SOURCE: Freedman, William. “Poe's ‘Raven’: The Word That Is an Answer ‘Nevermore.’” Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism: History Theory, Interpretation 31, no. 1, 2 (1998): 23-31.

[In the following essay, Freedman conducts an analysis of structure and symbolism in “The Raven.”]

In an otherwise uninspired 1845 notice of “The Raven” and Other Poems, the anonymous reviewer for the Broadway Journal wisely observes that “the impression of a very studied effect is always uppermost after reading [Poe]. And you have to study him to understand him.”¹ It seems a safe enough observation, but most recent criticism of Poe's poetry and fiction has arrived at the rather different conclusion that you have to study Poe to realize that in the end you cannot understand him—or, more precisely, that to understand him properly you must recognize that his poems and tales are perversely or meaningfully resistant to coherent interpretation. “The Raven,” which I will fix on here, has been read in this pointedly obscuring light, but for the most part only glancingly and selectively. Most such readings attend almost exclusively to the bird's “Nevermore” as a disconnected signifier emblematic of a habit of indeterminate speech that can be analyzed more fruitfully and fully in Poe's other writings, principally the fiction. There is room, I believe, for a closer look at both the utterance and the poem whose ostensible meanings it helps to empty or obscure.

The spirit of “charmed mistrust,” in Richard Wilbur's felicitous phrase, is afloat in the sea of Poe criticism generally, and it assumes a variety of forms, some more troubled than charmed. Although such dismissiveness is no longer fashionable, several earlier readings of “Ulalume” scorn it for what seems to Yvor Winters a form of deliberate obscurantism, to Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren cheap mystification. “[I]n Poe, obscurantism,” writes Winters in 1937, “has ceased to be merely an accident of inadequate understanding; it has become the explicit aim of writing and has begun the generation of a method. Poe's aesthetic is an aesthetic of obscurantism.” Winters means nothing praiseworthy by this. He is in effect agreeing with Brooks and Warren's observation that “Poe expected poetry to stand little analysis, and to affect only the person who gave it a ‘cursory glance,’ a superficial reading.”² But a later generation of critics meliorates the accusation, turning “an aesthetic of obscurantism” into an enterprise of no worse than neutral, often of quite exalted, standing. For some, it is an entertaining expression of personal inclination or of a characterological dualism with implications for genre and effect. Uncertainty about Poe's meaning and intent, in this view, is encouraged by his cultivated penchant for impish hoaxing, mockery, and self-mockery. Like Swift, if less acidly, Poe often mocks what engages him; he loves to tease and mystify his readers. Some of his stories are therefore, as David Halliburton observes, part horror story, part burlesque. And the line between horror and laughter, as Daniel Hoffman remarks, often wavers as discomposingly as the line between terror and passion.³

More commonly and more admiringly, the absence of meaning is ascribed to the aesthetic of suggestive vagueness articulated in “The Poetic Principle.” Through the lens of Poe's romanticism, the domain of ideal or supernal beauty is indefinite, ineffable, beyond empirical knowledge—to be discerned only in “brief and indeterminate glimpses” (Complete Works, 14:274). As George Kelly points out, because Poe identifies vagueness as “the effect of the spiritual,” he finds spirituality in vagueness. Reading “Ulalume” in this iridescent light, Poe's recent biographer Kenneth Silverman perceives it as an effort “to escape referential language into some astral music.” And many have agreed with Joan Dayan that Poe “harp[s]” in his fiction “for the true indefiniteness, the unquenchable desire for beauty,” not primarily to intensify horror but to lift the prose on beauty's shoulders toward the ethereal realm of poetry.⁴

Indefiniteness and absence, then, the hollowness readers find with increasing regularity at the core of Poe's writing, may be a product of aesthetic theory as well as hoaxing. But, richly overdetermined, it may also and more darkly reflect a somber metaphysic or epistemology of the void. The roots of understanding's failure are, from this standpoint, both epistemological and linguistic, and while the two are difficult to disentangle, different readers offer different emphases. Making one of the earliest arguments of this kind in his 1925 In the American Grain, William Carlos Williams presciently identifies the linguistic cause of our confusion, remarking Poe's preoccupation with words as autotelic phenomena. Expanding on Williams's insight, Joseph Riddell argues that in Poe “an abyss has opened up between word and world” and that this chasm introduces “a new literature, a self-critical or self-annihilating textual performance—the poem/story and even the critical essay (as performance) that deconstructs itself.”⁵ For Dennis Pahl, the problem is more broadly epistemological. Poe, as Pahl reads him, inhabits a Nietzschean world where “[t]here are no ‘facts-in-themselves,’ for a sense must always be projected into them before they can be ‘facts.’” Thus while his tales “may be said to characterize truth-seeking in a decidedly violent manner,” the search is inevitably thwarted, undone by an “uncanny structural relation between subject and object, between inside and outside, between spectator and spectacle,” that keeps meaning and knowledge always out of reach. Similarly, Dayan reads Poe as the purveyor of a “rigorously indeterminate philosophy” and of fictions designed to demonstrate the limits of a finite intellect that “cannot know the essence of anything.”⁶

