Categorizing Women in Annabel Lee and the Raven

If you take one part symbol, one part imagination, one part clever wording and two parts poetry, you have the workings of an Edgar Allen Poe poem. If you take a look at “The Raven” and “Annabel Lee”, you have the narrator of both stories reminiscing about a “lost love”. First we will discuss “The Raven”.

“Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore”; the second line of “The Raven”. As many readers look at this, they read more and should discover that the narrator is recalling his past, the “curious volume of forgotten lore”. Why would they be forgotten? To me, when the readers get to Lenore in the next few lines, he wasn’t remembering the “pleasant times” with her. As I will mention when I discuss “Annabel Lee”, the narrator covertly confesses to murdering the women about whom they are written. The complexity of these poems lies in the nature of the speaker, who wished to make his (narrator) guilt public, yet at the time, enjoys keeping it hidden. The principle of a covert confession serves as Poe’s poetic inspiration, drawing a connection between confession and creation; and so back to “The Raven”.

In the lines, “From my books surcease of sorrow, sorrow for the lost Lenore, For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore, Nameless here forevermore”. How so does Poe gratify and praise this woman we not know anything of. How does the reader not see that he’s completely covering up his act with all this satisfaction in his own work? Poe does this same writing in “Annabel Lee”. If you read this and the other poem, notice how he keeps using the symbol “angel” repetitively. Yet, his conscience that is taking over him now gets even deeper, and darker.

“Deep into the darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing

Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before;

But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,

And the only word there spoken was the whispered word,

Lenore? This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word,

“Lenore!” Merely this, and nothing more.”

I just want to point out some key notes in this phrase. “Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before”. What could he possibly be dreaming? Or is it that his conscience caught him in a day dream? That is left up to the reader to decipher. When he heard the whispered word ‘Lenore’. Who could have said that? Nobody was around him when he heard this. I would think that it is conscience again, his guilty conscience that is giving him these thoughts. So on and so forth. They go into when he is in his chamber and he hears a tapping at his chamber door. This line makes me think: “Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within my burning”. At this point, it seems as if he’s clarifying to himself that his own self is starting to get the best of him. All of his thoughts are finally adding up and all the stress and the knowledge of knowing what he did to Lenore is starting to take effect on him. And so, enter the metaphor, enter the illusion, enter his conscience: the raven.

“Quoth the raven, ‘Nevermore’”; the most famous of lines from this poem. The raven, to me, would be his conscience in “void, creature form”. I believe that lore has it that if a bird of any kind makes way to your window and waits for you, it’s not going to be the best of news. In the narrator’s case, he has a bird, but a black, eerie raven. His own anger arises and makes known to the audience that he was the culprit for the demise of Lenore. The calm, quietness of the raven, and the once, ever so rash “nevermore” has the narrator believing that this animal, this messenger from the other side is Lenore. Lenore knows what he did, and so the raven has the same knowledge… Although it is never stated that the raven actually is Lenore, it can be assumed that she is a metaphor or a human characteristic in this bird.

“Then I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing

To the fowl, whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom’s core”.

These two lines have now made affirmative that he has the best of himself exposed to everyone to see. He “confessed”