The Mind of “The Raven”

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Edgar Allan Poe‘s most famous poem “The Raven” is an allegorical poem. We know that it is not simply the story of a black bird who visits a morose mourner, but it is above all, about the narrator and the cocoon he shelters himself in to be able to cope with crippling loss. The narrator is so walled-off from reality that the raven may well symbolize the final and ultimate alienation that the narrator experiences, in which he finally says farewell to sanity.


There are nine successive delusions contained in the poem, which show us that the narrator is continuously misperceiving reality, and that his existence is a perpetual illusion. The misunderstandings gradually become more extreme, until, in the end, they overtake reality.


The first misconception is that the narrator thinks the tapping he hears outside his door is his dead lover, Lenore. He whispers her name into the darkness, as if he actually believes that she will answer him and reveal that she is still as alive in the darkness outside as she is inside his mind. “And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, ‘Lenore!’ This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, ‘Lenore!’—Merely this and nothing more.”  It is tragic hope, whose faint flickering flame the narrator desperately conserves.


The second misconception is that the narrator thinks the tapping is only the wind. He sweeps from the far-fetched supposition that his dead lover returns to the mundane and ordinary thought that it might be simply the wind. The leaps recall the emotional whiplash Poe recounts having suffered through with Virginia’s health as she seemed to repeatedly relapse and recover: “Each time I felt all the agonies of her death — and at each accession of the disorder I loved her more dearly & clung to her life with more desperate pertinacity ... I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”


The third misconception is that the narrator thinks the raven’s talk is gibberish: “its answer little meaning—little relevancy bore.” It makes no sense for the Raven to say that its name is “Nevermore,” so the narrator concludes that the bird is simply voicing meaningless utterances. The error is that the narrator is discrediting his own hallucination, yet even dreams have interpretations and it is a mistake to discount them.


The fourth misconception is that the narrator assumes the raven’s exclamation is the product of some past tragedy: “caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster Followed fast and followed faster till … the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore.” Now the narrator is projecting his own pessimistic view of life on the bird; indeed, the only error is that he does not realize how directly correct he is. That is, he assumes that the raven’s master had some separate tragic history that accounts for the bird’s utterance, when in fact the bird and his pronouncements may have been created by the narrator’s own experience, which has created this hallucination. (Conversely, the bird may be quite real, but the interpretations colored by pessimism.)


The fifth misconception is when the narrator comes to believe that there are angels in the room who have come to bring him relief from his suffering by spreading aromatic incense through his room. We are back to the vicious cycle of relapse and recovery, except that now Poe has raised the stakes to a surreal level with the angelic intervention. Until the bird bursts his bubble with the dagger “Nevermore.”


The sixth misconception is that the raven is a prophet, a fortune-teller who can tell the narrator what is going to happen: “‘Prophet!’ said I, ‘thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil!” Now, the narrator is engaged with the phenomenon of this mystery, talking bird—and so are we—right?  Part of the fun of this poem is trying to figure out what is going on. We are right alongside the narrator on this one. We are in his cocoon.


The eighth error is that the raven is a trickster, a deceiver. The principal characteristic of this provocateur is that the narrator thinks he is free to evict it, to eject it from his life and cast it to the desolation of the dark night: “Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!” Of course, we have all collectively realized on our own that this is not to be, and the narrator’s misconception seems as much a rookie mistake as his thinking it was just “the wind and nothing more.”


The ninth and final illusion is that the raven is a demon—just as ill-intentioned as in the last misconstruction, but perhaps even more malignant. Additionally, and more importantly, the key distinction is that the narrator is entirely powerless to cast the raven out, powerless even to do anything except remain motionless on the floor, literally in the shadow of the demonic intruder.  This is the horror climax that makes the poem so memorable and mirrors the supernatural kick in the gut of other Poe offerings such as “Alone” and “The Lake.”


Regardless of whether we think the poem tells the story of the literal visit of a raven, or an imagined visit; whether the narrator asks questions knowing what the bird will say all along (to punish himself sadistically by having his hopes dashed), the construct of the poem, with its succession of misunderstandings, weaves an alternate reality that diverges and departs from all pretense of anchoring in the real world.

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