This view of Poe, in a variety of creative permutations, has become commonplace, almost consensual. As R. C. De Prospo observes in a broad survey of deconstructive readings, “Poe is by now so generally associated with the theoretical avant-garde” that critics as widely divergent as Michael Riffaterre and Michael Fried “can take for granted that Poe is one of the American writers most likely to inspire deconstruction.” De Prospo is right, and while some may sympathize with David Hirsch's complaint that little is added to our knowledge of Poe's obsession with thoughts of “death, nothingness, and annihilation” by “convert[ing] these observations into the terminology of ‘sign, referent, semiotic impasse, and writing locat[ing] its own activity,’” the best of these readings do justify themselves by a meticulous attention to Poe's language as the adroitly evasive instrument of that annihilation.⁷

Recent criticism of “The Raven” runs in this vein, but most, as I have indicated, tends to limit its attention to the contextualized and ultimately unreferring meaning of “Nevermore” as representative of a practice better exemplified elsewhere. The poem's brain, in other words, is selectively picked for what it tells us about the implicitly more important or more profitably deconstructed works of fiction. In this poem, “as in Poe's works generally,” notes Michael Williams, the “sign is revealed as a function of interpretive desire.” And this “concept of the intrinsically empty signifier, which, we shall see, recurs in Poe's tales, … shifts the site of meaning from the relation between word and world to that between reader and text.” Mutlu Konuk Blasing, who offers a relevant close reading of “The Raven,” nonetheless similarly moves to the generalized proposition that Poe's “emblems are birds that rob the poet's language of transcendent significance or of the possibility of such significance.” “In Ovid as in Poe,” she notes, “the black birds, ‘which imitate whatever noise they choose,’ represent failed poets, uninspired chatterers.” And Jefferson Humphries, whose chief concern is the influence and metamorphic permutations of Poe's raven in later poetry, observes that, in allegories of loss and translatedness, “birds, ravens for instance, … are always pure signifiers, unanchored in any signified, any original, and yet [like Lenore's melancholy survivor] incit[e] endless efforts to translate their significance.” The “plus beau jour” in a poem by Verlaine, for instance, is, “like the raven, like the grotesque in general, a pure signifier, ‘to the extent that it “is destined … to signify the annulment of what it signifies.””’⁸

More attentive to the raven than “The Raven” and concerned almost exclusively with the bird and its utterance as representative of the habit of meaning-annihilation in other works, Humphries's study is itself representative of most recent writing on “The Raven.” But there is reason, I believe, for further analysis of both the emblematic word and the poem it organizes. What I want to suggest is that the bird's unvarying reply has been deciphered only partially and that what it tells (or refuses to tell) us is as richly elaborated in the rest of Poe's poem as in any of the more generously analyzed tales.

Here, for closer examination, are the three imploring questions the student addresses to the raven. The first and most resonant is the request for its name:

“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.”

(46-48)⁹

The others, though similarly formulated, request information not about the raven but about the speaker himself. The student inquires next about the prospect of eventual solace:

“Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted—
On this home by Horror haunted—tell me truly, I implore—
Is there—is there balm in Gilead?—tell me—tell me, I implore!”
                    Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”

(87-90)

And finally about whether he will rejoin his lost Lenore, fusing—as Poe impossibly wishes—the profane and the sacred, the sexual and the spiritual identities of the woman:

“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.”
                    Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”

(92-96)

At first glance the raven's answer is a direct if predictable reply to the questions put to it by the first curious, then incrementally self-tormenting student. My name is Nevermore; no, you will nevermore find respite from your grief; and no, you will nevermore clasp your sainted maiden. But when the syntax of the questions is more rigorously parsed, the import of the bird's answers is less apparent. In fact, there may be no answers at all. The inquirer does not simply pose questions but implores the raven, “Tell me,” “Tell this soul,” or “tell me truly.” Given that formulation, the answering “Nevermore” is more a response to the request to be told than an answer to the question itself; the utterance, then, that purportedly provides the devastating reply to an ordered sequence of questions is at the same time or more precisely a refusal to reply. However we construe the raven—whether as objective truth or a projection of the questioner's darkening psyche—it offers no answer to the questions crucial to the inquirer's comfort and well being. In these exchanges, Poe moves beyond the relatively uncomplicated question of the speaker's state of mind or future prospects to questions of the meaningfulness, even the possibility, of response. To take annihilation one step further, answering “Nevermore” to the entreaty “Tell me what thy lordly name is” means offering not only an answer that is a refusal to answer but a “name” that, rejecting the demand for a name, insists on the condition of namelessness. Perhaps the only answer, then, is that there is none, as the “name” of the raven and perhaps of everything else that may be named is the refusal to provide one.

