Violence of colors in “The Raven” and “Lenore”
In the poems “The Raven”, “Lenore” Poe inquires the loss of ideal beauty and the difficulty in getting it back. These two poems are narrated by a young man crying over the untimely death of his beloved.
In “The Raven,” Poe successfully unites his philosophical and aesthetic ideals. In this piece, a young scholar who is emotionally exhausted of the phrase “Nevermore” repeated by a raven in answer to his question about the probability of an afterlife with his deceased lover.
“Lenore” shows different ways in which the dead are best remembered, either by mourning or celebrating life beyond earthly boundaries. The narrator is not one man as there are lines written not as a direct speech. The narrator speaks about Guy de Vere, who is lover of Lenore. However, mourners shed false tears for Lenore, perhaps because they expect to receive bequests from her estate. This interpretation of the attitude of the mourners depends on the reliability of Guy de Vere's testimony against them. (Poetry Foundation)
Alliteration in “Lenore” plays an important role in “Lenore” in helping to maintain rhythm and musicality, and shows feelings of youth, love and beauty versus age, hate and death. (eapoe)
‘See! On yon drear and rigid bier low lies thy love, Lenore! Come! Let the burial rite be read–the funeral song be sung!– An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young– A dirge for her the doubly dead in that she died so young. ’
Poe commonly alliterates soft ‘s’ sounds with soft ‘c’ to convey a hissing kind of dark mystery that perfectly fits the mood of the poem. The persistent alliteration seems to come without effort. Poe created the fifth line of his stanza for the magic of the repetend. He relied upon it to the uttermost in “Lenore” also. (eapoe)
‘From my books surcease of sorrow - sorrow for the lost Lenore - For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named Lenore - Nameless here for evermore.’
Symbolism in “Lenore”
We get to know Lenore, who is a symbol for idealized love and beauty, by the description of her death. For the narrator (speaker 1) and de Vere she represents an icon, being compared to a symbol of love (‘sweet soul’), beauty (‘yellow hair’, ‘so young’, ‘bride’ and ‘golden bowl’), truth and hope for a better world. Moreover, symbols of life and death divide the author’s imagination about heaven and hell. According to him, life is possible only on Earth ‘as it doth float up from the damned Earth’. After life angels are coming to take you to ‘the King of Heaven’ or to the ‘evil eye’. The whole symbolism represents the process of how every beauty, or idea, will eventually die if you do not know how to keep it alive.
Symbolism in “The Raven”
One symbol is appearing in both “The Raven” and “Lenore” – this is Lenore herself, "rare and radiant" with angelic description, she symbolizes heaven and beauty as ‘the angels name Lenore’.
The raven, which is giving the title to the work, entering the room like an emperor and it from the beginning dominates over the narrator. The bird's black costume symbolizes death; death now serves as a reminder, an imperious intruder. In a broader context, it represents the theme of the man who cannot escape his ultimate fate. This topic continuously re – occurs throughout Poe's short works. The arrival of the bird at midnight also represents death and fear, as this is the darkest part of the night, always according to people’s beliefs connected with ghosts, witches and dead souls. To put further dark and scaring accents the author uses the phrase "Night's Plutonian Shore", where he incorporates all the negative aspects associated with death as Pluto is the Roman god of the underworld. The story of the poem is taking place in the month of December – nothing lives in December, and everything is freezing cold and grey. (Christian Schlegel)
Metaphors in “Lenore”
‘A saintly soul floats on the Stygian river’ (the river’s name says itself that her soul floats into the afterlife), the lover of Lenore Guy de Vere in his answer says that ‘the slanderous tongue’ and ‘the evil eye’ was the cause of her death. In the metaphor ‘the life still there, upon her hair, the death upon her eyes’ the speaker from Stanza 1 tells to lover de Vere "we have sinned" (from the Latin word peccavimus). However, he tells de Vere to stop raving with accusations, for he believes Lenore was a sweet and loving person. De Vere is angry, because Lenore died before he was able to marry her. She still looks dear to him, with breath of life in her yellow hair, but not anymore in her eyes.
Metaphors in “The Raven”
Once again, even the metaphors already are appearing within the work’s title, from the raven’s speech, and the dark hidden meaning in each of his lines. The description of the raven is also nothing positive “And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming” (Poe is comparing the raven’s eyes to a demon and the bird itself with evil in the words “demon” and “shadow.” The connection between the Raven’s “shadow” and the speaker’s “soul” in the last line of the poem suggests that the speaker believes himself to be cursed by the bird’s presence.
Poe created beautiful fantastic stories and was able to fulfill his fantasies into the poems with delicious melody of the second stanza. In “The Raven” and “Lenore” sound and color preserve their monotone and we have no change of place or occasion. In addition, the theme of both poems is pretty clear: the enigma of death and hallucination of an inconsolable soul. Through the command of the supernatural in these poems, it is avoided the danger-line between the ideal and absurd. (Harold Bloom) We can scan the lines, where Poe is seen as the true worshipper of the beauty, moreover his love for it was consecrating passion.
Sources:
- Bloom, Harold. Edgar Allan Poe : comprehensiv. Broomall, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 1999. 7 Dec. 2014
- http://www.eapoe.org/works/mabbott/tom1p078.htm
- http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/edgar-allan-poe
- Schlegel, Christian. Edgar Allan Poe: The Raven - A. München: GRIN Verlag GmbH, 2014. 7 Dec. 2014
