5/19/2023 0 Comments The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe![]() ![]() Whether Lenore in ‘The Raven’ is the narrator’s dead beloved – perhaps even his wife – is not spelt out in the poem, leaving us not so much to analyse as to speculate upon that point. The word ‘Nevermore’, like ‘never again’ and ‘no more’, evokes finality, something gone from us that will not be regained: time, our youth, a lost lover. ‘Nevermore’ rhymes with the dead beloved of the poem’s narrator, Lenore, but it is also an inherently ‘poetic’ turn of phrase to end a poem (or successive stanzas of a poem): compare Hardy’s ‘never again’, or Edward Thomas’s, or Tennyson’s ‘the days that are no more’. ![]() This makes ‘The Raven’ the perfect poem for reading aloud on a dark, wintry night – but it also arguably underscores the poem’s focus on speech, and on the talking raven that provides the refrain, and final word, of many of the poem’s stanzas. ![]()
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