Thanatopsis And The Raven Analysis

“Thanatopsis” did not glorify death. The name, Thanatopsis, Means simply a view of death. This poem never said “take my hand” and it never said to go with death. It said to enjoy life, but not to fear death because Mother Nature will take care of you. “Dust in the Wind,” by Kansas shows that life is short but need to be enjoyed while it last.

It was a symbol of a fresh and hopeful start. The Raven in Poe’s poem is the complete opposite of that dove. His bird represents mourning, disparity, loneliness and death. When we first see the narrator in the poem, he is trying to get lost in a “...quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore”(Line 2), hoping to forget his “...sorrow for the lost Lenore”. The raven was described as from the Night's Plutonian Shore, which refers to the Kingdom of Pluto, the god of the Underworld.

American Romanticism American Romanticism is a concept that developed in the 17th century. Romanticism is all about emotions, the meaning of life, religion, society, the human form, death, and nature. Romanticism is very diverse and complex because each writer interprets the themes differently and each person who reads the poem can see something different and unique. Two famous and influential romantic poets were Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. Although Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman were both romantic poets they interpreted society and death in two completely different ways.

It seems that both Creusa and Achilles appear in the darkness of the night as pale, seemingly glowing figures. These appearances are brief but powerful, like a strong gust of wind. Despite such darkness and brevity, both Creusa and Achilles are not shocked or daunted by the appearance of their loved ones, but instead comforted. In both Homer’s, Odyssey and Vergil’s, Aeneid, the presence of Creusa and Achille, create a link between the living and the dead. Despite Creusa and Achille conflicting views toward death, Odysseus and Aeneas given emotional guidance in coping with death and learning what life is like after

Edgar Allan Poe uses many different literary devices in “ The Raven” to create an overall depressing, eerie, and dark tone. Poe uses a monotone to help emphasize The Raven symbolic representation of death. All of these different literary devices helps him to create logical and methodical appeal. In “ The Raven”, Poe uses alliteration to create a dreary, depressing, methodological feeling. He states “ Nodded, nearly, napping” to get the reader to get in the state of mind of how he was feeling, he gets the reader to empathize his feeling of being alone and depressed.

“One of the Best Poems of Edgar Poe” “The Raven” is written by Edgar Allen Poe in 1845. The speaker of the poem is a depressed man who has lost the woman he loved. The author powerfully creates the gloomy atmosphere and depressing mood of the poem when he begins, “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered/weak and weary” (Poe). The use of internal rhyme and alliteration with “dreary” and “weak and weary” is a principal stylistic feature of the poem. One word to describe the tone of this poem would be “mournful.” The stanzas of the poem have almost mesmeric, hypnotic quality with repetition of rhyme words (Edwards).

In the poem “The Raven” the mood is also sad. In the poem, it says, “From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore—” (10). This line from the text tells us that the reader is sorrow for his lost love, Lenore. Lastly, a piece of evidence from “The Raven” is, “Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door” (101).

Keats’s diction, including “soft incense,” “embalmed darkness,” “each sweet,” and “seasonable month,” encapsulates the sanctuary for which the speaker yearns, and which he projects upon the nightingale’s experience (Nightingale 42, 43, 44). The exclusively serene imagery quickly fades, though, as Keats combines negative and positive language. Keats exposes the speaker’s budding awareness of the impossibility of reaching a painless reality through the line, “Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves” (Nightingale 47). Like the pleasurable images above, Keats’s imagery incorporates the speaker’s desire to escape awareness of mortality around him, but unlike the other lines, the diction acknowledges death. Here the speaker has awareness of the

I took this as his way of saying he would never let go of his love, even in death. Though those two speakers are similar in mourning, the tone in the poems differ. In The Raven, the tone of the poem comes off as scary and ominous. The way Poe uses alliteration, rhyme, and repetition creates the eerie tone. In the beginning line of the poem, the speaker says, “once upon a midnight dreary” (637).

Essentially, in “The Raven,” the allusions that Poe used suggested that he is desperate to forget his grief and guilt. This is presented when Poe states, “Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!” (Poe, 83). Nepenthe refers to the river of forgetfulness, located in the underworld, which allows the drinker to be rid of the memories and emotions that haunt them. Here, Poe begs to drink from nepenthe in order to forget about his sorrow. Divergently, in “The Black Cat,” Poe does not want to forget about his pain.