A mourning man descends into madness after a raven awakened him in the middle of the night. The man asks the raven questions but the later keeps answering “ nevermore”. 

The first time I read Raven, I was drawn by its musicality. The meter bumping in the background kept me on edge. I loved the rhythm. The silence. The structure. The assonance and the rhyme.

The contrasted imaginary provides a conflict between reason and logic, power and chaos, light and darkness, life and death, sanity and madness. The narrator is struggling with after the death of his loved one. As a result of it, we witness a man who is losing his grip on reality.

The narrator sends chills down my back. It is eerie. The raven ‘s repetitive response to the narrator’s questioning sent me chills down my back.

Raven is a poignant poem. It shows how the death of a loved one can disorientate a presumably sane and sound person and make them lose their sanity when they don’t come to terms with that person’s death.