Tomorrow we will look at Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven." This is a poem that we will revisit next year in the AP Language class. For now we will merely surface-scratch this crow to examine the literary devices you have learned and that are used in the poem. Click on the raven below to pre-read the poem. In class in your journals you will review "The Raven" and show examples of any literary terms that appear in the poem. Remember, the terms you should have already learned are: Repetition, Alliteration, Allusion, Assonance, Consonance, Invective, Onomatopoeia, Personification, Foreshadowing and Euphemism. Add two more to these: Internal Rhyme and Refrain.


By the way, here's a quick synopsis: During a cold, dark evening in December, a man attempts to find solace from the remembrance of his lost love, Lenore. As he is nearly overcome by slumber, a knock comes at the door. Having first believed the knock to be a result of his dreaming, he finally opens the door to be greeted only by darkness. As he peers into the nigh, he can only say the word "Lenore." Another knock is immediately heard from his window. He throws open the shutter and in steps the raven, which immediately posts itself on a bust of Pallas Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom. The speaker asks it its name, to which the bird replies "Nevermore." "Nevermore," the bird replies again when our humble narrator proclaims that the raven will soon leave him. Intrigued, frightened, he pulls a chair up directly before the bird to more readily decipher the meaning of the bird's single monotonous reply. Melancholy in his thoughts, the speaker's mind turns to Lenore, and how she will never again bless the chair in which he now reposes. Suddenly overcome with grief, he ponders that the raven is intended by God to deliver him from his anguish, but again comes the bird's laconic reply. The speaker viciously rebukes the bird, calling it a "thing of evil," and asks whether there is "balm in Gilead," a biblical reference to respite in a land of suffering. Again, "Nevermore" is the only answer. Shouting maniacally, demanding that the bird take its leave, the narrator attempts to dispatch it back to the "Plutonian shore" of Hell from whence it came. The bird, "the emblem of Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance," replies again "Nevermore," and sits there on the bust of Pallas to this day, ever a torment to the speaker's sanity and soul, a reminder of his lost love. Like Hamlet, another happy ending.