Poe makes use of several literary devices in ‘The Raven.’These include but are not limited to repetition, alliteration, and caesura. The latter is a formal device, one that occurs when the poet inserts a pause, whether through meter or punctuation, into the middle of a line. For example, line three of the first stanza. It reads: “While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping.” There are numerous other examples, for instance, line three of the second stanza which reads: “Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow.”

The Raven‘by Edgar Allan Poe ( Bio | Poems) is a dark and mysterious poem in which the speaker converses with a raven. Alone’– a haunting poem that touches on many of Poe’s favorite themes. It was inspired by the death of Poe’s foster mother. Edgar Allan Poe makes use of many poetic devices in "The Raven" to create a memorable and moving piece of writing. Below we discuss seven of the most important of these devices and how they contribute to the poem. Fairchild stared. All he could think to say was, ‘I should have thought you had already made enough money out of slavery.’

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The first stanza of Poe’s ‘ The Raven‘ exposes a story that the reader knows will be full of drama. The imagery in just this stanza alone gives the reader a very good idea that the story about to unfold is not a happy one.

Then why have I heard of it from five different people?’ Manners took a step closer. ‘They say you had her in the organ loft of Trinity chapel, while the choir were rehearsing.’ The man reflects aloud that the bird will leave him soon as all the people he cared about have left him. When the raven replies "nevermore," the man takes it as the bird agreeing with him, although it's unclear if the raven actually understands what the man is saying or is just speaking the one word it knows. The man is amused by how serious the raven looks, and he begins talking to the raven; however, the bird can only reply by croaking "nevermore."Now things get pretty heated as he starts to scream at the bird, calling it a prophet and a thing of evil. He doesn’t know what to think of the bird. Did Satan (the tempter) send this bird his way, or did a storm push this bird his way? He continues and describes that even through his shouting, the raven is unmoved/unbothered even though it is alone in his company. He calls his home a desert land, haunted and full of horror and asks the raven if there is possible hope of any good or peace in the future, and of course, the raven says: nevermore. There is also quite a bit of internal rhyme within the poem, such as the line "But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token," where "unbroken" rhymes with "token." The Raven’by Edgar Allan Poe ( Bio | Poems) is a ballad made up of eighteen six-line stanzas. Throughout, the poet uses trochaic octameter, a very distinctive metrical form. He uses the first-person point of view throughout and a very consistent rhyme scheme of ABCBBB. There are a large number of words that use the same ending, for example, the “ore” in “Lenore” and “Nevermore.” Epistrophe is also present, or the repetition of the same word at the end of multiple lines.

Many readers would be well-versed in the books and stories alluded to in the poem, and they would have understood the references without Poe having to explicitly explain where each was derived from. Doing so would have broken the tension and mood of the poem, so Poe is able to simply allude to them.

Manners jerked on the ground. Mungo looked down at him and for a second, his eyes flashed with an anger so fierce, anyone who saw it would have feared for Manners’ life. In that moment, you could not doubt that Mungo was capable of anything.