Essay On Symbolism In The Raven

Death is a funny thing. Death can bring people together or tear them apart. It can be seen as a start to a better life or as the end to life. But in the case of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven, the death of a loved one brings darkness. In The Raven, Poe creates a dark and morose feeling though his use of grief and madness that is inflicted by death; Poe develops this feeling by employing his creative use of imagery and through the use of Christian and Greek religious symbolism. Imagery in poetry has the incredible capability to transform the mind into a new world of the authors making, powered by the experience and imagination of the viewer. Thought the Raven, Poe provides the material needed for the transformation of his piece into a world of

Poe uses Greek mythology in the eighth paragraph, and again in the seventeenth, as he talks about the night’s plutonian shores. Pluto is the Greek god who is the ruler of the underworld. The underworld which is described as perpetually dark and a place where many suffer for eternity could be a symbol of how the narrator is very depressed and tormented since the loss of his love and views the world as very dark and a place of suffering. The shore comes in reference to the river Styx, in which souls are carried from the earthly world to the shores underworld. These two are used together to portray the idea that the narrator is in internal torment, caught in the grief and pain that come in the passing of a dear one. The raven itself is a symbol. However, there are two different meanings that it could symbolize. First, the raven is often a symbol of death, sadness, and loss. Here it could be used as a symbol of the narrator’s own emotions. Second, the raven could be alluding to Greek mythology as the raven is the messenger bird of Apollo, the god of prophecy. Here the raven could symbolize divine intervention from higher beings, and could be seen as bringer of knowledge that condemns the narrator to his life of darkness and