From Poe Studies Volume V, Number 2 (December 1972):

Classical Raven Lore and Poe's Raven

Several reasons for Poe's choice of bird for the harbinger of despair in "The Raven" are manifest: ravens can be taught to speak, they have a reputation for following armies and relishing death, and their dark plumage suggests melancholy and gloom. More subtle and ironic significance, however, can be found in the curious traditions which have accrued to this dark bird, associating him with wisdom, deviousness, and messenger service. In Hebrew folklore the raven, originally white, was turned black in punishment for not returning to the ark when Noah sent him out to check the flood conditions. His failure to return when he learned the waters were receding was attributed to bestial appetite, for which he was constrained ever after to feed on carrion. In Norse mythology Odin possessed two ravens, Hugin and Mugin, representing the mind and the will and thus symbolic of intelligence and power. Classical mythology has Pallas, the embodiment of wisdom, as the raven's original master, a tradition Poe evidently drew upon in perching his raven on her white bust. And in Ovid (Metamorphoses, Book II), the raven again was white before Apollo made it black for tattling about his beloved's unfaithfulness. Like Apollo's, Poe's raven is all too eager to deliver his unwelcome message of unfaithfulness--this time of the ultimate unfaithfulness of death. But the tradition most strikingly appropriate to Poe's poem is that which invests the raven as the symbol of hope. The sound the raven makes which we transcribe as "caw" the Greeks and Romans transliterated into the Greek word "cras," meaning "tomorrow." The raven represented hope, then, for all the reasons that "tomorrow" suggests hope or gives reason for optimism. Although this association of the raven with hope was not widespread--neither Pliny nor Ovid mentions it-- Seutonius makes it in Twelve Caesars, a common school text and one very likely used by Poe. It is as a bearer of hope that Poe's persona initially greets his raven, as bringing "Respite, respite and nepenthe / From this memory of Lenore." The [column 2:] bird, however, speaks not with the Greek word "cras," "tomorrow," but the exact reverse, "Nevermore," the message not of hope but of despair. Though the persona first thinks the bird has been "taught" mechanically to repeat his single word, a pattern of sense soon emerges, the message that his lover's death is total and final, without hope even of reunion after death in the "distant Aidenn." It is difficult to believe that this inversion is mere coincidence; the specific relevance of the words as well as the patness of the reversal are simply too logical and appropriate. Rather, the raven's value as a symbol of hope and the ironic reversal of that value seem central to the conception of the poem, certainly to the choice of the particular word Poe's raven speaks. In the course of the poem, the raven develops and modifies this and its other associations, becoming more and more a private symbol, more and more a dream or hallucinatory figure generated by the persona's emotional bankruptcy, increasingly symbolizing private spiritual dryness rather than personal lamentation for a specific loss. As such, the raven figure has often been taken as a contrivance with a significance largely unearned, ultimately without objective correlative. But the private symbol is confirmed and contained by an objective logic and system of reference. The traditional associations of the raven serve to broaden the ironic dimension and range of application of the private symbol, improving its logic and consistency, enriching its significance, raising it above a mere macabre hallucination.

John F. Adams, Washington State University
 

Devil Lore in "The Raven"

