The narrator of "The Raven" first describes the bird as "a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore." This is an odd description of a raven and should alert the reader to the strangeness of the narrator, one of a long line of unreliable narrators who contribute to the dark, gothic nature of Poe's works. This particular narrator seems to be a scholar, or at least a student, who has been living in the midst of his books ever since the death of Lenore. It is no surprise that he idealizes the past, the distant past as well as his own past, and describes the "days of yore" as saintly. The noble mien of the bird makes him think of a finer, purer age, an ideal time of chivalry and courtesy which never existed, but is present in the books he reads.

The nervous volatility of the narrator is emphasized by the fact that in the next stanza, while he still hails the raven as a visiting dignitary from another age and another world, now he calls the bird ghastly and grim, and connects it not with anything "saintly" but with "the Night's Plutonian shore." This is a narrator who has essentially moved from heaven to hell in the space of a stanza without appearing to notice, a foreshadowing of the drastic instability which is to characterize his attitude to the raven and its single utterance.