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Symbolism In Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Raven

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The characters in Coleridge’s The Raven and the representatives of the French revolution share a primary noble intention, but the circumstances and selfish human factors do not allow either of them to carry out their noble intentions as they wished. The desire for freedom was corrupted for selfish goals in France, the portrayal of these ideas by implication makes them more striking. The ideas of guilt and restoration are implicit in “The Raven” which were developed by Coleridge and grew out of his observation of the career of the French Revolution. The woodman, cutting the oak tree, committed a crime, which later caused his death in the poem; and the return of the raven to the oak tree symbolizes the idea of the restoration. The French Revolution is not present in the poem, but it throws its great shadow across it. At first, Coleridge appears to be a supporter of the Revolution and an upholder of dissenting views of society and religion. He believes that humanity can be redeemed by political actions. On the contrary, the freedom of …show more content…

Consequently, poets were under the influence of the political events of the time and reacted to them by writing the politically symbolic poetry. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the romantic poets who inserted the political concepts and symbols into some of his poems. Coleridge tended to speak about the interdependence of life and death through symbolic, metaphorical, and allegorical devices, because they offered him the opportunity to show interdependence of nature, man, and God in a very complex way. There could always be found numerous meanings on various levels. Not a straight- forward way of exploring the human existence and its termination was the theme found worthy of going into because Coleridge wanted to go through the haze of the mysterious in order to reach the realm of wisdom in the

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