BONUS! Edgar Allen Poe and Lenore

Two non-speaking characters from this segment (please excuse the extremely low-quality of this Poe shot, it's a single pan his bust appears in and apparently my DVD rip was not ready for it.)

In preparation for this week I read "The Raven" in full for the first time. And my conclusion is...it's good? I don't know if that's valuable insight.

See, I would have watched this Simpsons episode long before I had heard of The Raven, Edgar Allen Poe or even poetry in general. These five-or-so minutes defined what this literary classic means to me, and it took some effort to read through it without specific line-readings stuck in my head, or without Bart's interruptions. Despite this I can confirm...it's good.

I was not surprised to learn that the Simpsons segment leaves out several verses, and that the full version is more fleshed out in a few areas, but I have a couple of observations based on actually paying attention to this poem for the first time in over 20 years.

Firstly, Lenore. In the Simpson portrayal, you get the idea that the narrator is missing his lost love, Lenore, and this sets the scene that he is lonely, perhaps haunted by metaphorical ghosts. What I had not realised is that this is not just some character building to establish the narrator's state of mind, and how he could be spooked by a bird - Lenore's absence is the main point of the poem. In fact, the grief caused by her absence is the main factor in the narrator's decline in sanity - the raven itself is just the catalyst. I don't think this is a misinterpretation of the text by the show, I think they just chose to focus on the fun bird antics more than the man's grief, which is less entertaining for a cartoon. There are two significant verses omitted from towards the end of the poem in which he asks the Raven if he will be reunited with Lenore in heaven, to which the Raven replies...well you know.

And that's another thing! The Raven actually speaks!

Okay, so many of you clever, clever people will be mad at me for not understanding the entire point of the poem prior to this point, and get ready to get even madder: I did not realise that in the actual poem, the Raven actually literally speaks. I had thought UNTIL TODAY that this was the joke the show was making: that the line in the poem was 

 "Quoth the Raven, nevermore.”

as in, "The Raven never said anything, it just sat there taunting him," and the kids were taking the poem too literally. BUT NO. The line is

"Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”"

and at a couple of points makes it entirely clear that the bird is literally speaking to him, with lines like "Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly", "Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken" and "Get a load of this talking bird!" It is possible that the narrator is somehow hallucinating this speech, and that the Raven is not actually forming the word, but even so my initial interpretation that in he was silent (and the Simpsons was having a fun deliberate misrepresentation of this) was completely wrong.

This project has accidentally become very educational along the way. Or, you already knew all this and think I am incredibly stupid right now.

I suppose by the time we reach "Lisa's Rival" in season 6 I'll have to read The Tell-tale Heart to see what I've gotten wrong about that all these years. Do Star Wars figures factor into the original short story at all?

Let's close with another reference to The Raven from season 3's "Saturdays of Thunder":

This post is part of my "Every Simpsons Character Ever" series. For a list of my rules in this project, click here.