"The Philosophy of Composition"

" (Knapp 82) The month is December, the time amongst old and new. The light in the room doesn't come from a kerosene lantern, as one might expect in the room of a scholar stu destruction in 1845; rather, it comes from "dying ember[s]," which suggests a world that is half light, half dark. How can the loudspeaker system follow out decorous to read? Is in that respect light enough for the speaker's perceptions to seem credible? The proofreader begins to doubt, and it is just this uncertainty that allows the reader to identify with the speaker's uncertainties about ever being able to see his devotee Lenore again. Outside there is the real or imagined agitation and the "Plutonian shore" (stanzas 8 and 17) which Pollin associates with an "ambiguous source and symbolisation of disaster to man." (Pollin 145) Finally, the entrance of the Raven occurs though a window, unremarkably for seeing out, not coming in. This reversal of expectations hints at the poem's separate reversals: a bird that can speak revealingly, and a annunciate of death after the death has occurred. These details contri plainlye to the smack of indefinite perception, as if the speaker is either about to altercate or be challenged by reality.

 The speaker is stationed at some(prenominal) halfway points himself: this obscures the reader's sense of the definite even as it reveals the scholar's character. At the beginning of the tale the speaker says, "Ah, distinctly I remember...," which indicates that there is a s

ubstantial time bed cover amongst when the events of this tale occurred and when the tale is told. This tells the reader two things: 1) in the indefinite space of memory there may be a haze of misperception, and 2) the events of this tale are still critically important to the speaker, however many years may gather in lapsed in between.

The student now guesses the state of the case, but is impelled...by the human thirst for self-torture, and in part by superstition, to propound such queries to the bird as will bring him, the lover, the more or less of the luxury of sorrow, through the anticipated answer, "Nevermore.

" (Essays and Reviews, 24)

In "The Philosophy of Composition," Poe, rhetorically asking when Death is the most appropriate to the poetic form, answers that it is vanquish "When it most closely allies itself to witness: the death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical affair in the world--and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover" (Essays and Reviews 19) The "poetical" ingredient is not the fact that such a woman represents love or romance, but that she can be presented as a symbol of the unattainable ideal of dish aerial to which man owes allegiance, and to which allegiance itself is Beauty. The bereaved man must pen the poem because hardly his perpetual longing can earn the requisite sense of indefinite pleasure of having glimpsed true beauty, and thusly of having lost it forever. The only thing more beautiful than the Beauty correspond by the dead lover is the Beauty represented by the man's melancholy resignation to a platonic want that cannot, by definition, ever be fulfilled: one desires only what one does not have. Therefore the character of Lenore appropriately ne'er appears in this poem, not even in the speaker's memory.

Knapp suggests that the Raven functions as a messenger or a mediator between the unknown and the known, since the first bird that Noah sent out of th
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