Help? The RAVEN?

Question

What do u think the raven in the poem of the same name represents or symbolizes? support idea with refernce to text..

Answer 1

I don't read the Raven as symbolic in the narrow, allegorical sense. Rather, it is a crystallizing, metaphorical character around which are constellated the mixture of horror, grief, and despair which are the real subject matter of the poem.

Incidentally, Yahoo Answers isn't for doing your homework. If you quote me, your teacher will almost certainly realize you've plagiarized.

Answer 2

Unwanted memories. A reality check. The speaker is bored. But the speaker had a loss. Leonore. The speaker keeps questioning himself whether there is any way out of his grief. But his own mind, his own reality check, sits above the bust over his door, reminding him that there is no relief from his grief. Nevermore.

Answer 3

This is obviously a homework question. You're suppose to do it yourself for a reason...[to learn]


Poe wrote the poem as a narrative, without intentionally creating an allegory or falling into didacticism.[8] The main theme of the poem is one of undying devotion.[9] The narrator has a perverse conflict between desire to forget and desire to remember. In fact, he seems to get some pleasure from focusing on loss.[10] The narrator assumes that the word "Nevermore" is the raven's "only stock and store" and yet he continues to ask it questions, knowing what the answer will be. His questions, then, are purposely self-deprecating and further incite his feelings of loss.[11] Poe leaves it unclear if the raven actually knows what it is saying or if it really intends to cause a reaction in the poem's narrator.[12]


[edit] Allusions

The raven perches on a bust of Pallas, a symbol of wisdom meant to imply the narrator is a scholar.Poe says that the narrator is a young scholar.[13] Though this is not explicitly stated in the poem, it is mentioned in "The Philosophy of Composition." It is also suggested by the speaker reading books as well as by the wisdom-representative bust of Pallas.[14]

During December he is reading "many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore."[5] Similar to the studies suggested in Poe's short story "Ligeia," this lore may be about the occult or black magic. This is emphasized in the author's choice to set the poem in December, a month when the forces of darkness are believed to be especially active. The use of the "devil bird" of the raven also suggests this.[15] This devil image is emphasized by the narrator's belief that the raven is "from the Night's Plutonian shore," or a messenger from the afterlife, referring to Pluto, the Roman god of the underworld[16] (also known as Hades in Greek mythology).

Poe chose a raven as the central symbol in the story because he wanted a "non-reasoning" creature capable of speech. He decided on a raven, which he considered "equally capable of speech" as a parrot, because it matched his intended tone.[17] He was also inspired by Grip, the raven in Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty by Charles Dickens.[18] One scene in particular bears a resemblance to "The Raven": At the end of the fifth chapter of Dickens's novel, Grip makes a noise and someone says, "What was that -- him tapping at the door?" The response is, "'Tis someone knocking softly at the shutter."[19] Dickens's raven could speak many words and had many comic turns, including the popping of a champagne cork, but Poe emphasized the bird's more dramatic qualities. Poe had written a review of Barnaby Rudge for Graham's Magazine saying, among other things, that the raven should have served a more symbolic, prophetic purpose.[20] The similarity did not go unnoticed: James Russel Lowell in his "A Fable for Critics" wrote the verse, "Here comes Poe with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge / Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge."[21]


Poe may also have been drawing upon various references to ravens in mythology and folklore. In Norse mythology Odin possessed two ravens named Hugin and Munin representing thought and memory, just as Poe's raven.[22] The raven also gets a reputation as a bird of ill omen in the book of Genesis.[23] According to Hebrew folklore, Noah sends a white raven to check conditions while on the ark and learns the floodwaters are beginning to dissipate, but does not immediately return with the news. It is punished by being turned black and being forced to forever feed on carrion. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, a raven also begins as white before Apollo punishes it by turning it black for delivering a message of a lover's unfaithfulness. The raven's role as a messenger in Poe's poem may draw from those stories.[24]

Poe also mentions the Balm of Gilead, a reference to the Book of Jeremiah in the Bible: "Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there? why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?[25] In that context, the Balm of Gilead is a resin used for medicinal purposes (suggesting, perhaps, that the narrator needs to be healed after the loss of Lenore). He also refers to "Aidenn," another word for the Garden of Eden, though Poe uses it to ask if Lenore has been accepted into Heaven. At another point, the narrator imagines that seraphim (a type of angel) have entered the room. The narrator thinks they are trying to take his memories of Lenore away from him using nepenthe, a drug mentioned in Homer's Odyssey to induce forgetfulness.

Answer 4

read it and form your own opinion