It has surprised me a little to see the amount of ink that has been spilled analyzing The Raven. And the number of YouTube videos discussing it. Besides that, so many have made videos of themselves reciting the poem, and curiously, I've never heard it recited exactly as it was written. Well, who knows why. Poetic license? Like a lot of people, I find it to be a fascinating poem, and I also find myself wondering why it is so fascinating.
To look at the premise of the poem, an unhinged person opens the window and a bird flies into the room. Oh no! How was Poe able to make this idea into the drama that it is, and to so bare a part of his own soul that I can share his emotion?
It's probably a good thing that Poe lived before the time of psychoanalysis.
The poet cries out to the world to grieve with him over the sainted Lenore. Who was this Lenore? When one reads a biography of Poe, it seems that several women qualified, most of all his wife. However, Poe's wife died two years after he wrote The Raven.
A nice feature of poetry is that one can emote to the skies, and yet never actually reveal what exactly is being said. The Raven represents death. The entire poem is about death. But death is never mentioned.
Did this bird actually do anything to the man in the poem? No, I don't think it's about what the bird did to him. It's about what he is inventing in his mind, and projecting into the bird. Did the bird ever converse with the man in the poem? No, the bird was able to speak one word, that it kept repeating. I suppose that the way that the man was convinced that the bird was speaking to him, and telling him of the future, is intended to portray the man's desperate state of mind. The bird is sort of a stand in for the reader, giving a pretext for an epic torrent of emotion. The man was speaking to me.
https://www.eapoe.org/geninfo/poechron.htm
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