Skip to Content (press Enter/Return)
Essays
Topics
preview

The Symbolism of the Birds in Edgar Allan Poe´s The Raven and in Samuel Taylor Coleridge´s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Good Essays
Open Document
Feel that guilty conscious giving your gut a strange feeling? This is the way you are told that you have messed, done something wrong. Back in older times there was a different way that people were told that they messed up. “Real guilt needs our permission to exist. It’s sneaky and brilliant and invisible,” according to Liz Jones. But is guilt really invisible. Not in the poem The Rime of Ancient Mariner. The birds in these two poems symbolize two different things. This gets to be the main plot of both poems. The Raven in the poem The Raven by Poe is a symbolism of evil and the Albatross in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge is a sign of un-appreciation toward nature.
The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe shows us a man that is sitting in his house alone thinking of a woman named Lenore. However, we do not know who Lenore is we can assume that she is a woman that was close to our main character. He hears a tapping on his door and when he goes to answer his door no one is there. He goes and sits down and then hears it again on his window he looks to see that it is a Raven. The Raven enters his house and he begins to have a conversation with the bird however with all of the questions that the main character would ask the Raven would always reply “Nevermore.” The man starts to look too far into this and thinks that the bird is telling the future. When in the end the bird turns into a demon and the main character has gone completely insane. People wonder why Poe chose a Raven, but according to John Richardson this is why he believes Poe chose the Raven; “It was a pretty great choice on Poe's part, a bird that looks like a part of the black night it came out of, a little scary looking, but also hard to read.”
...

... middle of paper ...

... go mad for a point of time in their lives. The birds make the men realize things they didn’t think were truly important. There is a fine line between being a genius and being mad. This is shown in these poems. Both men start out sane and very smart, but in the end they are both completely insane.

Works Cited

Getting Rid of Your Guilty Concience. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Mar. 2014. .
Good Reads. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Mar. 2014. .
Shmoop. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Mar. 2014. .
Shmoop. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Mar. 2014. .
Student Pulse. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Mar. 2014. .
Get Access
Related
Get Access