Similarities Between The Raven And The Masque Of The Red Death

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The Personal life of the magnificent author Edgar Allan Poe is represented through “The Raven” and “The Masque of the Red Death.” “The Raven” is about a severely depressed man who is trying to forget about his lost love Lenore. While he is reading, a tapping comes from the window and a raven flies in. The man interrogates the Raven, but only gets “nevermore” as a response. The poem ends with the man losing his sanity after advising the bird to leave him to drink away his pain. Just like the narrator, Poe had started to drink to forget about the stress and pain he felt from his wife's illness. In addition, alcoholism was an immense part of Poe’s life, so it clearly had to be represented in the poem. For instance, it states, “respite and …show more content…

They are locked inside the castle and they are certain that they are shielded from the disease. Little do they know the Red Death is among them. The story ends with the Red Death exterminating them all, leaving no one safe. Poe lost his family to tuberculosis, and this really impacted his writing. He saw tuberculosis as a terrible killer, so that’s how it was expressed in his writing. The narrator claims that “No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. -- Blood was it’s Avatar and its seal -- There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution, -- And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all” (Masque 1, 15). This is clarifying that the Red Death is the worst killer of them all, and nothing was ever more dreadful. Also, it’s naming the symptoms of the disease, which are very similar to the symptoms of tuberculosis. Another thing is, the Red Death was explained like Poe would explain Tuberculosis. The Red Death killed everyone in the castle, and tuberculosis killed everyone Poe cared about. This truly reveals how tuberculosis dominated Poe’s personal life so much he had to include it in his writing. Above all, through disease, alcoholism, and loss, Edgar Allan Poe’s life is represented astonishingly in “The Raven” and “The Masque of the Red

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