Essay: The Raven – Edgar Allen Poe

Death within the realm of poetry has always been seen as beautiful, yet no poet has undertaken this topic more deftly than Edgar Allan Poe. Poe’s interpretation of poetry is that all poems should be a “rhythmical creation of beauty”. To Poe, sadness and gloom are both traits of a beautifully tragic story. Specifically, there are two poems written by Poe which embody the essence of the beauty of death. The Raven is a story about a man who mourns the death of a woman named “Lenore” who he loved dearly. Similarly, his poem “Annabel Lee” is about a man who mourns the death of a beautiful woman. In this way, both “The Raven” and “Annabel Lee” share similarities in their themes of the death of a beautiful lady.
Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven” is about the death of a beautiful lady who had died a very long time ago, yet for some reason, the man in this story is still saddened by this loss. He sorely misses her, and is always lamenting how she was forcefully taken from him by angels who were probably jealous of their love, and of her family who didn’t believe he was capable of bringing her to her final resting place. His passionate love for Annabel Lee exceeds the amount of love anyone has ever shown for another person. In “The Raven”, there is a quote which shows the reader the immense love the man in the story has for her, it also shows that he would truly do anything for her, even if it meant he had to sleep next to her tomb every night. “And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side of my darling, my life and my bride, in her sepulcher there by the sea, in her tomb by the side of the sea.”(Poe, lines 38-41)
In “The Raven”, a man, most likely older than the man in “Annabel Lee”, mourns the death of his love whom he called “Lenore”. Lenore, similarly to Annabel Lee, had passed away a few years earlier. In “The Raven”, the older man hears a tapping on his chamber door and sees the curtains slowly billowing in the wind. He is convinced it couldn’t possibly be anyone but his lost love, Lenore. Sadly, for the man, it is only a bird. This bird is big and black; it is called a Raven. Although the men in these two stories are similar because they both mourn for their loved ones, they are also different. The man in “The Raven” may be sad about his lost, but his love cannot compare to that of the man in “Annabel Lee”.
The story of “Annabel Lee” revolves around the memory of a man’s sad, painful memory. The speaker in the poem reminisces about his lost lady, Annabel Lee, whom he loved. The speaker had known Annabel Lee for many years, since she was just a girl, and they both lived “in a kingdom by the sea.” Although being only kids, these two souls seemed to be locked on to each other, deeply in love. They were so in love, that in the poem, it says even the angels were jealous of their beautiful love. This is interesting, because further on in the story, the speaker actually blames the angels for killing his beloved Annabel Lee. According to the story, a wind came down from the clouds, which caused Annabel Lee to fall ill, which eventually turned into a fatal sickness, ultimately killing her. After her death, Anabel’s relatives came and took her body away from the overwhelmed speaker. The speaker in the story reiterates that this love between he and Anabel was not just infantile love, but a grandiose, real, and passionate love. He goes on to say that something as little as death will not keep him apart from her, nor even angels or devils could either. After her death, she can not seem to leave his thoughts, he is always thinking about her, whether it be in his dreams or in the stars. Weirdly enough, he loves her so much and cannot let go, that he sleeps in her tomb with her every night. Therefore, similarly to The Raven, the speaker in Annabel Lee lost his past love. He laments and weeps for her, and is still so in love with her post-mortem that he goes to lie with her in her tomb.
In these two short stories, the two main characters, as mentioned before, are very much alike, yet at the same time different. They both lose the woman of their life and they both are still in mourning. Poe’s poems are usually about such sorrow and sadness, and it is this that makes his poems beautiful.