""
byopens with the narrator trying unsuccessfully to distract himself from thinking about how sad
he is over the death of his beloved . He briefly smiles when he is distracted by surprise as a
raven suddenly knocks at his window and flies inside.
The narrator comments
on how serious and spooky ("grim" and "ghastly") yet regal
("stately") the bird is and then asks his first question: "Tell me what thy
lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!" Throughout the poem, the raven answers his
questions and statements with only the single word "Nevermore!" At first, the narrator
simply takes the reply as a funny name for a bird and is disappointed that the bird says nothing
else.
When the narrator comments that the raven will likely leave because
"other friends have flown before," the raven repeats, "Nevermore." It is
effectively saying that it will never leave. This is even more jarring, but the narrator finds
it amusing again, at least until his thoughts drift inevitably back to lost Lenore.
The narrator next says aloud that the raven was sent by God as "respite and
nepenthe, from [his] memories of Lenore" to help him forget his grief. According to
Merriam-Webster dictionary, nepenthe is a "potion used by the ancients to induce
forgetfulness of pain or sorrow." The raven immediately denies it by repeating,
"Nevermore."
When the narrator hears the bird offers no hope of a
break from his deep sadness, he demands it answer another question: "Is thereis there balm
in Gilead?" This is a reference to a Bible passage, Jeremiah, which said that even if there
is balm in Gilead, it does no good. The narrator is asking a hopeless question, which gets the
hopeless answer "Nevermore."
The narrator the asks if he will ever
see Lenore and hold her again in "Aidenn" or Eden, the blessed afterlife promised to
those who accept Jesus Christ's salvation in Christianity. The bird again says
"Nevermore." This might suggest that Eden isn't waiting for Lenore, that she isn't
there, or that the narrator will not be welcome. In any case, not having that reunion waiting in
the future upsets the narrator badly.
The narrator then shrieks for the bird
to leave and take its "beak from out [his] heart" (that is, to stop deeply upsetting
him). As it implied before, however, the bird is not willing to leave. It says again,
"Nevermore." Rather than being the distraction the narrator hoped for, the raven
turned out to be the cause of an even more complete despair and hopelessness than the grief he
was feeling at the beginning of the poem.
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