Untreated Grief In The Raven By Edgar Allen Poe

Untreated grief can erode sanity. This is shown in The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe by saying, “-here I opened wide the door;-/ Darkness there, and nothing more”, the narrator reveals his insanity by the wandering of his imagination. His strong desire for Lenore to return has caused his mind to envision his love returning to his life. In the same manner, the narrator says, “‘respite and nepenthe, from thy memories of Lenore’” (Poe 4). The inability to cope with his grief in the loss of his love has reached an extreme, especially since he would rather drink a potion that causes all of his worries to disappear than to cope with the sorrow that he feels. When the news was received from the raven, he reacted by saying, “‘Get thee back into the tempest and Night’s Plutonian Shore’” (Poe 5). This reply stood simply to emphasize his weakness in handling the grief that stemmed from the loss of his love. Poe strengthens the ideas behind the

The raven symbolizes grief that refuses to leave the narrator alone, even through his darkest of times. Since he is unaware of how to cope with the grief that came from the loss of Lenore, his love, his untreated grief seems to consume his life in eroding his sanity. This insanity is shown by his hallucination of the first knocking on the door. Later, his reaction to the raven shows that his grief is, in fact, unbearable. The main lesson Poe wants to convey to his readers is how necessary it is to find ways to deal with the grief that comes along with events in your life. The idea of grief is a main idea of literature written in the Gothic Romantic style, especially since many of these pieces incorporate a dark, gloomy setting, as well as curses and intense emotions. Through his use of word choice and literary devices, Poe demonstrates the gloomy setting and how the narrator’s strong feelings of grief continues to affect his