O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Još u djetinjstvu ja ne bejah
drugima sličan-niti gledah
drugima slično-nije htjela
duša da pije sa opšteg vrela-
S izvora istog nisam pio
ni svoju tugu-zanos čio
ne mogah srcu svom da dam-
i sve što voleh-voleh sam

My English teacher asked for my favorite poem at school. And, I gave her this book ;)

Creo que esto lo leí dentro del tomote de "Obras completas" que tengo, pero tendría que corroborar bien el contenido. Y si en algún momento me lo puedo releer, mejor todavía.

Not wild about poetry, not wild about horror but I love, love love these poems. I'm becoming a big Edgar Allan Poe fan completely by accident.

Some poems are really hard for me to understand unless I sit down, reread the lines twice and think hard. Though there are some that are beautifully haunting and sad. My favourite poems by him are the ones about his lost loves, those are the ones I delved into and got lost in. For one thing, Poe sure had an uncanny ability to depict pain and suffering. Hell, it seem to seep through the pages. It's obvious this man wrote with passion and feeling.

4.5 ☆

Poetry is not usually my thing, but this is truly sublime.

First published in the New York Evening Mirror in 1845, The Raven, is perhaps one of Poe’s most well-known poems.

A talking raven visits a man tormented by the loss of his love, “the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named Lenore”. The Raven perches upon the man’s chamber door and foretells he will “nevermore” be reunited with his love, not even in death. With each refrain of “nevermore” the protagonist becomes more and more agitated until he finally succumbs to madness.

“And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted - nevermore!"

While the language is old fashioned the poem is easy to read with its nursery rhyme rhythm, and the familiar hark of "nevermore" - but this simplicity is deceptive. Seeded in the tradition of the allegoric (and the epic) The Raven is ambiguous in the telling. Was the man in fact visited by a talking bird, or had he already begun a slow decent into madness, the bird merely being a manifestation caused by his deep-seated grief?

I do have a secret though, one of my favorite adaptations of this poem was in The Simpsons first Halloween special Treehouse of Horror I, narrated by James Earl Jones. Homer portrays the grief-stricken lead, Marge as Lenore and Bart the antagonistic Raven. Nice to see popular culture references to this classic.

3.5

Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”

I have been working my way through most of the audio renditions of "The Raven" I can lay hands on, and I probably should have been reviewing as I went, because I am going to have to relisten to most of them to remember what I thought about them all. Today I decided to find out what the big deal is about BJ Harrison, who narrates really quite a lot of classics from (naturally) The Classic Tales Podcast. Of course, you can't do things like this on Goodreads in a clear fashion, since every possible collected volume that mentions 'The Raven and Other Poems' is mashed together in one entry regardless of which poems are involved, so consider the star rating to be for the poems themselves. (Poe is brilliant but his romantic meditations on Death do hit snags from time to time.)

Harrison's narration I would put at an even three stars. I can definitely see his charms; he enunciates beautifully and his performance of the particular poems does not obscure any detail, indeed was remarkably clear. But he is unfortunately a really bland narrator for the most part, and falls into the same rhythm for almost all of the poems in the book, which makes the similar subjects of this collection begin to blur together, and I lost the thread a couple of times and had to go read a copy to see what the gist of the verse was supposed to be. Also, he emphasizes the most comic moments in the poems, which is absolutely great with Poe, but since his dramatic side isn't quite able to carry the same weight, the overall effect is a little wacky. Overall, I expect his prose narration will be better, and I do have some other titles to try from him. This is not at all a bad listen, but I wouldn't recommend it as your go-to for a reading of these poems.

Some notes on the individual poems for my own happiness:

"The Raven"
But the Raven still beguiling all my fancy into smiling,
Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust and door;
Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore—
What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore
Meant in croaking “Nevermore.”