Poe's evocative play with naming and namelessness is further present in what seems an internal contradiction, perhaps even an authorial error. In stanza 2, the student recounts his futile efforts to find comfort:

Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore—
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore—
                    Nameless here for evermore.

(10-12)

Nameless here for evermore—only to be named twice more but three stanzas later and yet again twice more in the rest of the poem. That which will be nameless here for evermore, in other words, will be repeatedly named—a paradox that lends itself to several interpretive possibilities. For J. Gerald Kennedy, it is because “Lenore ‘signifies’ the absence which afflicts him” that the speaker perversely and self-punishingly cannot resist naming her. For Blasing, Lenore may not be the actual name of his beloved at all, but a “generic name for … the male speaker's anima-muse”; hence her real name does remain unspoken.¹⁰ But other possibilities are more evocative, more consistent with the poem's pervasive destabilization of truth and meaning. One is that time and eternity have lost all distinctness and all meaning. That which will never again occur will reoccur almost instantly and then repeatedly as eternal prohibition becomes temporal fulfillment. Viewed psychologically, the point or implication may be that time is a fundamentally subjective phenomenon: every despairing moment merely seems an eternity, and terms like “evermore” or, more critically, “Nevermore” lose their objective force and substance. Time and eternity, in this view, are absorbed into personal consciousness, become expressions not of substantive conditions but of private experience. They become, in short, localized expressions of the poem's progressive process of internalization, its conversion of the raven and of all else the poem describes from material fact to hypostatizations of the musing and speaking mind. Viewed more metaphysically, time and eternity become expressions of another equally pervasive process: that which, like the name that is no name and the answer that is none, resists the desire for clarity and distinction, for the definition of borders on which meaning and comprehensibility depend.

This unsettling of boundaries—the teasing interchangeability of the named with the nameless, of evermore with nevermore—might be seen as a relatively simple refusal of distinction, an insistence accordant with Poe's quest for unity among the smallest particles of a grand design in which all entities and concepts are ultimately inseparable, in which separability and distinction are merely deceptions that tempt reason and plague experience. But to name the nameless is to equate that name with namelessness, as Marlow's insistence that Kurtz's final utterance was not “The horror!” but “your name” is in a sense to name the Intended as the horror. Lenore is the lost or missing woman who, like truth itself as Nietzsche has it, is absent, sought after, and denied. For Nietzsche, as Derrida remarks, “Woman is but one name for that untruth of truth”; “Woman (truth) will not be pinned down.”¹¹ Lost and beloved, she becomes, like truth or beauty, not only the unattainable but the unnameably unknown. That she is named almost simultaneously with being declared nameless is no simple contradiction. Insistently, perhaps defiantly, the poem here identifies that which is most eagerly sought and ostensibly identifiable as that which, even when named, remains nameless. Like the raven, the source of truth about what once was mythically possessed and known, the lost woman bears the name that is equivalent to namelessness. All that may be named is that which has no name.

The effect of these seeming contradictions is pervasively to transform “Nevermore” from an answer to specific questions into a voided state in which no answers are forthcoming or, indeed, possible; it is to translate that which is sought and eagerly longed for into a nominalized form of namelessness. The object of the quest, in other words, becomes that which cannot be identified and the vehicle of knowledge becomes that which can or will provide no answers. In this context, from the retrospective vantage of a second or later reading, other ambiguous reifications emerge. The student's first-stanza surmise in response to the rapping at his chamber door is “‘Tis some visiter … / Only this and nothing more’” (5-6). Or, as he rephrases it in stanza 3, “‘Some late visiter … / This it is and nothing more’” (17-18). At first glance, the meaning is plain: it is a visitor and no more than a visitor. But in the light, or darkness, of what follows, “nothing more” assumes an identity that hovers between the literal and the hypostatized, both pointing to the perpetuation of nothingness. As we learn, there is indeed a visitor at the door, a visitor whose message is simultaneously the denial of immediate desire and the refusal of all response. As a result there will be, for the inquiring student, nothing evermore. It is only a visitor, and all that follows will be nothing.

