The Raven - Edgar Allan Poe - ★★★★.¼

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AUTHOR: Edgar Allan Poe
GENRE: Classic, Poetry.
RATING: 4.25 stars.

In a Nutshell: The audio version helped me crack a classic poem! Enjoyed it way more than I expected. (This isn’t an insult to Poe, but an honest comment about my – Ahem! – outstanding poetic sensibilities.)


I am not a staunch fan of verse. This logical head much prefers to read stories in prose then in poem form. I do love a few poems, but I am very much a traditionalist in my choices. Free verse makes my head spin. Rhymes and repetitions make a poem a “poem’ in my eyes.

‘The Raven’ was not at all on my reading radar. To be honest, I have attempted it twice in the last couple of years, but my brain is so anti-verse that the moment it sees lengthy poems, it goes a-wandering after the threshold limit is crossed. Any poem that extends beyond 15-20 lines gives me palpitations. However, a retelling based on this poem is present in the anthology I am currently reading, and I like to be familiar with the source material when I read retellings. Hence the brave decision of checking this out.

When I looked for a free version online (the poem is in the public domain, being originally published in January 1845), I stumbled upon Wikipedia, which, to my surprise and relief, featured an audio recording of this poem. I thus decided to try immersion reading - audio in the ears and text in front of the eyes - to coerce my brain into cooperating, and this idea worked brilliantly!

The poem is made up of 18 stanzas of six lines each. Generally, the meter is trochaic octameter—eight trochaic feet per line, each foot having one stressed syllable followed by one unstressed syllable. (The poetic smartness evident in this para should immediately make you realise that I didn’t write it. I copied it from Wiki so that I remember in future what a long poem I read! 😛)

Not being aware of the above poetic details while reading the work, all I knew was that I enjoyed the narrative poem tremendously. The rhythm of the words, the pattern of the rhymes, the stress on maintaining the meter, the increasing chaos of the narrator’s mind – each factor contributed in making my experience a memorable one.

Credit also goes to whoever was narrating it on the Wiki page. I don’t know how to detect the narrator on the Wikipedia recording, but he was amazing! What an excellent rendering of this poem, with a spirited reading and the right word stresses in perfect rhythm! 5 stars to his performance. 

If you are afraid to try poems and want to check this out on audio, I’d certainly recommend the Wiki version. It’s just 7 minutes long – an added bonus.

My heart: Have I ever felt a poem hit so deep within my core?

My brain: Never before!

My heart: Will I attempt in future, without the audio, lengthy poems of yore?

My brain: Nevermore!

My heart: Will I now rush to read such works like a bull towards a matador?

My brain: You’re kidding, right?


Here’s the Wiki page, for the poem, the analysis, and the recording!


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