The Raven

Like all of Poe’s poems, “The Raven” is metrically rigorous and organized. It has eighteen stanzas, with each stanza consisting of five lines of trochaic octameter followed by one, shorter line of trochaic tetrameter. This means that in each stanza, there are eight feet per line for the first five lines (hence the “octa”), then four feet in the last line (“tetra” means “four”). Each foot consists of two syllables, stressed, then unstressed. This beat pattern is called a trochee, hence “trochaic.” A typical line in “The Raven” is scanned like this (notice the eight trochees, with the stressed syllables in bold):

Once up- | on a | mid-night | drear-y, | while I | pon-dered, | weak and | wear-y

The reliable, thundering rhythm of “The Raven” evokes a heartbeat, perhaps, or a sacred chant. Because of its meter, the poem has a hypnotic, incantatory quality. On a meta-literary level, the chanting nature of the rhythm itself may have “summoned” the raven. There has long been a connection—emphasized by classical authors Poe was fond of like Homer, Sappho, and Catullus—between the sing-song nature of poetry and magical spells. Thus the rhythm reflects both the theme—a mysterious encounter with a possibly supernatural being—and Poe’s own belief that poetry should always sound musical.