Poe's Life Reflected in His Works
. The tragedies in Poe’s life are reflected in his poem, “The Raven,” and can be predominately seen through the comparison between the loss of his wife, and the narrators loss of Lenore. The apparent tone in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” seemingly represents a very painful condition of mind, an intellect sensitive to madness and the abyss of melancholy brought upon by the death of a beloved lady. The parallelism of Poe’s own personal problems with those of the narrator in “The Raven,” and the repetitive verse by the raven, makes the reader aware of Poe’s prominent tone of melancholy. A strong device for the melancholic tone is Poe’s life experiences. The narrator’s sorrow for the lost Lenore is paralleled with Poe’s own grief regarding the death of his wife. Confined in the chamber are memories of her who had frequented it. These ghostly recollections bring out a state of eager anticipation in the reader to know and be relieved of the bewilderment that the narrator and consequently Poe himself are experiencing; the narrator ponders whether he will see his wife in the afterlife. After Virginnia’s lingering death, Poe tried to relieve his grief by drinking. A parallelism is formed in “The Raven” between the condescending actions of the raven towards the narrator and the taunting of alcohol towards Poe. The raven condescends that Poe will never see his lost love again when uttering, “forget this lost Lenore,” in line 84. Alcohol taunts Poe into ceaseless depression and caused him to have a life-long problem with alcoholism, which eventually led to his death. In a similar manner to which alcohol explored Poe’s inner devastation, the raven brings out the narrator’s innermost fears that he will never see his Lenore again. The articulation of language through the use of the raven and it’s refrain is also utilized to produce the melancholic tone in “The Raven.” In the poem it is important that the answers to the questions are already known, to illustrate the self-torture