it

this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore

The speaker likens the raven's eyes to those of a "demon" and wonders if it is a bird or a devil, calling it a "thing of evil."

The poem shows a young man in grief over the loss of his beloved, but instead of receiving comfort from a benign and compassionate deity, as one might in a Romantic poem, he faces torment from a frightening black bird that appears to come from a hellish place. The poem is relentlessly melancholic and bleak, and pictures the bird as the messenger of despair. All of this is the stuff of Gothic. The speaker faces what we normally repress: that there might be no recovery from the grief of death.

Edgar Allen Poe is a master of Gothic literature and his most famous poem is certainly no exception. Key to creating the menacing, brooding atmosphere that forms a backdrop to the action is setting and time. Note how the action occurs late at night in a dark and dingy room with the student exhausted pouring over his books. This creates an essential ambiguity as it is obvious his perceptions are clouded and his ability to interpret what is going on under such conditions is limited at best.

There are five characteristics that allow a work to be labeled as "gothic".  The first is that there is a victim and a torturer -- here the victim is the speaker and the raven is obviously torturing him in that he will not respond with anything other than "nevermore", seemingly driving him crazy.  The second characteristic is that the torturer is either evil or has supernatural powers; this is also true in the poem since the raven can speak (supernatural) and the speaker refers to it many times as being evil or demon-like.  Third, the work must have some type of setting that the victim can not escape.  Here, it would seem that the speaker could easily walk out of the room but since he thinks that the raven has some information for him about his lost love, he feels like he must stay and is, in essence, trapped.  The fourth trait of a gothic work has to do with the mysterious or spooky atmosphere which this poem obviously has.  Finally, in a gothic poem the victim must be enraptured by the power of the one who is victimizing him -- this again is the case since we have a speaker who can not break himself from talking to the raven to find out who he is and what he is about.

In "The Raven" Poe joins a long line of poets who have used the conceit of bonding with a bird figure as an expression of hope or despair, of desire, and of fear.

The Gothic element is present in the setting, at midnight in "bleak December," and above all in the supernatural appearance of a wild, dark bird that flies into the poet's chamber and speaks to him. Poe's use of trochaic meter, as opposed to the much more frequently employed (in English) iambic meter, creates a sing-song impression, as if a nursery rhyme, ironically, is being recited. But it simultaneously lends a trance-like quality to the entire poem. The speaker is in the midst of a dream about "the lost Lenore," and the raven visits him not to give hope but ultimately to confirm his despair of ever being reunited with her.

Poe's use of repetition reinforces the hypnotic tone of the poem, as in "tapping, / Tapping at my chamber door," and "And this mystery explore,-- / Let my heart be still a moment, / And this mystery explore." The phrase "and nothing more" appears multiple times, as does, most significantly, the raven's repeated "Nevermore!" There are frequent feminine rhymes: rhymes which are multi-syllabic. In English (unlike in Italian and other languages), feminine rhymes often have a slightly humorous effect, and Poe uses this to distance himself, and the reader, from the emotion of the poem and to intensify a quality that is mechanical in a subtly frightening way. The poem unwinds like a watch-spring, having an irresistible and unstoppable power, like that of a nightmare from which the sleeper is unable to break free.

In his essay "The Poetic Principle," Poe makes it clear that he values poetry for its musical quality as well as for its ability to convey emotion. As in "The Bells," in "The Raven" Poe creates a poetic fabric like a melody which, again, establishes an ironic distance between himself and the baffling and uncontrolled hopelessness of the poet's love for Lenore. In "The Bells" we do not fully sense the pathos in which the speaker is enveloped until the line "And the moaning and the groaning of the bells!"; in "The Raven," Poe delays until the final stanza the fact that his soul will "nevermore" be lifted from the shadow of the raven.

In his preface to an anthology of Romantic poetry, W.H. Auden stated that Poe was the first poet in English to create a completely unreal world, one in which the actual world is replaced by a dream. This may be an exaggeration, but we can see some truth in it if we compare "The Raven" with John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale." Keats sees the bird as a symbol of a world of dreams he wishes to enter, but when he does so, and rhapsodizes, "Tender is the night!" he also concludes that "....here there is no light / Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown, / Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways." Keats backs off from joining the realm of illusion to which the bird beckons him. Poe, in "The Raven," has allowed himself to be captured by his bird, and to reside in a world such as he describes in his "The City in the Sea," which is a realm of eternal night.

The mystery inherent to "The Raven" as well as the possibility of supernatural occurrences both help to identify this poem as a work of Gothic literature. First, the phantom knock at the door and then the inexplicable behavior of the raven, including his repeated vocalization of such a macabre word, are very mysterious. The narrator initially interprets the bird's speech in a very logical way—assuming that he learned the word from a master who repeated it often—however, he soon begins to wonder if the raven was sent by God to be a distraction from his grief. Next, he thinks that, perhaps, the raven is a prophet sent to tell him whether or not he will be reunited with his lost lover, Lenore, in heaven. Either way, he believes that the bird has come from "Night's Plutonian Shore," or the underworld. The potential for this bird's supernatural provenance as well as the mysteries he initiates both help to qualify this work as Gothic.

It is well known that Edgar Allen Poe was very fond of the Gothic genre. What is not so often acknowledged is the fact that Poe often made the Gothic the object of his parody: for example, "The Fall of the House of Usher," one of his most famous short stories, deploys many elements typical of the canonical Gothic tale, such as a decaying mansion secluded in a forlorn and ominous landscape, a violent thunderstorm that bursts precisely at the climax of the story (which is the appearance of the lady Madeline enshrouded and covered by blood), the old romance that Roderick is reading, which evokes the events taking place in the House of Usher itself, etc. And yet, Poe  combines such elements in such an exaggerated manner that they reveal their artificiality and conventionality.  With his parody, Poe aims to criticize the poor artistic quality of much of the literature being written in the United States at the time, which were oftentimes Gothic tales without any literary value. Many of his newspaper and magazine articles bear witness to that.

In this context, the Gothic elements in "The Raven" can be seen as double-edged, and the ultimate purpose of the author remains rather unclear, in the sense that while the poem is an elegy, that is, a lamentation for a deceased person, it is also a mystery story in which the bird acquires spectral and even demonic connotation. Poe took pains in describing how he wrote his famous poem in the essay "The Philosophy of Composition" and in that text he never uses the term "Gothic," despite the fact that some of the materials he uses for the poem belong clearly in that genre. The setting of "The Raven", which is both lyric and narrative, recreates a sitting room during a dark December night, when the narrator finds himself sitting be the fire and reading an old volume which contains ancient (and therefore arcane) lore, or knowledge, while he tries to overcome the torturing pain caused by his remembrance of the dead Leonore, the angelical maiden who was the object of the narrator's adoration. In the opening lines, we are told that in the fireplace "each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor," a clear anticipation of ghostly nature of the black bird who appears in the midst of the night. In fact, the poem abounds with terms like "ominous," "devil," "terror," "fiend," "demon," etc., which reinforce the effect of horror and fear which Poe seeks to impress upon his readers. By means of repetitions (as in the refrain "Nevermore" which is repeated over and over by the raven), alliterations and internal rhymes ("Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary"), personification (a raven that is able to speak), juxtaposition of angelical and demonic imagery (the angels who name Leonore and the demon-like bird) are among the devices and strategies that Poe deploys in the construction of his unique poem.