The wedding of the most handsomest couple in town. The superstitious old womans story about what happened at the funeral. When Hooper leaned over the corpse, the veil was lifted enough that the dead woman saw his face and shuddered even though she was dead. Poe leaves unclear whether the Raven is telling the narrator the truth or giving voice to the narrator’s own anxieties about having lost Lenore for good. The black veil was considered to be this at the young ladys funeral. After the Raven arrives, cutting short the narrator’s sense that Lenore might be visiting as a ghost and answering his hopeful questions about Gilead with only the repeated “Nevermore,” the narrator resigns himself to believing that he will never encounter Lenore again. Hooper continues to wear his veil when on-duty and off, even as he officiates weddings and directs funerals, and refuses to remove it on his death bed. In “The Raven,” however, the narrator ultimately takes a gloomier view. In “Lenore,” another of Poe’s poems featuring a deceased woman named Lenore, the narrator, confronted with the loss of his wife, reassures himself with the prospect that he will see her again in heaven.
In either case, the narrator’s desperate desire to be reunited with Lenore in some way is obvious.
Following the Raven’s arrival, he eventually asks the bird if there is “balm in Gilead,” implying a hope that he might see Lenore once more in heaven. In either case, his reaction to the death of a loved one is rather typical: to try to escape the pain of it, or to attempt to deny death.īefore the Raven’s arrival, the narrator hears a knocking at the door of his room, and after finding no one there calls “ Lenore?” into the darkness, as if sensing or hoping she has returned to him.
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One might also interpret the narrator’s reading of books of “forgotten lore” to indicate that he is looking for arcane knowledge about how to reverse death. One might read this as an effort to distract himself and thereby escape the pain of the death of a loved one. He portrays himself as trying to find “surcease of sorrow” by reading his books. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one: ). More specifically, this poem explores the effects of death on the living, such as grief, mourning, and memories of the deceased, as well as a question that so often torments those who have lost loved ones to death: whether there is an afterlife in which they will be reunited with the dead.Īt the beginning of the poem, the narrator is mourning alone in a dark, cheerless room. The The Minister’s Black Veil quotes below are all either spoken by Elizabeth or refer to Elizabeth. As with many other of Poe’s works, “The Raven” explores death.