The Raven

The Raven:

The opening lines identify the speaker as someone who feels tired and weak but is still awake in the middle of the night. He passes the time by reading a strange book of ancient knowledge.

The speaker tells of becoming more tired and beginning to doze but being wakened by a sound that he assumes is a quiet knock. Internal rhymes of "napping," "tapping," and "rapping" along with repetition of these last two words, create a musical effect. This effect is also produced by alliteration...

Near the end of this poem, when the fear of the poem's speaker has reached a level of near insanity, he shouts "Leave my loneliness unbroken!" In one sense, this could just be an emotional outburst, like the lines that lead up to it, but the interesting thing about this particular line is that the speaker, in his terror, is for once reflecting upon himself. This, and the line's location at the climax of the poem, indicates to us that "my loneliness" is not just another expression that he shrieks: it is the key, the secret that he has been trying to guard all along. Throughout the poem, we see the speaker being drawn out of his isolation by the raven and the one word that it speaks. Once the bird enters..... Then the bird quickly angers the man. Then the raven only says one word; Nevermore.

Setting:

The man’s chamber

Theme:

Sadness

Lose

Loneliness

Insanity

The Raven comparison:

The differences are that, first the Simpsons is a cartoon, while the Original poem is a written piece. The other differences are that Homer gets angrier faster in the Simpsons. Other than that everything is basically the same. The words, the dialougue. Also the costume isn't specified in the poem but is shown in the Simpsons.