The idea is expanded and enriched in the succeeding stanza. Here the student, pining for his lost Lenore, opens wide the door and discovers “Darkness there and nothing more” (24). Again the meaning seems evident and unequivocal, yet proves to be neither. For presaged in this line is the darkness inherent in Lenore's namelessness or in the namelessness that is Lenore, the darkness that follows too from both personal despair and epistemological ignorance. In seeing darkness beyond his door, the student in effect has seen Lenore, that which must remain perpetually absent. And he has seen too the darkness that is both the ebony bird and the shadow that, as the final lines inform us, will shroud his soul forevermore. To say “Darkness there and nothing more” is not to say nothing at all is there, except insofar as “nothing at all” may be read in reified form as an ominous figure, the inescapable presence of the impenetrable unknown. The visitor who eventually brings nothingness in its wake is also Lenore: a vacancy equated with darkness and the raven but also with the woman and the perpetuation of utter absence and uncertainty. The absence of Lenore expands to an absence that shadows the human inability to know.

In the following stanzas, the surmised sources of the tapping shift from one increasingly concrete identity to another. In stanza 5 it is no longer darkness but an echo of the word “‘Lenore,’” “Merely this and nothing more” (30). In stanza 6 the ethereal echo becomes the more substantial wind “‘and nothing more!’” (36). And in the seventh stanza the progression culminates in the physical form of the raven, the embodiment of darkness who, the narrator records, “Perched, and sat, and nothing more” (42). What we begin to realize is that the contradictions and reifications we speak of, those that turn the absence of something into the luminous presence of nothing, are virtually unavoidable consequences of the use of language.¹² The attempt to distinguish between “Darkness there and nothing more” and the presence of nothing at all traps us in a linguistic constriction that refuses the distinction we seek to make. There is virtually no way, it seems, to express absence that will not assert its presence or, alternatively, the presence or hypostatized status of that which denies either. Almost inevitably, the assertion of nonpresence or absence ascribes a kind of existential status to the void.¹³

The problem, in other words, is largely a problem of language, though in a way quite far removed from the positivist assertions of “The Philosophy of Composition.” There the problem of the poem is the answerable question of the proper subject, length, and terms of poetic expression, the fitting of language to the desired effect. But “The Raven” we read lacks the confident simplicity of “The Raven” whose composition Poe ostensibly recounts. Here the problem of language is the virtual impossibility of meaningful communication, one feature of which is the seeming inability of language to express absence without implying presence. The problem of language, however, is not simply a condition of existence for “The Raven”: it is one of the poem's principal subjects. For it is the play of language, finally, that pulls the student—and the poet—into the orbit of the shadow from which he will never be lifted. And with the entrance of the speaking bird the deferred referent of the early stanzas becomes the manifest subject.

In one of his first observations about the raven, the narrator expresses wonder at the plainness of its “discourse,” though he notes, as he marvels, that “its answer little meaning—little relevancy bore” (49, 50). The raven at this stage bears a curious resemblance to the Poe whom Emerson termed “the jingle man” and whom contemporaries as well as succeeding generations of critics variously praised and disparaged for his seemingly accessible but ultimately elusive and perhaps meaning-drained language. For Poe, of course, beauty rather than truth is the proper province of the poem, suggested rather than definite or imperious meaning the objective of the poet or artist. In its first appearance, therefore, the ghastly grim discourser perched on the bust of Pallas and uttering a seemingly unmeaning language seems to be Poe-as-ideal-poet in another of his countless autobiographical disguises. Wilbur writes:

It is not really surprising that some critics should think Poe meaningless, or that others should suppose his meaning intelligible only to monsters. Poe was not a wide-open and perspicuous writer; indeed, he was a secretive writer both by temperament and by conviction. He sprinkled his stories with sly references to himself and his personal history.¹⁴

The raven, I would suggest, is such a self-reference, one that heightens an already encouraged sense that ultimately the discourse between the student and the raven is an internal dialogue, that the clearly autobiographical student is joined by the covertly self-referring raven in a dialogue of the single soul. The manifest subject of this discourse is the lost beloved and the dashed hope of her recovery. But the more interesting exchange, suffusing both the personal and the psychological, concerns the nature of language and verbal art; the relationship between self and other, imagination and world; and the limits of human understanding.

