Edgar Allan Poe - The Raven (1845)
Poem – read as an app on the iPhone, May 2011
- 4 nods out of 5 -
The Worm’s first introduction to The Raven – perhaps like many others of a recent generation – was via The Simpsons Halloween Special of the early 1990s. Insanity strikes the cartoon yellowness of Homer as the sniping bird of Bart looms into his chambers in a surprisingly well directed segment.
The poem’s origins, however, lays well before the television age. Written by the very much esteemed Edgar Allan Poe in the 1840s, the poem has been a stable of school classes for decades upon decades. It narrates the titular raven descending upon an abandoned lover, his cries of ‘Nevermore’ slowly driving the lover insane.
Poe crafts this fall into madness with a wonderful pattern of prose and rhyme; the poem – like all good poems should do – rolls off both the tongue and the eye. As the poem’s climax displays:
‘And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted - nevermore!’
The Raven is a popular classic and will continue to be so, remaining in the consciousness of, chiefly, the American nation (as parodies and tributes such as The Simpsons episode show). Read in one sitting, and read for scot-free upon the internet, there can be no excuse for ignoring Poe’s creation. Go out and Google The Raven today.
Read it today right here:
http://www.heise.de/ix/raven/Literature/Lore/TheRaven.html
