“Night’s Plutonian shore” Symbol Analysis

“Plutonian” is a reference to Pluto, the Roman god of the underworld. The narrator, upon first encountering the Raven, is amused by its stately comportment, and jokingly accuses it of having emerged from the “Night’s Plutonian shore”— the border between the worlds of the living and the dead. At the close of the poem, the narrator, no longer amused and convinced that the bird means him ill, repeats the phrase with conviction, suggesting that the Raven is a messenger of death, but not a death in which souls travel up to a heavenly paradise where they are reunited with the other departed, but instead a death of blackness and despair.