Analysis of Ulalume and The Raven

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Hi

Could you please send me an analysis of Edgar Allen Poe's poems Ulalume and The Raven!!!

Thankyou Sam Hicks

-- Anonymous, May 29, 2002

Answers

Hi, Could you please send me an analysis of "The Raven" from Edgar A. Poe. Especially about sounds.

Thanks a lot

-- Anonymous, November 15, 2002


Both Ulalume and The Raven deal with A. man's tendency to dwell on traumatic experience, and B. Man's hopeless search for pure beauty to bring himself out of the abyss. In Ulalume, we meet a man who searches for beauty by wandering through the forest, alone with his thoughts. He sees a beautiful star and decides to follow it, because he foolishly and naively thinks that its beauty will bring him happiness, even though Psyche, his rationality, warns him against it. He pursues it anyway, which only leads him to death and despair and reminds him that he will never find happiness searching for this pure beauty. Also, the man subconsciously wanders into the same region in which he buried his wife, which illustrates Poe's recurrent theme of perverse fixation with repressed trauma. There is always the possiblity that the narrator is not telling the whole truth, that he might well have killed his wife. This is also a possibility for The Raven, in which a man encounters an irrational beast that can purely arbitrarily speak one word: "nevermore." Knowing that the bird can only speak this word, the narrator already knows the answer to every question he asks the raven, and is simply torturing himself by dwelling on depressing facts of his life. Also, he feels that the only way he can find happiness is with the angelic beauty of Lenore, which is a shallow and ultimately hopeless aspiration. These two poems are very alike.

-- Anonymous, October 06, 2004

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