Poe despaired of her life” (Bloom 14).How shall the ritual then be read – the requiem how be sungBy you – by yours, the evil eye – by yours the slanderous tongueThat did to death the innocence that died and died so young?(Poe, “Lenore” 10-12)Armed with the new discovery about his life and with the help of the stanza quoted above, it will be safe to conclude that Lenore was meant to represent Virginia. With that in mind, it is possible to move to the next step of understanding the points in “The Raven.” As Bloom explained with a single word, despair, Edgar was convinced that his wife was going to die and leave him, like the other women he loved (his mother and foster mother). In the poem “The Raven,” Poe carefully placed verses, like: “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary”(1), “Thrilled me – filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before” (14), and “long I stood there wondering, fearing / Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before” (25 - 26), to express how much the possibility of losing his wife terrified him. To Poe, his wife’s death not only marks the end of his marriage but also his happiness and short lived successful life. Approximately a year before Virginia’s accident, Edgar’s luck seemed on the verge of taking the golden road.[1841] was in many ways the high point of Poe’s life, and may be seem as the only happy period in his adult life. He was hired as editor of Graham’s Literary Magazine at the affluent salary of $800 per year, and during his tenure the circulation of the magazine improved tremendously. His writing also went well, and he wrote some of his most famous stories, including “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mask of the Red Death,” and “A Descent into the Maelstrom.” He and Virginia lived wi...
