The Raven: Tales and Poems
Edgar Allan Poe; edited by S.T. Joshi, series editor, Guillermo Del Toro
ISBN: 978-0143122364
Penguin Classics, October 2013, 352 pages
(Many other editions available; in the public domain)

I don’t like “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe.

This is what I’m thinking while I am helping my daughter through the last bits of her Gothic Literature class. She doesn’t actually need my help, she just wants it. The class was taught by a woman who was clearly passionate about the Gothic. “The Raven” was the last thing they, the students, were assigned. By then, we’d gone through a gauntlet of texts. “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner. “The Vampyre”  by John William Polidori. “The Old Nurse’s Story” by Elizabeth Gaskell.

My daughter does not like horror. She would not say she was a fan. She likes romance and murder stories. She wishes more romance had murder and more murder had romance. “Oh my darling,” I said to her when we started our little journey, “what do you think the Gothic is?”

She told me not to be weird (too late) and later, after we’d started, that she couldn’t stop thinking about “A Rose for Emily.” That she kept turning the story over in her head. But this is not about her, my daughter, or Emily, for that matter.

This is about me. This is about “The Raven.”

We read other poems for the class. “The Highwayman” by Alfred Noyes. “My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning. Even a slew of others by Poe. “Lenore,” “The Bells,” and “Annabell Lee,” which I adore. But it was strange, so strange because I hadn’t ever really thought about it, how long he, Poe, had lived in my deep memory until we read “The Raven.”

The last thing we read in the class.

It was the first thing I ever read by him.

It had to be. It travels the planes of my thoughts in a way that could have only happened while everything was still the kind of soft and malleable that exists only in childhood. Footprints in soft ground, a world that isn’t empty but still becoming.

I do not remember when I read it.

I was young. Elementary school. I was one of those very curious children who knew too much and nothing at all. One of those children that would learn to live in the library because it was one way to survive being a child. Survive being me long enough to become me.

I cannot say exactly when I read it, “The Raven,” but I had already known it by the time it was on Tiny Toon Adventures. A cute bit that you can find on YouTube if you’re curious. Vincent Price is the Narrator, all the parts that you remember are in it, and if you’re reading this, you do remember parts of it. We all remember parts of it.

I do not like “The Raven.”

I did not like it then, in that unremembered when. How did I find it, how did I read it? Was it given to me? A random poem in a book of poetry, a school assignment, a “here, you like spooky things, right?” moment? I do not remember! How, how, how this question would haunt me if it mattered, but it does not matter, so no ghost rises from it. What I do remember is an odd feeling. I do not remember the details, they are forgotten in the way that childhood can be forgotten. I do not remember but I remember.

That I did not like it but I did not . . . dislike it.

It was a taste, a feeling not quite right, not quite there. What was wrong? Off, failed in it? As if Edgar Allen Poe, one of the greatest writers America had ever seen somehow owed something to a sad Black girl with a library card. If I were older in this passage, I would describe this differently with words like desire and longing but I was not, yet.

At this point I am a child and I know nothing of those things only that there is something, something, close but it is not there and I am –

Needy.

I want in the way that a child wants, clawing at the unknown, headfirst, done and onto the next next next. There’s a mystery, a sophistication, that I do not understand but can feel crawling up my spine, tickling at my guts. This is something different and meaningful and I do not understand it, I am a child, far more a child than my child is at the introduction of these works. But I want it. I need it. Needy.

Poe’s work isn’t a hard thing to find. The work is horror, sure, but it’s classic. It’s refined. I am being bettered by reading it, I am learning something of history, of literature. It’s not hard to find. I read more, I devoured the short stories, I did not understand them. I could not. I was a child.

I did not like “The Raven,” but I loved the dark and it was dark in a way that Goosebumps wouldn’t be later. Ah yes, I found this before R. L. Stine found me. There is a line here, a path that is forming that will lead to other places, veer off in strange directions, grow crooked and wild and become. . . me. It tears through the horror section of the library, discovers the 90s midlist. Discovers a lot of things that maybe I was too young to read but I was reading and it was *the 90s* and what has a book ever hurt? I have forgotten more books, lost in the dark labyrinth of my imperfect memory than most people will read in their entire lifetime. But this is not about the line. This is about Poe and “The Raven,” which I did not like but needed to read.

