Poetry
The Raven
Edgar Allan Poe · 1845
Opening lines
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
One December night, a man keeps watch over his books to forget the woman he has lost. There is a knock, and no one is there. A raven enters through the window and perches on the bust of Pallas set above the door. To the first question it answers with one word, a single one, and it is the same for all those that follow. The man understands that the bird can say nothing else, and yet begins to put to it the questions whose answers he most dreads.
Context
The poem appeared on 29 January 1845 in the New York Evening Mirror, while a monthly magazine printed a version signed with a pseudonym, Quarles. It was reprinted at least ten times within a few weeks, imitated and parodied, and its author gained national fame from it, along with the nickname of the bird. The following year he published an essay in which he claims to have built these verses with the rigour of a mathematical problem, starting from the effect to be produced; almost no one has taken this account literally.
Who it is for
Eighteen stanzas of six lines, in trochaic metre, with very marked internal rhymes. Stéphane Mallarmé's translation, in prose, gives up rhyme; others have attempted it in verse.
Prizes and reception
Translated by Charles Baudelaire and then by Stéphane Mallarmé, illustrated by Édouard Manet and by Gustave Doré, it was said as early as 1885 to be the most popular lyric poem in the world.
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