The Raven Summary & Analysis

The cold night, book of “forgotten lore,” and sudden knock establish the gothic mood and at the same time mark the narrator as a scholar. That the narrator drowses off before the knock makes it unclear if he’s awake or dreaming through the rest of the poem, whether what happens is supernatural or subconscious. Note also how he at first explains the knock rationally, using “nothing more” to assure himself the knocking has a rational origin, though the fact that he has to assure himself at all indicates his uncertainty. Both his rationality and doubt are on display.

The framing of the poem as a memory emphasizes how the events of the poem continue to haunt him. Here the poem also introduces the fact that the narrator is grief-stricken over his dead love Lenore, and is trying to escape that grief by reading. The fire, too, is dying. The poem vividly establishes its concerns with death and memory, and casts memory (both of his dead love, and of the raven) not as something desired but as a burden the narrator wishes he could escape, but can’t.

As his fear increases, the narrator again asserts his rationality, using “nothing more” to deny the knocking could be supernatural and then acting “normal” by calling out and apologizing. But all of this effort to assure himself that there are rational answers to the knock show how, lost in grief, his rationality is already under siege. Meanwhile, the mention of napping again raises the possibility, without giving an answer one way or another, that the narrator is actually dreaming all this.

Although the narrator began the poem trying to forget Lenore, in a moment of irrational hope he allows himself to wonder ifshe could possibly have returned from the dead. Suddenly it’s clear that narrator, while fearful, also wantsthe supernatural: he can’t escape the memories of his lost love, and desperately wants her to return, even if it’s as a ghost. But now the “nothing more” is turned against him to dash those hopes: earlier he used the phrase to assert rationality, but now that he is hopeful of his lost love’s supernatural return, the real world asserts itself and he is forced to realize the name is just an echo and “nothing more.”

Pallas Athena is the Greco-Roman goddess of wisdom and learning. The bird’s landing place on the statue thereforeimplies a kind of opposition to such rationality. Note how at first the narrator finds the bird merely amusing, and he quickly develops a rational answer to how the bird learned the word “Nevermore.” But curiosity – the desire to learn more, to venture into the unknown – drives him to want to understand the bird. And his sense of Lenore’s presence implies that his curiosity is driven by a not-all-that rational sense that the bird might be able to give him news of his lost love. Also note how similar the bird’s “nevermore” is to the narrator’s earlier “nothing more,” except that he used “nothing more” to assert rationality, while the bird’s “nevermore” will do exactly the opposite.

Earlier the narrator hoped to be reunited with Lenore by supernatural means. Now suddenly he senses another possibility, that he might be saved from his painful memories by supernatural means: the “nepenthe,” a mythological potion of forgetfulness. But whereas earlier the narrator explained the Raven’s words as rote learning from a former master, now in his growing mania, he takes the Ravenseriously and is crushed when it answers his pleas with “Nevermore.”

The narrator’s relentless questions, despite the fact that the bird always answers the same way, show how the narrator’s rationality has not just failed in helping him understand the bird, but pushed him to despair and near-madness. First, in his fervor to understand the bird’s meaning, he has lost sight of the fact that the bird might not have any meaning at all – that its words might be nonsense. Once he gives that up, his mind slips into a kind of interpretive frenzy, finding meaning in everything, and seeing the Raven’s “nevermore” as denying all his hopes of reuniting with Lenore. He’s fallen down a kind of rabbit hole, in which he tries to figure out the unknowable – the raven, death – and with each failure only tries harder until he erupts in fury and despair.

The Raven’s refusal to leave parallels the narrator’s memories of Lenore, which likewise never dissipate, suggesting that death and grieving for the dead are inescapable. Further, the Raven sitting, forever, on the bust of Pallas suggests that the narrator’s ability to reason has been permanently diminished and overwhelmed by the unknowable. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether the Raven is a supernatural visitor, a product of the narrator’s dream, or a random bird that learned one word. In each case, it is the narrator’s own doubts in the face of loss, memory, and the unknown that have driven away his rational peace forevermore.