Text: Launcelot, “The Raven,” Newcastle Weekly Chronicle (New Castle-Upon-Tyne, UK), whole no. 6,548, January 16, 1890, p. 10, col. 6

[page 10, column 6, continued:]

“The Raven,” Poe's chef d'œuvre, was first published in Evening Mirror on January 29, 1845, and created quite a sensation throughout the United States and Great Britain. Whence Poe derived the idea of “The Raven a much-mooted point. In a letter to a correspondent, Poe says is true that in several ways, you say, lamp might have thrown the bird's shadow on the floor. My conception was that of the bracket candelabrum affixed against the wall, high up above the dens and bust, is often seen in the English palaces, and even in some the better houses of New York.” The late Buchanan Reid, however, informed the late Robert Browning that Poe described to him the whole process of the construction his poem, and declared that the suggestion of it lay wholly in a line from “Lady Geraldine's Courtship”: —

It is evident that Poe derived certain hints, unconsciously otherwise, from Mrs. Browning, as the parallel line above testifies

It is strange that none of your correspondents have touched upon what without doubt, be called the germ of “The Raven.” In the year 1843, Poe was a contributor to the New Mirror, and in the issue October 14th there appeared some verses entitled “Isadore,” by Mr. Albert Pike, a well-known litterateur. Mr. N. P. Wilks [[Willis]], in some introductory remarks, says: “We do not understand why we should not tell what we chance to know — that these lines were written after sitting up late at study — the thought of losing her who slept near him at his toil having suddenly crossed his mind in the stillness of midnight.” This is a most remarkable coincidence, for both Poe and Pike write poem lamenting a lost love, when, in point of fact, neither one nor the other had lost either his “Isadore” or his “Lenore,” save in imagination. Far more important, however, than the subject of his verse, as he suggests, was the effect to be obtained from the refrain, and in Mr. Pike's composition the most distinctive feature is the refrain of “Forever, Isadore,” with which each stanza concludes. A still more remarkable coincidence follows: In his search for a suitable refrain, Poe would have his to-be-mystified readers believe that he was irresistibly impelled to select the word “Nevermore.” Evidently there are plenty of equally eligible words in the English language — words embodying the long sonorous o in connexion with r as the most producible consonant; but perusal of Mr. Pike's poem rendered research needless, for not only does the refrain contain the antithetic word to “never,” and end with the “ore” syllable, but in one line are found the words “never,” and “more,” and in others the words “no more,” “evermore,” and “for evermore” — quite sufficient, all must admit, for analytic mind of Poe. The transmutation of the name from Isadore to Lenore needs no comment. The following stanzas from Mr. Pike's poem may be cited with advantage: —

But Isadore contains no allusion to the “ghastly, grim, and ancient Raven,” unless its “melancholy burden” be shadowed forth by the melancholy strain of “the mocking bird.” Whence, then, did Poe import his sable auxiliary, the pretext, as he tells us, for natural repetition of the refrain? “Naturally, a parrot, in the first instance, suggested itself,” he remarks, and, a favourite work with him was Gresset's chef d’œuvre, is not improbable that reminiscence of “Ver-Vert” — not “Vert-Vert,” as many persist in miscalling that immortal bird — may have given him the first hint, that it was in “Barnaby Rudge” he finally found the needed fowl seems clear to us. Poe had called attention to certain points he deemed Dickens had failed to make; the raven therein, for instance, he considered, “might have been made more than we now see it, a portion of conception of the fantastic Barnaby. Its croakings might have been prophetically heard in the course of the that drama. Its character might have performed, in regard to the idol, much the same part as does, in music, the accompaniment in respect to the air.” Here, indeed, beyond and question, is seen shadowed forth the poet's own raven and its duty. With the Editor's permission, I should like to conclude these notes, which are taken from the latest most complete “Biography of Poe,” by Ingram, with a quotation from Professor Henry E. Shepherd: —

“No poem in our language presents a more graceful grouping of metrical appliance and devices. The power of peculiar letters is evolved with a magnificent touch; the sonorous melody of the liquids is a characteristic feature, not only of the refrain, but throughout the compass of the poem, their linked sweetness long drawn out’ falls with a mellow cadence, displaying the poet's mastery of those mysterious harmonies which lie at the basis of human speech. The alliteration of the Norse minstrel and the Saxon bard, the continuity of the rhythms illustrating Milton's ideal of true musical delight, in which the sense is variously drawn out from one verse the power of sustained interest and graphic delineation, are some of the features that place the ‘Raven’ foremost among the creations of poetic art in age and in our land.”

LAUNCELOT, Birmingham,

The discussion of this subject must now come.

EDITOR