Edgar Allen Poes `The Raven`

The poem of Edgar Allen Poe entitled The Raven ' is a beautiful poem that tries to vividly describe the depths of melancholic emotion that is part and parcel of human experience although there may be some less blessed mortal , in a remote possibility , that would never go through such inner turmoil as the narrator did . If read without reflection and contemplation the reader would come to believe that the narrator in the poem is a psychologically mad or crazy person . However , careful reading would show that the narrator in the poem is in

no way an insane or mentally deranged individual but a person who is experiencing despair sorrow and hopelessness due to the loss of a beautiful young lover

The reason why any superficial reading would conclude that the narrator is psychologically mad or crazy is because the narrator mentioned that the raven talked or is replying to his question in a word Nevermore This is unusual , for the ravens never talked . Then the narrator seemed to engage in a conversation with the raven . Normally , human beings never talked to animals much less engaged in a heated conversation with them But in any human experience this is not an unusual occurrence for sometimes we engage in some made up conversations with anything that caught our fancy just to let out what was burdening in our hearts . We would then pretend that such an object is replying to us , most often in words that we would like to hear , so as to comfort us . But before explaining this further it is best to established first that the man is not crazy by pointing some relevant situations or verses from the poem

The narrator in the poem , as mentioned earlier , is going through some self-inflicted emotional torture upon the remembrance of the death of a beautiful young lover , Lenore . It is not mentioned whether his lover just died or died some time ago but it is clear that it had created a deep emotional wound within him . The sorrow he felt is not unusual and may be aggravated by the fact that Lenore was still young , implying that maybe he was not yet reconciled to the reality of the untimely parting So in a midnight of December , with such sorrow weighing heavily upon his heart that he cannot sleep , the narrator was distracting himself by reading some forgotten lore ' which could mean any interesting stories of the past that has the capacity to engage his scholarly mind . To say that he is a man of education is not a remote possibility because first he read books to ease his mental torture and that he was not simply reading only one book but many of them so perhaps reading is a habit to him . Next the bust of Pallas (Roman goddess of wisdom ) adorned his chamber door signifying that he was a man acquainted and has interest in historical scholarly learning . Reading to distract the mind means that the man still has...