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Poe makes use of several literary devices in ‘The Raven.’These include but are not limited to repetition, alliteration, and caesura. The latter is a formal device, one that occurs when the poet inserts a pause, whether through meter or punctuation, into the middle of a line. For example, line three of the first stanza. It reads: “While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping.” There are numerous other examples, for instance, line three of the second stanza which reads: “Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow.” You have heard a great deal this evening about the supposed evils of slavery. But has anyone here ever been to the great tobacco plantations of Virginia, or the cotton fields of the Mississippi?
We hope you will find Call of the Raven a fascinating exploration of the dying days of the slave trade. It feels like an important contribution to our understanding of a period in history which continues to throw long shadows into the darkest aspects of the human soul. Wilbur Smith & Corban Addison in a letter to the readers As the man continues to converse with the bird, he slowly loses his grip on reality. He moves his chair directly in front of the raven and asks it despairing questions, including whether he and Lenore will be reunited in heaven. Now, instead of being merely amused by the bird, he takes the raven's repeated "nevermore" response as a sign that all his dark thoughts are true. He eventually grows angry and shrieks at the raven, calling it a devil and a thing of evil. Throughout, Poe uses repetition more broadly as well. For example, his use of parallelism in line structure and wording, as well as punctuation. He also maintains a very repetitive rhythm throughout the poem with his meter and rhyme scheme. He leaned on the despatch box, as comfortable as if he were leaning on the mantelpiece of his drawing room enjoying a cigar.And that is a very fine and noble profession,’ Mungo agreed. ‘But if you ever actually succeeded in exterminating the slave trade, you would be out of a job. So it is in your interest to see that slavery endures.’ An allusion is an indirect reference to something, and Poe makes multiple allusions in "The Raven." Some key ones include: Alliteration is one kind of repetition that’s used in ‘The Raven.’It occurs when the poet repeats the same consonant sound at the beginning of multiple words. For example, “weak and weary” in the first line of the poem and “soul” and “stronger” in the first line of the fourth stanza. It was Chapman, the college porter. If he was surprised to see Mungo with a poker raised like a weapon, Fairchild wrestling him for it and Manners kneeling helpless at his feet, he made no comment. Chapman had known Mungo since he arrived three years ago, and nothing the undergraduate did could surprise him.
Call of the Raven is the prequel to Wilbur Smith's bestselling novel, A Falcon Flies (1980), part of the Ballantyne Series. Many readers would be well-versed in the books and stories alluded to in the poem, and they would have understood the references without Poe having to explicitly explain where each was derived from. Doing so would have broken the tension and mood of the poem, so Poe is able to simply allude to them.
The poem ends with the raven still sitting on the bust of Pallas and the narrator, seemingly defeated by his grief and madness, declaring that his soul shall be lifted "nevermore." When he comes to the actual realization that he has lost her physical body forever, he begins to panic. He can literally smell the sweetness of freedom from these feelings that he felt God was allowing him. He thought that it was a divine message to forget Lenore, and he wants to accept; he wants out and away from his mess of feelings, especially from the certainty the grief keeps claiming that it will last forever. He tries to force himself to let it go, but then the raven speaks. His grief overpowers him, and he still claims that he will never forget her.
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