Edgar Allan Poe's Poem, The Raven

This month we were reading the extraordinary poem The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe.The poem was written on January 29, 1845.Edgar Poe was born in Boston on January 19, 1809, he was the second child of the English actress Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe and actor David Poe, Jr.He had an older brother William Henry Leonard Poe, and a younger sister Rosalie Poe. His father abandoned their family in 1810, and his mother died a year later from pulmonary tuberculosis. Poe was then taken into the home of John Allan, who lived in Richmond, Virginia. The Allens were his foster family and gave him the name "Edgar Allan Poe", but they never formally adopted him.The family sailed to Britain in 1815, and Poe attended the grammar school for a short period of time in Irvine, Scotland before rejoining the family in London in 1816. He stayed at a boarding school in
Metaphor is used multiple times throughout the poem to personify the raven,when the raven first appears, the narrator says he sat "with mien of lord or lady," which automatically lets the reader know that there is something unique about this bird.One simile in the poem is "Suddenly there came a tapping, As of someone gently rapping".That is a simile using the word "as" to compare tapping and gentle rapping. personification is used when he describes his soul floating on the floor, and shall be lifted nevermore. He became frightened by the raven tapping at his chamber door and described his fear like he soul escaping his body. In the Raven the hyperbole is when he procedes to scare himself by almost having a conversation with himself.Onomatopoeic words such as tapping and rapping are used to build up the tension felt by the protagonist in Poe's