hears that sound once more, this time from the window. Betraying his emotion by the rapid beating of his heart, he flings open the window and the Raven flies in, alighting on a bust of Pallas above the door. Pallas Athene, pagan goddess of wisdom, is symbolic here of human reason, learning, and the arts. Apparently she is an ineffectual diety whose powers earlier proved insufficient to lift this tragic man, even briefly, from his mournful state of mind. Now the ill-omened Raven sits triumphant above her. Like the allegorical Virgil in Dante's Inferno, human reason is limited and without divine aid and can ultimately be surmounted by evil.The man's initial response to this black-plumed apparition is one of contrived amusement. Though deceptively light in the tone of his greeting, the man's words belie his seeming indifference from the outset. He hails the Raven as having originated from the "Night's Plutonian shore." Pluto, another pagan deity, was lord of the underworld, the realm of the dead. The Raven comes recognized as an agent out of the land of darkness and death. Upon being asked its name, the mysterious entity responds with the single word, "Nevermore.""Nevermore" is the haunting refrain upon which the lyrical cadence of this poem is built. Its meaning appears to elude the man at first. He dismisses the word as an irrelevant utterance and wonders aloud whether his new companion will fly, as all his hopes have done before. "Nevermore" comes this time as an apt reply to his despondent query. Despair we know to be the utter absence of hope. Hopes have flown away and despair has taken up its abode in a place of desolate hope. The man conjectures that this bird has perhaps learned its one word form some unhappy master plagued by catastrophe, "til his song one burden bore/ Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore of 'Never nevermore.' " (2) Hearing this word intoned as the funeral dirge for the hopes of another miserab...
