"The Raven" is a narrative poem written by the American writer Edgar Allan Poe. It was first published on January 29, 1845, in the New York Evening Mirror. Although the poem has about 108 lines, but it’s perfectly readable at one sitting. What’s more, it was noted by its musicality, stylized language and supernatural atmosphere. It tells a mysterious conversation between the narrator and a talking raven on the narrator’s lost beauty, Lenore in a bleak December night. All 18 verses have the same form, as the narrator's night terrors increase. It creates a feeling of steadily growing tension and anxiety from the narrator’s reaction of what the raven said.

It built up a figure of beauty in reader’s mind. Following its sense of melancholy over the death of a beloved beautiful young woman pervading the whole poem, we can easily catch the character of the narrator. He feels sadness through his lost of the beautiful Lenore. His grief being turned to madness under the steady one-word repetition of the talking bird introduced right at the beginning of the poem. The torture which the bird has brought to the narrator was already in the narrator's ruminating character—the bird only brought out what was inside. Poetic imagination displayed itself in the illusion of a raven as well as enhanced the effect of the tragedy of the death of his beloved beautiful girl in this way.

Death without cause is theme in a poem, so as the beauty. It seems that the beauty is everyone desired and the death is everyone hated, so when they come together, it will come a mixed and complicated feeling. Is the beautiful Lenore died because of her beauty? All the wish the narrator has is the beauty of Lenore can last forever .Additionally, the narrator recalls the memory, for that is all he has left. What the raven has taken from him so cruelly is his loneliness—but this cruelty he brought upon himself, for he cannot resist the urge to interrogate the raven. He is fascinated by the bird's repeated, desolate reply. The narrator repeatedly asks it questions in the hope that it will say "yes"—or perhaps out of a morbid desire to be again told "no."

Although we cannot figure out the reason of Lenore’s death, but it is not hard to find out the narrator’s contradiction of the desire to forget with the desire to remember. In Poe's own words, "The human thirst for self-torture", so it is in “The Raven” we still feel the narrator’s self-torture. However, in some degrees, the self-torture of the narrator is not only reflected from the madness of himself, but also reflected by the words of the talking raven says. So the poem writer creates a maze for us. The raven maybe is true, or not true. Perhaps the raven is indeed a creature exist that night, however, as we all know that the raven can’t talk. The words what the raven

says maybe is the illusion by the young man or even all the raven is a illusion of the young man.

 

第二篇：The raven