as opposed to in the finished poem) we are free to move from “wonder” to “startled.”

In doing so, we can feel ourselves move from a more strictly mental activity, to a reaction had primarily in the body, by the senses. Wonder takes place, for all its “bodily” awe, in what we feel to be mental space. It displaces one set of conceptions, receiving other, wider ones, ones with the potential to make cohere differing motions of thought. Even as a mental action, startling is born of suddenness, causes recoil, reactive change of expression, which the more internalized “wonder,” whose attributes include an observing scrutiny, a slow seepage of change over the spirit, doesn't. The speaker can still “wonder” at stillness broken (asking why or how, for example); but the speaker reports abruptly, with a sense of interruption, the suddenness of a voice so unexpectedly breaking the continuum of “stillness” (which is quite different in nature, more sepulchral and tactile, for instance, than silence). As a result, we are brought much further into the present tense occasion of the poem. The change moves the speaker from the position of narrator, to that of protagonist of the event. We move, in a sense, from the report of, to the very cry of, the occasion.

But how can stillness be broken? How the nevermore gotten around? By a constantly receding priority (and uttering) of visions and revisions: by a quotation (speech within speech); by a quotation which refers this “reply” to prior versions of itself, of which it is imagined to be a “stock” repetition; by a quote of a prior quote which sends us back to yet a prior speaker (some “unhappy master”) and his unknowably recessed fate—unmerciful Disaster; all of these “followings” accelerating not only under the speed of backward-looking, forward-facing transmission (“followed fast and followed faster”), but also under the general urgency of this letter carrying the revision or substitution. The multiple voices here (letter-writer, author, “prior” author, narrator of poem, speaker reported or quoted by narrator) create substitutions of “authority” which course in the opposite direction (desirous of endless opportunity for reformation and transformation) from the stilling nevermore.

So the page contains a spell—(the doubling-up inner rhymes breaking the lines into the stilling trochaic tetrameters of spell-casting)—placed inside a prayer. The formal devices of the poem, the elaborate inner music, its echoic symmetries, its strong, overly repeated rhymes, seek a stillness which, although it approximates a sepulchral stillness in that it nears its ideal of “perfection”—(wordlessness? Stillness unbroken?)—still slips from it and so has the marmoreal formal qualities while having, equally, the expressive qualities that adhere to the mutability of life.

“Wonder” moved in a direction which we must call, here, a deceleration: it moved towards the dumbstruck awe that can superficially mimic a transcendence of time and death, therefore it is the first impulse, but not a sufficiently complex one, not true transcendence.

Being able to start, to be started and startled, makes one (however much one can be both still—via echoic sound—and capable of accelerating past the mortal broken phrase) (via quotation and back-glancing forward motion) unable to be in anything other than syntax, in other words temporality: the state of “more.”

The concatenation of replies from stillness: apt speech still heard in the head as an echo, breakage of stillness by it, start of speech, startledness of narrator, sensation of doubt, call to doubt-less-ness, raising of voice into actual broken speech, memory of prior such utterances causally enchained to an original burden represented by an apparent forward acceleration in the remembering (backwards!) (faster and faster), creates a typical Poe “vortex.” That faster, (moving forwards), referring back to the disaster of the prior unhappy master creates the mental inswirl, the dizzying near to swooning, the spell, so signal of Poe's site of imagination.

The “till” we arrive at is both the most forward point in time and the furthermost backward point in the tracking of the ever-preceding source of the burden and the disaster to an original (startling) point or burden which all subsequent “songs” bear. It is in fact a storing up (store/bore) and a filling up of the present by the past. It is also a loading down of the present by all forms of precedence from which one cannot escape—not even by the fastest speaking or singing or writing of it. The accumulation of each precedence upon its borne offspring in fact is not only a conflagration (i.e. a startling), but also a dirge. It accumulates (forward-facing) as if it is Hope. But hope itself is an accumulation of all one cannot shed, but only constantly bear (carry), bear (make manifest and so leave this endless trail of the prior) and bear (give birth to) into the present moment, always creating only more instances on the verge of becoming “prior.”

As the supplanted version is, itself, one this one supercedes, so this one, too, will become, is becoming, the next one which will supplant it. (One is reminded of “disaster”'s source in the image/idea of a star: mostly echo of something no longer even there, and yet, Bright Star!, so very steadfast.) …

The only way out, (it turns out), is the never / more. Not the “Ah, Nevermore” swooned into by melancholy, but the second-order

till … that melancholy burden bore of ‘never—nevermore’

Poe altering, as with the first gesture of the stanza, this final one from a metaphorical use of “bore” to the distinctly literal and physical bore of ‘never—nevermore.’

In fact, the original revision (wonder/startle), bringing, as it does, the “representing” closer to its occasion, refiguring the speaker closer to the actual moment of active encounter (“startled”), inevitably jostles the rest of the stanza until subsequent revisions turn the generalized “the melancholy burden”, to the pointed-at (in other words sensorally “present”) “that melancholy burden” and the more rhetorical “Never—ah, Nevermore!”, into the much more subjective “that melancholy burden bore / of ‘never—nevermore’,” a phrase not only much more “spoken”, but also one that teases out the never from the rest of its phrase.

One could ultimately argue the word nevermore here is seen as being born out of the word never. The removal of the “ah”, and the exclamation mark, drives the melancholy down into the body. The burden borne by the body is, finally quite other than that borne by the mind. It is the part of one that does not conceive of the “nevermore” as a [terrifying] concept, but only bears it as its final burden, mute and uncomprehending. The body experiences never. The mind nevermore. “Ah” had no place in such a drama—it was theatrics. He removed it to free and reveal, as so often in Poe, the maelstrom of opposing forms of death.