Skip to main content

Nevermore

By


Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore--
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
"'Tis some visiter," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door--
Only this and nothing more."

Comments

  1. RickJanuary 29, 2010 at 2:14 PM

    Poe didn't publish much poetry and that's okay by me.

    ReplyDelete
  2. James FergusonJanuary 29, 2010 at 3:04 PM

    What, you don't like The Raven!

    ReplyDelete
  3. RickJanuary 29, 2010 at 4:09 PM

    I suspect that question is at least partly facetious.

    The Raven is admirable in its own way. It works as a kind of horror story in verse. The twelve year old boy in me--yes, he's still in there somewhere--also thrills to some of its effects. But when not in a twelve year old boy mode, I find it pretty corny.

    ReplyDelete
  4. RickJanuary 29, 2010 at 4:11 PM

    By the way, that engraving is a little odd. The bird looks more like a seagull than a raven.

    ReplyDelete
  5. James FergusonJanuary 29, 2010 at 4:13 PM

    I'm glad you didn't take my comment seriously. Personally, I prefer The Gold Bug,

    http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/eapoe/bl-eapoe-goldbug.htm

    ReplyDelete
  6. avrdsJanuary 29, 2010 at 4:46 PM

    I come from a very working class family with few books etc in the house. But my father did read Poe, and would read the Raven and other Poe stories and poems aloud to us when my brother and I were little. Funny, the story I remember most clearly is the Gold Bug.

    Hadn't thought about that in years. I should read it again.

    Did you hear that the mystery person who always visits Poe's grave didn't show this year? I wonder where Dooxy is?

    ReplyDelete
  7. RickJanuary 29, 2010 at 6:49 PM

    Some of the stories hold up quite well, especially those starring Auguste Dupin.

    ReplyDelete
  8. JAbelJanuary 30, 2010 at 6:32 AM

    Arvds,You beat me to the Dooxy punchline.The reading of The Raven on one the Simpsons Halloween shows remains my favorite version.

    ReplyDelete
  9. TripplerFebruary 7, 2010 at 7:01 AM

    I have always enjoyed this great poem. Years ago there was talk that it was partly plagiarized. But you don't hear much of that nowadays. Maybe we shouldn't.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
230 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more

The Age of Roosevelt: The Crisis of the Old Order

By
A quarter of a century, however, is time enough to dispel some of the myths that have accumulated around the crisis of the early Thirties and the emergence of the New Deal. There is, for example, the myth that world conditions rather than domestic errors and extravagances were entirely responsible for the depression. There is the myth that the depression was already over, as a consequence of the ministrations of the Hoover Administration, and that it was the loss of confidence resulting from the election of Roosevelt that gave it new life. There is the myth that the roots of what was good in the New Deal were in the Hoover Administration - that Hoover had actually inaugurated the era of government responsibility for the health of the economy and the society. There is the contrasting myth (for myths do not require inner consistency) that the New Deal was alien in origins and in philosophy; that - as Mr. Hoover put it - its philosophy was "the same philosophy of government which...
170 comments
Read more