Poe was clearly influenced by the theories of Coleridge, from whom he derived his pivotal view of literature as a mode of expression whose immediate object is pleasure, not truth. He shared and may likewise have been influenced by Coleridge's insistence that “images, however beautiful, … become proofs of original genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant passion; or by associated thoughts or images awakened by that passion; or when they have the effect of reducing multitude to unity”—an aim Poe would render as “unity of effect.” And he was almost certainly, even affectedly, familiar with a related Coleridgean edict, which found its way into his own aesthetic theory and creative work: the principle of the “reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities.”¹⁵ The artist, for Poe, must be both poet and mathematician, a writer blessed equally with the seemingly discordant gifts of intuition and analysis. Genius, he declares, “is but the result of generally large mental power existing in a state of absolute proportion—so that no one faculty has undue predominance.”¹⁶ Arguing in Eureka for a unified field theory of metaphysics, art, morality, psychology, and nature, he maintains that the poet's task is to unite science with poetry, reason with imagination; and, true at least in this to his own theoretical strictures, he seeks in his words to shape seeming dissonances into a unified work of art governed by a dominant effect. For Coleridge, whose phrasing is more familiar but whose hypotheses are revealingly similar, “What is poetry? is so nearly the same question with, what is a poet? that the answer to the one is involved in the solution of the other.” And “[t]he poet, described in ideal perfection,” like Poe's artist or genius,

brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination. This power … reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order.¹⁷

The raven, even more than “The Raven,” is such a blend of oppositions, most of them suggestive, in their particular as well as their generic form, of the work of art as Poe, guided by Coleridge, conceived it; the bird thus bears not only the subtle marks of the poet but, like Keats's nightingale and Yeats's golden bird, the more conspicuous markings of the poem. As both bird and symbol, emissary of darkness and projection of the speaker's troubled mind, the raven assertively combines the concrete and the general, the image with the idea, and the individual with the representative. As a speaking bird it bears a weighty literary ancestry. And as one who speaks in this odd, obsessive, and tormenting fashion, it adds novelty and freshness to an old familiar object. But the oppositions are also more specific and more pointed. The bird is introduced as a “stately Raven of the saintly days of yore” (38) (again the old and familiar object), whose “mien of lord or lady” (40) links it with the noble elegance of conventional romance. And yet, in a seeming lapse that serves the pervasive oppositional purpose that makes the bird an emblem of the poem, it is but a few lines later an “ungainly fowl” (49), suggestive of more modern forms of literature or verse—romantic experimentalism perhaps. Like the form of literary utterance Poe associates with prose and the expression of truth, the bird “discourse[s] … plainly” (40). But equally like another, like the poetic as Poe views it and like his own affective practice, the raven speaks the single word “as if his soul in that one word he did outpour” (56). Like an inspiration alternately blessed and cursed, and like a visitor or visitation that represents welcomed relief from loneliness (82) yet also its feared perpetuation (100), the bird is perceived in rapid succession as an emissary of God and angels (80-81) and as a devil, tempter, or “‘thing of evil’” (85-86), as a “Prophet” (85) and yet a liar (99). As the source of the ominous intonement that seems to forecast and stand for tragic inevitability, the bird is tragic prophet and poetic seer. But the raven is also a liar, not simply because it speaks what the inquirer cannot abide but because it presumes, in one reading of its reply, to know what the other reading (“Nevermore” as refusal to answer) suggests it will not reveal. When the only truth is the darkness the raven incarnates, all pretense to substantive prophecy is falsehood.

As the blend of oppositions and as speaker of the single utterance that unifies and refines them, then, the raven is simultaneously poem and poet. More particularly, as most readers have noticed and as Poe reveals in his “Philosophy of Composition,” the bird is also a projection of the speaker who mirrors it if not as poem then as poet.¹⁸ That the student becomes engaged in an essentially creative or poetic enterprise is suggested first by the identity between the raven and the poem as a site of oppositions. But the activity is more explicitly identified in the twelfth and thirteenth stanzas. Here the speaker, like an opportunistic writer fixing on his subject, wheels “a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust and door,” and finds respite from his anguish by “linking / Fancy unto Fancy” (68, 69-70), considering what the bird means by croaking “Nevermore.” Like the artist in the stage of preparatory contemplation, the student recalls, “I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing.” “This and more I sat divining,” he goes on, “with my head at ease reclining / On the cushion's velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o'er” (73, 75-76). To us if not to Poe, though probably to him as well, the gloating lamplight evokes the poetic imagination that seeks to illuminate the blackened world of the raven, looking for relevance and meaning in the speech that, devoid of a limiting context, contains none. The raven as poem, or utterance on the way to becoming poem, provides temporary relief for the student/artist. But his playful contextualization of the raven's speech at the same time uncovers the threatening view of language that turns relief into torment, the search for understanding into the despair that is also the despair of knowing.