I found in all those stories a sad sort of romance, but I didn’t know what romance was then. In reading I was aware The Narrator was sad because his love had died and I understood that on the most basic of levels because I was a child. This is not a synopsis, a critical read. The particulars of the poem are not important (and besides you already know them, you do, you do.)

What is important is, I loved the sad romance of it before I even knew what romance was.

I did not like “The Raven.” I did not like that first hit, but I saw something in it that I could like. Felt it in my soft child bones, my soft child guts. Some unnamable characteristic to the child me, that sung out through those pages, and so I went back for more.

Found more.

I do not like “The Raven.”

I like “Mask of the Red Death.” I like “Murders at the Rue Morgue.”

I like “Fall of the House of Usher.”

I love “Annabel Lee.”

I do remember when I read “Annabel Lee.” At least, when I read it and understood it. I was in eighth grade. I knew what romance was. It felt like something far away from me. A thing I would always desire and never receive. By then I knew desire and longing and all kind of things but still nothing, nothing at all.

I was still a child. I had read lots of Poe. And Poe as a child a different thing. The language isn’t hard but it is strange. . . lovely. And that is what I did not know I was missing in “The Raven.” “The Raven” is not beautiful. Not like “The Bells” or “A Dream Within a Dream” or “Annabel Lee” are.

“The Raven” is practical. The rhyme, the repetition, the cadence, the nearly call and response nature of it make it approachable. Memorable even for people who have no head for poetry. You don’t need to know who Pallas is when the Raven itself looms so large, croaking its catchphrase. I don’t need to say it, you know it.

Vincent Price recorded it for Tiny Toons Adventures.

Before long ago me, the me before I become me, reads “The Raven,” it had already become a sanitized creature and will remain so forevermore afterwards. No words have been changed, it is only in the presentation. Only the perception. This is a safe poem, there is nothing scary, nothing haunting. Give it to children. Slap it on décor. Cliché. Only this and nothing more.

But. But but but! There is more! There is.

“The Raven” is familiar. I do not like “The Raven.” But there is a tickle of a thing I will like. An inkling of what I will like. The beauty of it, the poetry, the stories. The beauty of the words.

This poem is just words, all poems are just words. They are the same words that they have always been but in reading as a child the beginning of a concept is planted in me. An understanding, a parasite that will become part of me. That these things are made of words and words can build stories. And stories, oh stories, they’re a special thing. Stories are doors and beyond them is something more fantastic than the thing that is on the page.

I cannot reach it, not as a child. But I know there is something there, and I am entranced. I do not like “The Raven,” but I needed to read it. I needed to see how language and story could be used in that way. I needed to understand that the dark could be more than scary.

That the dark could be beautiful. That the dark is beautiful.

I do not like “The Raven,” still so many years, so much more understanding in between that unremembered then and now, but I am no longer a child.

The dark is what was missing. I did not have words, I did not understand, but I felt, I knew, I could sense that space there where a feeling should be that was not. Children don’t know anything but they know so much and I was a child. The dark is the thing that had been sanitized, not through any change of the words but in the cultural context of its presentation. We are not meant to see it as an obsessive treatise on grief or the unanswerable question of what lies beyond the last heartbeat within us all.

It is presented as a little creepy poem with sing song-y rhyme structure. A simple artifact of literature where the language is archaic in parts but not inaccessible.

A child can read it.

It is close enough, in measure, to a nursery rhyme to be unintimidating. It is gloomy and dreadful in ways that are safe for a child. There is no blood, there is no gore, there is only death but nothing more. There is no body, only memory and night and wind and these simple things, these small horrors. The stuff of nightmares for little dreamers.

A child may stumble on the words here and there, lose the thread of what is happening on that December night, but it doesn’t matter. Think only of the door, the wind, how strange a bird in the middle of the night, and I do not like “The Raven,” but oh do I understand why it was the first. The first maddening thing.

My first maddening thing.

A touch of dark. An invitation to open the door.

I do not like “The Raven.”

I am changed by it.