The Raven

Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven is memorable for many different elements in its mood, images, and rhyming. One of the techniques Poe uses is extreme amounts of repetition, the simplest form being the raven's spoken word, 'Nevermore.' This shows the unavoidable desperation in the narrator, as he asks the raven over and over if things will ever get better in his life. This is just the icing on the cake, though, because Poe uses many other different kinds of repetition in many different ways in this poem.

The fourth and fifth lines end the same in every stanza, sometimes repeating up to the last six words (3rd stanza and 16th stanza). This helps to build tension within each stanza, as the last line is always shorter. This turns it into a kind of conclusion, as many stanzas build a climax with the narrator posing questions and the raven unhesitatingly rejecting them in the 6th line. Poe creates suspense within each stanza, building it up and bringing it back down.

The rhyming scheme is repetitive too, both within the context of each stanza and over the whole poem. The second, fourth, fifth and sixth lines end with a word that rhymes with 'door,' and Poe never lets off or changes this scheme. As the poem continues, it's like a nail is being driven home over and over, just as unrelenting as the raven itself.

Other techniques are used too, especially alliteration. Lines like "Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before," repeat the same sounds, and even the same words, over and over. Words are repeated multiple times in the same sentence for emphasis on several occasions. Poe repeats punctuation too: he uses five exclamation marks in the second to last stanza. All of these layers of repetition add up to create an unusual level of tension and make the poem that much more creepy. It seems like such a strange way to build up stress and drama in a poem, and it's definitely not something that is used often at the level Poe uses it, but somehow it works out.