The problem of language is a kind of monadic image of the whole, a repetition among the instruments of construction of the destabilizing character of the construct. In one of its functions, the bird appears as reality or fate. Perched like truth or wisdom on the bust of Pallas, it is that which blindly and mercilessly resists the ambitions of the pleading will, insisting on what is and what must always be. In another sense, as Poe explains at the end of his “Philosophy of Composition,” the bird, perched on the bust of Pallas that is the externalization of the speaker's own mind, is “emblematical” of “Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance”—a projection of the poet's own despairing psyche. Poe claims in this passage that “it is not until the very last line of the very last stanza” that this meaning “is permitted distinctly to be seen.”¹⁹ But in fact the blurring of the distinction between interior and exterior, imagination and fact, begins with the “nearly napping” of line 3 that introduces the pervasive possibility of the experience as dream. Furthermore, much of the poem's setting and descriptive imagery, from its beginning, is translatable as reified spirit. In this reading, the chamber is the soul as the bust of Pallas is the mind, and the tapping at the chamber door, as stanza 6 strongly suggests, is the excited beating of the student's heart. The stanza's first line implies the intermingling of chamber and soul, the remainder that of the tapping and the heart:

Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,
Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before.
“Surely,” said I, “surely that is something at my window lattice;
Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore—
Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore;—
                    'Tis the wind and nothing more!”

(31-36)

The bird that seems at first objective fact in resistant opposition to the subjective will dances ungraspably back and forth across the line of self and other. As its answer is at the same time a refusal to answer, so its identity, vacillating between stern reality and shadowy projection, is at once not-self and self, its message genuinely informative yet expressive of what is already known or despairingly averred. The poetic imagination's quest for something external to it tangles in the skein of its own projection. And at least until midpoem, where the student, grasping the rigidity of the bird's utterance, begins his imperious inquiry, fact and fancy will not separate; immortal truth will not distinguish itself from mortal dread. Assuming a variety of contrary and contradictory identities, the raven refuses all stable definition, all effort to ascertain or fix its nature. As such, it is the proper embodiment of woman and darkness as the vacuous unknown, the blackness whose only reply is the refusal of reply. As such, it is also the image of its single utterance, the word that, assuming every given meaning, finally has none.

To accept the word “Nevermore” as a name, in the first of its many repetitions, and to observe that it “little meaning—little relevancy bore” (50) is to express skepticism about the relationship between naming and meaning; it is to suggest that the word tells us nothing of the world. But even if we stop short of such expansion, we find the speaker dissatisfied. The word, as the raven has given it to him, has as yet no meaning. And when he realizes that “‘what it utters is its only stock and store’” (62), he understands that the burden of meaning has fallen on him. Every signification the word assumes from this point forward will be determined exclusively by the questions that precede it. In other words, the word itself—not just “Nevermore,” but any isolated utterance—carries no inherent meaning. It becomes meaningful only as a human mind ascribes context and interpretation.

On one level, of course, this is the absorption of reality into the subjective intelligence, the subordination of both language and the world to the creative mind. The raven that begins as the voice of the other, the irrevocable truth of reality or fact, becomes but an expression of the haunted projective imagination. Narrowly, the fateful word “Nevermore” acquires the despairing meanings attributed to it by the speaker's tortured memory; but meaning moves, like the expanding and contracting universe of Eureka, in irradiating rings. More broadly, reality itself has no meaning but that which the imagination assigns it or projects upon it. The fundamental question about the relationship between reality and mind, the outer and the inner worlds, is answered in the latter's favor. The world is darkness, a blackened bird that utters but a single word, barren until we provide a context in which to read it. Indeed, even the word may come from within, for the raven may be our own despair.

This involution has still wider, more fateful implications for art and knowledge. The question for Poe, in Edward Davidson's formulation, is “What might happen if the imagination not only rejected the world of sense and meaning but attempted to enter a range of expression and experience where the artist could make any word or sign mean anything he wanted, either a nothing or a completely abstract symbol?”²⁰ The question, it seems, receives at least one answer in “The Raven,” where the word acquires meanings determined entirely by the framing questions. That the word is “Nevermore” and that it is both an obliterating answer and a refusal to answer effaces the very possibility of substantive response and extends the darkness. For it brings the word, the poet's grounding instrument of expression, to a triple denial: the word may mean whatever we choose to make it mean and is therefore inherently meaningless; the word as a rejection of questions and a refusal to respond signals the fundamental vacuity of language, its rejection of the task that literature, indeed all speech, wishfully assigns it; and the word as “Nevermore” is a denial of poetic hope and aspiration, of the poet's longing for the woman that is at once truth, his muse, and the celestial beauty to which, in Poe's view, all poetry aspires. As Wilbur remarks, “it is not easy for the poet to detach his soul from earthly things, and regain his lost imaginative power—his power to commune with that supernal beauty which is symbolized, in Poe, by the shadowy and angelic figures of Ligeia, and Helen, and Lenore.” Not merely difficult, I would suggest, but impossible (“Nevermore”). And not primarily because “his mortal body chains him to the physical and temporal and local,” but because the instrument of meaningful music melts in his hands.²¹

