The Raven as Lenore

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,

Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven is one of the great poetical works of Western Civilization. I’ve argued before for an esoteric reading of The Raven which has been heretofore unfortunately underdeveloped. The unnamed narrator is wearily pondering at that witching hour of midnight a “curious volume” of forgotten lore. As he nods but with no intention of sleep, there is suddenly a tapping. The Raven, published in 1845, was birthed in that tempestuous 1840’s decade in which Spiritualism – and “spirit knocking” – raged to prominence in the antebellum United States, and one need only consider as grimoire the narrator’s curious volume for a very different reading to effervesce. Poe was famously well read, and I choose to believe he knew and was influenced by Matthew Lewis’s diabolical The Monk. The Monk is, well was when formerly people read such things, criticized by the more pious for its peri-enlightenment skeptical portrayal of religion, and yet Lewis merely strips the Faust legend of saccharine poignance. The legend bit because Satan was very, very honest: “I’ll give you everything now, but I will take your soul for eternity.” It is Lewis, of all people, who asks the actually orthodox question, “why the hell would you ever trust the devil?” The monk, not exactly orthodox, is cheated through Satan’s duplicity even out of his “everything now,” and the demons writhe. The house always wins; and, in this valley of tears, it is still to some extent the Prince of this World’s house. Poe’s unnamed narrator is playing the devil’s game, no matter how casually he may thumb the spell book’s pages in that bleak December midnight. The narrator conjures with the devil his lost Lenore, and she dutifully arrives as the black and blackening Raven. “But tell me, oh, please tell me that you are in heaven?” “Nevermore!” Nevermore implies once was. Was Lenore in heaven until the narrator conjured her? Does judgment occur in heaven such that “all go to heaven” be yet another devilish trick? The narrator’s despair is that, should he go to heaven, Lenore will not be there. “Nevermore!” And if he stays with his beloved – “And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting” – he will never go to heaven. “Nevermore!” He, like the monk, makes his choice. Never play with the Devil.