| Thoughts about The Raven, the poem by Edgar Allan Poe |
[20 Jul 2011|08:41pm] |
Dear friends, let me tell you a story. A story about The Raven, by Edgar Allan Poe. If you haven't read it recently, you can do so here (among many other places). People who only know it from Omnia's version should read it too, there are some differences.
A while ago, I was at a live concert where I heard Omnia's version again. In the introduction, Steve said it was about a student who was reading some books, about Greek tragedies or something, he didn't know, and suddenly there was this raven. This got me thinking. The line is, “many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore”. I thought to myself, hmm, Greek tragedies aren't forgotten, what could it be that this guy is reading. So I went researching for a bit.
It turns out that a number of scholars are of the opinion that 'forgotten lore' means lore about the occult, or black magic. This guy isn't reading tragedies, he's reading books about the dark arts! These books are very hard to get. And not only does he have a few, he has 'many'! This guy must be very determined. And he's not reading them, he's 'pondering' them, which means, to give a lot of careful thought. And he's doing so in 'December', a month that is traditionally associated with the forces of darkness. But why would he be studying those books?
Well, we get some hints in the poem. The narrator of the poem is very distraught about 'the lost Lenore'. It is safe to assume that he is in a lot of despair because his girlfriend Lenore died. (One of the questions he asks the raven is if his soul wil ever meet Lenore 'within the distant Aidenn', which is the Garden of Eden, or Heaven.) People in despair sometimes do dangerous things. And he may just have been doing things like that, because he says having "dreams no mortal dared to dream before". Another few very interesting hints are, when the raven taps for the first time and he thinks it's someone at the door, he is filled 'with fantastic terrors never felt before' as he opens the door, looks into the hallway, and says 'the whispered word Lenore'. (People who only know Omnia's version will miss this clue since Omnia skips a part of this.) Now why would he be all stressed out and call out her name when he hears someone knocking at the door, if we know Lenore has died.
Here's my opinion. I think The Raven is about a very distraught lover that has been trying to bring his deceased girlfriend back from the dead. He has done the work, burned the incense and spoken the incantations, and now he hopes Lenore will arrive. But bringing back people from the dead is a very stupid and dangerous thing to do. In the first place, everyone knows that when you raise people from the dead, they always come back wrong. Furthermore, by meddling in the natural order of things, you piss off the people from the underworld. Once someone has landed on the Plutonian shore (has reached the afterlife, Pluto is the god of the underworld) they want them to stay there. Our student must have been causing quite a rumble down there.
So what do you do when you want this rumbling to stop, but not attract too much attention to yourself? You send a messenger of course. We all know about carrier pigeons, or owls perhaps, but the people of the underworld, they don't want no truck with pigeons or owls, they want to send one of their own: a raven.
So here's this raven, arrived at his destination, almost causing a heart attack at the recipient's, so far so good. But you know, Raven is a very hard language to understand. And when a raven starts speaking English, he probably will have an accent. So, what is this raven really saying. Well, I think, and I admit that this is a stretch, but hear me out: I think the raven is saying “Lenore Nevermore”. In other words, stop what you are doing right now. The Words "Lenore Nevermore" really do sound alike, don't they, and with a Raven accent across them, our narrator might have misunderstood them, distraught and all. He admits the raven is 'croaking'.
We get some hints that the raven is a messenger from the underworld. It is not a regular raven, it is a very 'stately raven of the saintly days of yore'. You don't send just any raven for a message as important as this, you send the boss. The narrator acknowledges that the raven is from 'the Plutonian shore', and that his 'eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming'. And of course, normal raven don't do any tapping at windows.
So here's my story. I think The Raven is about a guy trying to bring his deceased girlfriend back from the dead, and while doing so is causing so much trouble in the underworld, that they sent a raven to tell him to stop. And it worked too.
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