Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”

This is the first time the bird speaks. At midnight, in the bleak December, the narrator is reading to forget his lost Lenore when he hears a tapping. He opens the door: only darkness, and his own whisper, “Lenore!” He flings open the shutter, and in steps “a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore”, which perches on a bust of Pallas above his chamber door. Amused by its grave decorum, the narrator asks its “lordly name” on “the Night’s Plutonian shore”. At first the answer seems to have little meaning; but the Raven will say nothing else, and each new question turns the word into a verdict of despair.

Poe published “The Raven” in January 1845, and it made him famous almost overnight. In a later essay, “The Philosophy of Composition”, he claimed to have built the poem methodically, choosing the refrain for its sound, and a raven rather than a parrot as a talking creature more in keeping with the melancholy tone.

The Raven, refrain, 1845

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