By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,
'Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,' I said, 'art sure no
craven,
Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore-
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore?'
Quoth the Raven- 'Nevermore.'
Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,
Though its answer little meaning- little relevancy bore;
For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being
Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door-
Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door,
With such name as 'Nevermore.'
The effect of the denouement being thus provided for, I immediately drop the fantastic for a tone
of the most profound seriousness- this tone commencing in the stanza directly following the one
last quoted, with the line,
But the Raven, sitting lonely on that placid bust, spoke only, etc.
From this epoch the lover no longer jests- no longer sees anything even of the fantastic in the
Raven's demeanour. He speaks of him as a 'grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of
yore,' and feels the 'fiery eyes' burning into his 'bosom's core.' This revolution of thought, or fancy, on the lover's part, is intended to induce a similar one on the part of the reader- to bring
the mind into a proper frame for the denouement- which is now brought about as rapidly and as
directly as possible.
With the denouement proper- with the Raven's reply, 'Nevermore,' to the lover's final demand if
he shall meet his mistress in another world- the poem, in its obvious phase, that of a simple
narrative, may be said to have its completion. So far, everything is within the limits of the
accountable- of the real. A raven, having learned by rote the single word 'Nevermore,' and
having escaped from the custody of its owner, is driven at midnight, through the violence of a
storm, to seek admission at a window from which a light still gleams- the chamber-window of a
student, occupied half in poring over a volume, half in dreaming of a beloved mistress deceased.
The casement being thrown open at the fluttering of the bird's wings, the bird itself perches on
the most convenient seat out of the immediate reach of the student, who amused by the incident
and the oddity of the visitor's demeanour, demands of it, in jest and without looking for a reply,
its name. The raven addressed, answers with its customary word, 'Nevermore'- a word which
finds immediate echo in the melancholy heart of the student, who, giving utterance aloud to
certain thoughts suggested by the occasion, is again startled by the fowl's repetition of
'Nevermore.' The student now guesses the state of the case, but is impelled, as I have before
explained, by the human thirst for self-torture, and in part by superstition, to propound such
queries to the bird as will bring him, the lover, the most of the luxury of sorrow, through the
anticipated answer, 'Nevermore.' With the indulgence, to the extreme, of this self-torture, the
narration, in what I have termed its first or obvious phase, has a natural termination, and so far
there has been no overstepping of the limits of the real.
But in subjects so handled, however skillfully, or with however vivid an array of incident, there
is always a certain hardness or nakedness which repels the artistical eye. Two things are
invariably required- first, some amount of complexity, or more properly, adaptation; and,
secondly, some amount of suggestiveness- some under-current, however indefinite, of meaning.
It is this latter, in especial, which imparts to a work of art so much of that richness (to borrow
from colloquy a forcible term), which we are too fond of confounding with the ideal. It is the
excess of the suggested meaning- it is the rendering this the upper instead of the under-current of
the theme- which turns into prose (and that of the very flattest kind), the so-called poetry of the
so-called transcendentalists.
