Diction In The Raven

Our speaker describes the raven as a large, majestic, bird, that resembles in its appearance ones that could be found long ago, in noble times. It refused to give deference or veneration to anyone, and kept shifting and moving around, before finally perching on the bust of Greek Titan Pallas, god of battle and warcraft. This, at first, brought a much-needed amusement to our speaker, which was due to the resemblance of the solemn expression on the raven’s face to serious and relentless regard towards etiquette and keeping up good behaviour. Perhaps that look comically reminded our speaker of the disciplined behavior of humans.

But our speaker couldn’t help but wonder why, of all places, it chose his window lattice, and what did it find so
intriguing about his house that prompted it to land on it. Then, it finally comes, the most pivotal word in the poem, the one most associated (besides “raven”) with it, the one that best concretizes the idea behind it, the raven mutters “Nevermore.” This is where the poem starts incorporating the element of dark fantasy, the passage to which had been set up by the preceding development of an unsettling atmosphere surrounding an increasingly unaccepting-of-reality and despaired person, both classical components of dark fantasy. Understandably, our speaker was flabbergasted, and at first, after the effects of the unexpected surprise of a raven talking wore off, struggled to understand the relevance of what it said because he thought it was answering his question. (Little did he know how relevant it would become once he projected it onto his reality.) He was also able to see the comicality of it by cracking a little joke. But the more time he spent interpreting it the more worried he got- particularly about the sincerity and weight the raven put in its utterance of “Nevermore.”

After that we get a little background of the speaker in his one-sided dialogue with the raven, whom he had begun to regard as friend, and was able to obtain a soon-to-be-destroyed slight relief from the state of languishing desolation he had been in before its arrival. This didn’t hinder him from lamenting his galling fate by indicating that all of his hopes and friends had “flown,” and such was what the raven was going to do. It seems that our speaker had always carried with him a feeling of rancor or animosity towards the failure of his prospects, and Lenore was the only one who didn’t willfully abandon him, and was always there for him before her death. And so because of the scarcity of such occurrences, he cherished and adored Lenore to such a degree that he developed a gradual mental and emotional dependency, which, in turn, grew to become a full-blown mania, ultimately taking hold of every facet of his mind. In other words, he espoused Lenore as a form of life without which he ceased to truly live, but merely existed as a mass filled with torment and distress.

After the speaker finished his groan of loneliness, the raven cared little to consolidate him, and instead threw at him another “Nevermore.” This time the speaker started getting more woeful (perhaps due to a perceived appositeness resulting from the little time interval between the speaker’s groan and the raven’s “Nevermore”), and began contemplating a way by which he could diminish any value of relevant truth the word “Nevermore” could entail. He did this by chalking off the raven’s abnormal utterance of nevermore as a manifestation of what the raven, as opposed to our speaker, had gone through: The speaker speculated that the raven had probably been long acquainted with an unhappy master whose predicaments and disasters had inflicted deep harm and distress on him so that he was only able to say “Nevermore;” and our raven learned to say it from him (a quite unrealistic scenario, but then again so is a raven talking).

However, despite his increased worry as to what “nevermore” truly means, and his common sense sagaciously admonishing him not to get too committed to the raven, our speaker decided to further engage with it. For some odd reason, our speaker still found the raven’s traits funny, but perhaps the uncomfortable kind of funny, the kind you indulge in when put in a tense, awkward, situation. He took a chair and sat right in front of it, and made it his purpose to understand what “Nevermore” meant. Our speaker, moreover, modified his perception of the bird according to the gradual enmity and unease he started to view it in. No longer did he identify it as the graceful and stately bird, but instead called it “ungainly,” “grim,” and “ominous.” It is perspicuous that our speaker had started to suspect that the raven’s “Nevermore” was a delineation of his wretched state of affairs with the dead Lenore. As a result, the image of the raven was altered in his mind to convey a gloomy, unpleasant, and scrawny creature that came carrying with it bad news, as opposed to the majestic, poised, and regal new friend he had initially viewed it as. Furthermore, the reader could easily discern that, from his ostensible fixation with the raven, our speaker has quite a penchant for becoming besotted with things.

Our melodramatic speaker continues trying to unravel the meaning of “Nevermore,” with the raven, whose eyes- which are said to be the “windows of the soul,”- had now induced a vexatious burning in the very core of his chest, still standing right next to him.
This is another in a long line of references to eyes in Poe’s stories and poems. Poe implemented eyes in no paucity in his writings as an instrument by which he could add to whatever emotion he wanted to add to- sometimes as a central part of the polt, as could be seen in The Tell-Tale Heart. It seems that Poe understood clearly and completely the ability of the eye to vehemently illustrate and evoke (as is the case here) emotion, the precision the eye could portray and reflect the human condition in, and its dominance when it comes to using physical clues to unveil hidden human sentiments and motivations, by noting even the most nuanced alterations in its form. Therefore, he committed himself in every story to, whenever there was a possibility, use its power. And use it he did. Generally, this is an integral constituent of Poe’s style writing: his efficiency to invoke concrete common objects and basic characteristics of beings to paint an atmosphere that embraces the plot and aids in its elevation to the apotheosis. He does so by merging it with the characters as an inseparable synthesis that utilizes the multiform, often volatile, sometimes even antithetical layers of which the apparatus of human emotion
comprises.

It is entirely plausible that, by this time, our speaker had begun to grasp what “Nevermore” meant, but simply insisted on further immersing himself in the muddy pit of delusion.
Think about it: What could he do other than deny it? For him, it was either that or complete and utter delirium. Soon we will find out that, after a small while, the evidence had become inundating, and the (rather large) scope of imagination could no longer run from the irrefragable truth from which he desperately aimed to insulate himself. There it became abundantly clear that there was no path to which he could be carried, by persistence of only his internal locomotion and will to live, other than
madness.

But before that happens, he envisioned an irksome instance of nostalgia involving Lenore (surprise surprise), which likely acted as a catalyst that facilitated his inevitable succumbing to insanity: While deeply pondering what the meaning could be (or, if my aforementioned theory is correct, alternative meanings), in a state of hyperfocus, he oddly saw the image of Lenore in the mere, unremarkable, fact that the light of the lamp cast itself onto the cushion of the lavish violet lining of his chair- “gloating” it, so to speak. This vigorously kindled the sorrowful flashing memory of Lenore in his mind, as he remembered that no longer was she going to sit on that cushion. This is what people speak of when they mention Poe’s mastery at coalescing atmosphere with the characters’ emotions. More and more we see our speaker drawing from the inanimate objects of his ambience to see the transiently enchanting lively image of Lenore. Before subsequently realizing the absence of this image from his life for evermore, and falling back into the incrementally intensifying condition of despondency and melancholy. It is this dilemma, which I spoke of above in the third paragraph, that step-by-step fundamentally threw him into the depths of insanity; it is this self-contained cycle of thought that tormented him further every time he underwent it; it is this conundrum of grief that develops the story of the mental demise of our speaker. And this conundrum of grief has been sparked by the atmosphere.