The Raven

The story unfolds with a grieving narrator mourning the death of his beloved Lenore. Late at night he hears a tapping at his chamber door and eventually encounters a raven which perches upon a bust of Pallas. The bird's only utterance Nevermore becomes a refrain that drives the narrator to the edge of madness as he interprets it as an omen of eternal sorrow and the impossibility of reuniting with Lenore in the afterlife. Through the symbolic raven and the narrator's descent into despair Poe masterfully captures the depths of human anguish and the inevitability of mortality solidifying the poem's place as a masterpiece of Gothic literature.