Grief In Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven

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The author John Green once said, “Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.” Grief and anguish over the loss of a loved one is indeed painful, but there is more to it; it pushes us to extreme emotions. Grief by definition is a keen mental suffering or distress over affliction or loss. Everyone will someday lose a loved one and the thought of never able to see them again could result in mental illness. What if you lost your parent or sibling to death? How about losing a very close friend to death? Maybe your mate or spouse? In the gothic poem “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe, readers contemplate on these questions and think of the mental effect grief has on an individual who has lost a loved one. In the poem, the speaker ponders on his …show more content…
The poem starts by saying that the speaker was “weak and weary” his weakness shows he is vulnerable and this increases the chance of hallucinating particularly in his state. His weakness shows that he has been grieving for a while. As he lamented, the thought of losing his wife and and never to see her again made him desperate, “vainly I had sought to borrow from my books surcease of sorrow - sorrow for lost Lenore.” He was lonely and scared “deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering and fearing.” Now, every pin drop, every sound reminded him of Lenore his lost wife “and the only word there spoken was the whispered word, ‘Lenore’ ” even when she was not there. When the bird enters his house, he asks the raven if it had a name or was from the underworld “tell me what thy lordly name is on the night's plutonian shore” and “quoth the raven, ‘nevermore’” indicating that the raven was not visibly there. Also the speakers requests of the Raven, asking it to help him forget Lenore and later on asking the bird to leave him and his thoughts “unbroken,” reveals that he doesn't know what he wants thus he was going insane. Once a person gets so tired from grief, they begin to hallucinate, ask themselves questions and seek answers to their problems. Through the language used in the poem, Edgar Allan Poe, demonstrates that grief can result in mental illness or
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