A Raven for a Dove: What Poe Missed

What bursts through gloom like a ray of white light and smashes down barriers as though they were paper?

It’s what Poe’s narrator longed for in his famous poem “The Raven”, though he didn’t know it.

The answer, of course, is Christ. Jesus Christ barges into the darkest places in a Christian’s heart to address misplaced longings and soothe the deepest insecurities.

Longing and insecure aptly describe Poe’s emotional state when he wrote “The Raven” in 1845.

As you may have guessed, we finally reached the Romantic Era of the early 1800s in my Worldview English classroom just before Christmas break.

I’m always excited to introduce “The Raven”, dripping with moody adjectives, languid rhythm, and classical allusions. Poe’s words seem to slide off the page and hang in the air, much like a foreboding raven hovers above the narrator’s doorway in the poem.

As the poem’s story unfolds, a huge bird enters the narrator’s bedroom uninvited at a time when he is grieving the loss of his life’s greatest love, a maiden named Lenore.

Poe himself lost the three people he loved most, and who loved him best in return: his mother when he was just three-years-old, a mother-figure in his adolescence, and later his beloved, twenty-four-year-old wife. Death by tuberculosis in the nineteenth century was bloody and terrifying: its victims slowly shrank to skeletal forms of themselves and finally suffocated. It’s easy to surmise that Poe projects his own sorrow, bordering on madness, onto his narrator and transforms his unremitting grief into the symbol of his poem’s raven.

As tension mounts stanza by stanza, the narrator asks the raven a succession of questions about when it will leave him alone. Each time, the raven’s answer is NEVERMORE. By the final stanza, it’s clear to the narrator that he will be crushed by despair throughout eternity.

He feels no hope for stability in this life or the next.

The narrator, like Poe, had placed all his hope for happiness, stability, and fulfillment in an earthly relationship. When the object of his hope is taken from him, his grief becomes his obsession, and he is consumed by it.

The poem aptly frames the human condition. Without Christ, our losses sink us into depression or point us toward some method of numbness for relief. Whether relief is sought in busyness, other relationships, or substances, these strategies never assuage and cannot satisfy.

Apart from Christ, NEVERMORE is the answer to mankind’s questions about when suffering will end.

Poe’s “The Raven” is a photo-negative of the Christian’s hope and a picture of our joy. It’s a clear view of what Christ has rescued us from. For those who put their hope in Jesus Christ, nevermore is the answer to a different set questions!

When will our sins be held against us? Psalm 103:12

NEVERMORE

When will we be separated from the love of Christ? Romans 8:35

NEVERMORE

Will we experience sickness and pain in eternity? Isaiah 53:4

NEVERMORE

When will we shed a tear in eternity? Revelations 21:4

NEVERMORE

Thank you, Lord Jesus, for coming to earth to live a perfect life, die the death we deserve to trade your righteousness for our sinfulness and our griefs for hope and joy. Thank you for trading the raven for a dove!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!