The Raven

The Raven is the most famous narrative poem by the 19th-century American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published on January 29, 1845, in the New York Evening Mirror and collected the same year in the poetry volume The Raven and Other Poems. The poem has 18 stanzas and 108 lines, written in trochaic octameter and using abundant internal rhyme, alliteration, and refrain to create musicality. The story takes place at midnight in a bleak December: a young scholar consumed by grief over his lost love sits alone in his study, reading old books to forget his departed lover Lenore; the door is tapped, there is only darkness and wind outside, and then a stately raven flies in and perches on the bust of Pallas Athena above the door. To the scholar's questions the raven answers only with the single word "Nevermore." He first mocks himself that this is merely the only word the bird learned from its former master, but then cannot help pressing further: whether he can escape sorrow, whether there is a cure, whether he will be reunited with Lenore after death. Every answer lands on the same word, and at last he orders the raven to leave, but the raven remains perched, casting its shadow over him. In The Philosophy of Composition, Poe explicitly discusses the poem's construction: taking "the death of a beautiful woman" as the most poetic subject, melancholy as the tone, and the long vowels of the refrain to heighten grief. This edition is part of the Doré illustrated series, collecting 29 poems from various periods of Poe's career, with several illustrations created for The Raven by the French illustrator Gustave Doré.