“The Raven” Text Analysis
4. Make Inferences Review the inferences you made as you read. What conclusions
did you draw about the speaker and his emotional state?
In “The Raven,” the speaker is a person who is mourning the death of Lenore, who is his
beloved. He is alone in his house on a cold December midnight, trying to distract himself
from his thoughts of her. His desperation leads him to emotional extremes, from sadness to
near insanity and finally to depression once the Raven pronounces that he and Lenore will be
apart forever. The Raven overthrows the narrator’s rational mind, as shown by that he is
talking to it, for example in lines 45-47 “‘Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,’ I said,
‘art sure no craven, Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore— Tell
me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!’”. Therefore, the speaker’s
emotional state is very unstable since he is desperate, hysterical, and hopeless.
7. Evaluate Sound Devices Reread lines 79–84. Identify the rhymes and other sound
devices used in this stanza, and give examples of each technique. Which of these
devices do you find most compelling or effective? Explain your answer.
The sound devices used in this stanza include alliterations, rhymes, repetitions, and
onomatopoeias. The alliterations include “tinkled”-“tufted” and “foot”-“falls”-“floor” (line
80); the rhymes include “denser”-“censer” (line 79) and “floor”-“Lenore”-“Nevermore” (lines
80, 82, 84); the repetitions include “respite” (line 82) and “quaff” (line 83); finally, the
onomatopoeias include “tinkled” (line 80) and “quaff” (line 83). In my opinion, the rhymes in
this stanza are the most compelling and effective because they make the poem musical and
memorizable, and they also help build up the poem’s gloomy tone.