Yet as a Coleridgean fusion of contraries, as the speaker of a single repeated sound, the raven seems to figure the ultimate ideal of poetic unity: the dissolution of its component oppositions, indeed of all content, into a single ethereal utterance. Like the raven, the universe of Eureka, as Poe makes plain, is a metaphor for the work of art, and the expanding universe of that scientific treatise cum poem, having reached its outer limits, longs for a return to the originating condition of unity (Complete Works, 16:302, 306-8). In a phrase that fuses his own mourned and beloved mother with the deity and with the female objects of futile longing that haunt his writing, Poe refers to this primordial focus as the world's “lost parent.” It is from the “bosom” of this lost parent that the world irradiates or hurls outward, like a work of art from its thesis or ruling ideas (16:220, 306). Although the return to this ideal state and image is hindered by separateness and difference, the impulse toward unity is the “strongest of forces,” and it remains the beckoning ideal. The “diffusion from Unity,” Poe declares, “involves a tendency to return into Unity—a tendency,” like his own anguished longing, “ineradicable until satisfied” (16:234, 207). But the raven's ominous utterance, its reduction of all discourse and opposition to the ultimate unity of a single word, seems a mocking emblem of reunion with the summoning perfection that Lenore embodies. The ideal of perfect unity is here the dark reality of the world, the refusal of communication in an utterance that may mean anything and that intones in “Nevermore” the denial of its own accessibility. As in the universe of Eureka, where the return to the center is the final obliteration of all matter, the ultimate unity that is aesthetic paradise is synonymous with death—not the self-annihilating transcendence for which Moldenhauer argues,²² but the death of art as meaningful communication or the attainment of supernal beauty.

“The Raven” closes with a clouding exchange of identities, an erasure of distinction, and the descent of darkness. In the closing image the bird assumes the opening identity of the student: while the latter, who may have dreamed the entire sequence, was first discovered “nearly napping” (3), now it is the raven whose “eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming” (105). And in the final line, the student, whose identity has just been usurped by the raven, in turn internalizes the usurper; it is he who utters the fateful and terminal “nevermore.”²³ What begins as separable reality becomes the expression of self and imagination as the only reality. And it is a reality that is none. The lamplight, again evoking the creative imagination, returns in the final stanza. But no longer does it illuminate the velvet violet lining of the cushion on which the poet perched birdlike in inquiring quest of his creation. Blackened by the opacity and resistance of the word, the lamplight becomes the instrument of darkness. It throws upon the floor not the animating light we associate with the poetic imagination but the shadow of the raven, the ultimate embodiment of the darkness at the door. It is from out this shadow, the obscure veil of language and the void it “speaks” for, that the soul of the poet and his art shall be lifted—nevermore. In a last ironic turn, as the final unity is annihilation, the last annihilation is fusion. The shadow that encompasses the raven, the darkness, and Lenore also merges the aesthetic with the metaphysical and psychological implications of the poem. The darkness that is hopeless mourning for the absent woman is also despair for the ultimate silence of the word and world. Woman/truth will not be discovered or pinned down.

Notes

1. See Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1101.

2. Richard Wilbur, “Poe and the Art of Suggestion,” in Critical Essays on Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Eric W. Carlson (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987), 160-71, esp. 160; Yvor Winters, “Edgar Allan Poe: A Crisis in the History of American Obscurantism,” in Maule's Curse: Seven Studies in the History of American Obscurantism: Hawthorne, Cooper, Melville, Poe, Emerson, Jones Very, Emily Dickinson, Henry James (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1938), 93-122, esp. 106 (first published in American Literature 8 [1936-37]: 379-401); Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Poetry, 3rd ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1960), 228-33, esp. 231.

3. David Halliburton, Edgar Allan Poe: A Phenomenological View (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973), 228-37 passim; Daniel Hoffman, “Poe's Obsessive Themes,” in The Origins and Originality of American Culture, ed. Tibor Frank (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1984), 109. “Idealistic quest and parodic self-exposure,” writes Evan Carton in the same vein, “are interwoven almost seamlessly in Poe's fiction. Nearly any tale … manifests—or may be taken to manifest—both of these purposes,” and the two are often indistinguishable (The Rhetoric of American Romance: Dialectic and Identity in Emerson, Dickinson, Poe and Hawthorne [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1985], 132).