So much emphasis has been placed upon Poe's essay of "The Philosophy of Composition" with its carefully crafted analysis of the creation of "The Raven" that other ways of looking at the poem are generally neglected. I wish to offer here an explication of the folklore context in the poem which gives perhaps a better reason for Poe's selecting the raven as the bird of ill omen than that which his essay suggests. For it is the folkloric connotation of the raven as the Devil's bird and as one of the forms he takes upon occasion for convenience which makes clear exactly why the young man will never again see his lost Lenore. It's not simply that she is dead. It is that he has damned himself. It is no mistake that the month is "bleak December" rather than an equally dreary November. The forces of darkness are never more powerful than during the high holy days of the Christian year, and December, with its share of the twelve days of Christmas, ranks foremost. The mention of "each separate dying ember [which] wrought its ghost upon the floor," is reminiscent of Coleridge's "Christabel" in which other embers reflect the presence of evil in much the same way. The "many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore" may very well be books of black magic which the protagonist studies in order to raise the ghost of his beloved, and so attain "surcease of sorrow." In his semi-somnolent state it does not occur to him that he has actually raised something by his endeavors, for he mistakes the odd tapping for that of a midnight visitor. The darkness and silence he meets when he opens his door lead him in to strange musings, not in the least lightened by his own whisper of "Lenore?" It evolves, of course, that the tapping is at his window, through which a raven steps into his room and at once takes its position on a bust of Pallas. That the bird should perch on the representation of the goddess of wisdom is suitable, for the protagonist had been seeking mastery of dangerous knowledge. At first the young man is somewhat amused by his visitor. The first ominous indication arises from the student's ah-poor-me comment that the raven will no doubt leave just as all others have: the bird states, "Nevermore." Further, the student admits his Hopes have all fled; this is what happens to those who commit suicide, and it is the only unpardonable sin in Christian belief: the total loss of Hope. In such a state he is ready to be claimed by the Devil. That repeated "Nevermore" with its implications of hopeless eternity has a sobering effect on the protagonist. For the moment he continues to find some rational explanation for the aptness of the single word to his situation. But it becomes clear that this is no ordinary raven "whose fiery eyes burned into [the student's] bosom core." In folklore, the Devil's eyes [page 54:] become fiery when he is about to seize a soul. The reference may imply the casting of a spell (the evil eye) on the young man. In any event, there is no more mention of smiling. Although overcome by a paroxysm of grief, the student imagines he detects fragrance from a censer, perhaps even the presence of good spirits come to give him solace, which he should seize and hold. It is not to be. The raven croaks his indomitable sentence of doom, "Nevermore." There is a rapidly rising pitch to the poem from this point to its conclusion. The forlorn student addresses the raven directly as "Prophet still, if bird or devil" (my italics), and demands to know, calling upon Heaven and God as witnesses, whether he will after death again clasp his beloved. Again the word, "Nevermore." This reply sends the protagonist into a fury: "bird or fiend," he shrieks, no longer doubting its identity. Frantic, he orders the raven to leave: "Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!" The student's doom becomes clear with the raven's final "Nevermore." The protagonist, in seeking to bring Lenore back from the dead--if only for a moment--has succeeded in selling his own soul to the Devil. Never again will he escape a destiny he has brought upon himself. The evil bird sits dreaming on the bust of Pallas as the lamplight throws its shadow on the floor. Submerged in that shadow is the soul of the student: "And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor/ Shall be lifted--nevermore!" When one sells his soul to the Devil. the first manifestation is the loss of one's own shadow, for it has united with all that is the Devil's.

Byrd Howell Granger, University of Arizona
 

"The Raven" and the Chair

In addition to the literary precedents Poe made use of in devising his talking bird in "The Raven," there may also be biographical sources for his interest in ravens. One may lie in an uncommon black wooden chair in the Poe Shrine in Richmond, Virginia, which the staff there attests to be from the dining suite of the John Allan family. Mounted on its high cane back (and duplicated on the cross piece between the two front legs) is a carved bird with wings outspread, bearing an unmistakable likeness to a raven, which, I suggest, may have been a subconscious source for the bird and its import. In The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe (London: Imago Pub. Co., 1949), Marie Bonaparte comments that "The Raven," like much of Poe's work, shows the imposition of "the lost-love motif" whereby Poe, separated from his dying mother as a child and brought into the Allan household, manifests the urge to regain his lost mother--a pattern Bonaparte finds governing the poet's personal relationship with women as well. For the Princess Bonaparte, the sisterhood of lost loves that A. H. Quinn and others have noted conceals the original lost love of his mother; and Poe, always so much the conscious literary strategist on one level, is, on another level, finally unaware of the hidden "cause" and desired "effect" (within himself) of his writings. "But who, then, is this Raven?" Bonaparte asks. "For a long time I was at a loss and it was only when analysing Annabel Lee that I realized its identity with the 'highborn kinsmen' who separate the poet from his Annabel Lee. Like them, the Raven is a father figure, an Oedipus father symbol placed between mother and child" (p. 131). At the risk of seeming to exchange the hard and palpable reality of the raven chair for the subjective ease of the psychoanalyst's couch, I would suggest that the former, a steady feature of the Allan dining room, could well have been fixed in young Poe's mind as an emblem of John Allan. And the Richmond merchant's succession to guardianship of the poet (with all attending ill feelings between them) may, in the logic of childhood, have been felt by Poe as the "cause" of the loss of his mother. The unvarying utterance of the bird--"Nevermore"-- then easily seems the appropriate verbal expression of Allan's role in Poe's life, a role that (again, to the child's mind) "put an end" to his earlier life with his mother. Only "The Raven," it is interesting to note, was published by Poe under a particular nom de plume which, in this context, seems oddly like a nom de guerre: "Quarles."

Miles D. Orvell, Temple University [column 2:]

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