Here, exactly is what I mean by the comical. Poe's narrator grabs a chair and plops himself down in front of the giant corvid sitting on Athena above his door and starts daydreaming. But Harrison doesn't pause for the daydreaming, instead plowing right into the next stanza where the narrator starts talking to the bird, giving the overall impression of a guy who just grabs a chair, has a seat, and starts interrogating a bird. (In fairness, he absolutely does do that; there's just some brooding in there first.) It's hilarious and I love it. The atmosphere never really recovers, though, and even Lenore can't save it. (STILL one of the better renditions of the poem I have listened to this year, which should give you some idea of how ham most narrators go with this work.)

"The Sleeper"
Oh, lady dear, hast thou no fear?
Why and what art thou dreaming here?
Sure thou art come o’er far-off seas,
A wonder to these garden trees!
Strange is thy pallor! strange thy dress!
Strange, above all, thy length of tress,
And this all solemn silentness!

Another hilarious moment; Harrison's emphasis falls solidly on "Strange, above all, thy length of tress," which, let's say, is NOT the thing that would make me swoon for Irene. I find myself wondering if we have some kind of Bayonetta situation going on here? In the end, Poe's image of the Irene as a child throwing stones against a family crypt is still magnificently haunting.

"Bridal Ballad"
Lo! the ring is on my hand,
And the wreath is on my brow —
Satins and jewels grand,
And many a rood of land,
Are all at my command,
And I must be happy now!

He does a good job conveying the fake happy of the trapped bride here, but this is also where I really had to start making myself pay attention due to the samesville nature of the reading.

"The City in the Sea"
Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.

Samesville continues, but the brilliant imagery Poe evokes (the city on a still sea lit only by St. Elmo's fire and the waiting flames of hell) cannot be destroyed by a merely average reading.

"Dreams"
But should it be—that dream eternally
Continuing—as dreams have been to me
In my young boyhood—should it thus be given,
’Twere folly still to hope for higher Heaven.
For I have revell’d when the sun was bright
I’ the summer sky, in dreams of living light,
And loveliness,—have left my very heart
In climes of mine imagining, apart
From mine own home, with beings that have been
Of mine own thought—what more could I have seen?

I lost the plot here completely until the end of the poem, and after pondering Poe's breathtaking hereticism, I had to go read the rest of the poem to get the full thought. (Spoiler: even more heretical.) Arguably the poem itself goes on overlong and even the most brilliant narrator would drag on here.

"Eldorado"
Gaily bedight,
A gallant knight,
In sunshine and in shadow,
Had journeyed long,
Singing a song,
In search of Eldorado.

Harrison chooses this fragment to perform full voices for the knight and the shade. Strange choice, but a nice one.

"Annabel Lee"
The angels, not half so happy in Heaven,
Went envying her and me—
Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

"Annabel Lee" is one of my favorites, in which we have the ridiculous setup of the angels of heaven straight up murdering a child bride to destroy her child husband's happiness. The emphasis of "chilling and killing" is really obvious in Harrison's narration and I found it mostly funny. (Again, not that the poem isn't funny. Just, it's not really supposed to be funny on that specific line.)

Anyway, that was my experience of BJ Harrison. I MAY avoid him for poetry in the future, but then again maybe not. He might do better with something besides gothic romance, though. And I am looking forward to hearing his prose. Poe is as wonderful as ever and I will never tire of him; one of the few authors I can reread without fear of disappointment.

The Raven, Annabel Lee; pure genius.

Papá Poe no deja de sorprenderme, pero las tres estrellas son porque simplemente no he encontrado todavía poemas que me deslumbren. Que tiene muy bello vocabulario, que la sonoridad es preciosa, que toca temas góticos y no tan románticos, todo eso sí, sin duda. Que me dan ganas de leer más cosas de Poe, aparte de algunos cuentos sueltos que leí por ahí de él, obvio. Pero, ¿yo sintiéndome a gusto con poemarios? Lejos todavía de ser una realidad. No sé si porque no le encuentro el gusto a ninguna poesía – ninguna, ni los sonetos mejores armados de Shakespeare ni la poesía libre de hoy en día – o si algunos versos se me hicieron medio estirados como para que rimen, o la rima me pareció muy obvia… No sé. El Cuervo estuvo muy bueno, eso sí.