4. George Kelly, “Poe's Theory of Beauty,” American Literature 27 (1956): 534; Kenneth Silverman, Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1992), 336; Joan Dayan, “The Identity of Berenice, Poe's Idol of the Mind,” Studies in Romanticism 23 (1984): 507.

5. William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1925), 220-24, esp. 221; Joseph N. Riddell, “The ‘Crypt’ of Edgar Poe,” boundary 2, vol. 7, no. 3 (spring 1979): 120, 124. Kenneth Dauber's essay “The Problem of Poe” (Georgia Review 32 [1978]: 645-57) is relevant here. For Dauber, Poe's “fiction is fiction, but one which, if we are to see it, must be seen as nothing more”; it is a realm given over to “a language self-constituted, never constituting anything beyond itself” (646, 652).

6. Dennis Pahl, Architects of the Abyss: The Indeterminate Fictions of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1989), xv, xviii, quoting Friedrich Nietzche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), 301; Joan Dayan, Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe's Fiction (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), 19, 24.

7. R. C. De Prospo, “Deconstructive Poe(tics),” Diacritics 18 (fall 1988): 44; David H. Hirsch, “Poe and Postmodernism,” in A Companion to Poe Studies, ed. Eric W. Carlson (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996), 420.

8. Michael J. S. Williams, A World of Words: Language and Displacement in the Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1988), 7, 8; Mutlu Konuk Blasing, American Poetry—The Rhetoric of Its Forms (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1987), 26, 31; Jefferson Humphries, Metamorphoses of the Raven: Literary Overdeterminedness in France and the South since Poe (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1985), 6, 61, quoting Jacques Lacan from Shoshana Felman, “On Reading Poetry: Reflections on the Limits and Possibilities of Psychoanalytical Approaches,” in The Literary Freud: Mechanisms of Defense and the Poetic Will, ed. Joseph H. Smith (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1980), 137.

9. All quotations from “The Raven,” referenced by line number, come from Works, 1:364-69.

10. J. Gerald Kennedy, Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1987), 68; Blasing, American Poetry, 28.

11. Jacques Derrida, Spurs/Eperons, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978), 51, 55.

12. In “The Power of Words,” Poe's ruminations on language take a more positive turn: As Agathos claims that “the first word spoke into existence the first law,” and as he has spoken a “wild star … with a few passionate sentences—into birth,” words would appear to possess, for Poe, a divine power of physical summoning and generation. “[W]hile I thus spoke,” asks Agathos of his angelic companion, “did there not cross your mind some thought of the physical power of words? Is not every word an impulse on the air?” (Complete Works, 6:141, 143-44). All denials, in such a universe of language, are implicit affirmations, all negotiations conjurings.

13. I say “almost inevitably” because one can think of dodges. “It was not a visitor after all,” for example, or “I opened wide the door / And couldn't see a thing.” Aside from the rather dubious poetic quality of these lines and the rhyming and rhythmic problems they create, one notices two things. One is that it is the use of abstract terms like “nothing” and “no one” that heightens the duality I speak of, though borderline nouns like “darkness” will do as well or better. The other is that even my deliberately drab examples barely escape with their univocality intact. One need only look again at “It was not a visitor” and “couldn't see a thing” to recognize the possibilities for reifying transformation.

14. Richard Wilbur, “The House of Poe,” Library of Congress Anniversary Lecture, 4 May 1959, in The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Eric W. Carlson (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1970), 256.

15. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross (1907; reprint, London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), 2:16, 12.

16. Edgar Allan Poe, “Marginalia,” in The Literary Criticism of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Robert L. Hough (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1965), 58.

17. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 2:12. For Coleridge's influence on Poe, see, for example, Robert D. Jacobs, Poe: Journalist and Critic (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1969), 36-50, 111-14, 234-37, 366-68; and Williams, World of Words, 1-16, 81-82—both of whom emphasize Poe's qualification of Coleridge's aesthetics.

18. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition,” in Essays and Reviews, 25.

19. Poe, “Philosophy of Composition,” 25.

20. Edward Davidson, Poe: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, Belknap Press, 1966), 56.

21. See Wilbur, “House of Poe,” 259, 258.

22. Joseph J. Moldenhauer, “Murder as a Fine Art: Basic Connections between Poe's Aesthetics, Psychology, and Moral Vision,” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association of America] 83 (1968): 290.

23. That he utters it once previously in line 78, also without enclosing quotation marks, does not, I think, invalidate the point. It only suggests what I have argued: that the identities are fluid and interchangeable throughout, and that the process of incorporation begins earlier.