RavenEssay

	The word grief is defined in the dictionary as a keen mental suffering or distress over affliction or loss. People deal with grief in many different ways; no two people deal with grief in the exact same way. In Edgar Allen Poe's classic poem “The Raven”, we see a speaker struck with grief after the loss of someone close to him named Lenore. The speaker deals with his grief stemming from Lenore's loss by repressing and forgetting it by doing other things to pass the time; it is not until the Raven appears that he must deal with his repressed feelings face to face. The Raven is the physical representation of his emotional state of his grief,  where we see his inability to forget and move on, the amount of self pity and depression he has repressed in himself, and finally the madness he succumbs to when he must finally deal with his repressed grief of Lenore's death.
	Our speaker's inability to forget is the catalyst for his guilt and the reason why he represses his feelings so intently. We can see this inability to forget in other aspects of our speaker's life, for example when “[he] ponder[s] weak and weary/Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore”.(line here) The word forgotten really tells us something about our speaker; the general public has forgotten the knowledge and stories written in these volumes, but he refuses to let these things be forgotten, and is in a way trying to keep a grip on some part of the past, possibly as a way to also remember and relive a past in which Lenore was still alive. The raven represents this idea of his inability to forget by its very presence; the raven is the physical representation of the speaker's grief and unwillingness to forget. The raven appears, sits on his bust, and refuses to move, despite any protestations from our speaker: “Leave my loneliness unbroken!-quit the bust above my door!/Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!”(line here) We can see a close relation to the speaker's grief and the raven's presence. Clearly the raven's beak in this case is the grief and suffering he faces from the loss of his beloved Lenore, and his very presence forces him to deal with his crushing loneliness he feels from the loss of Lenore. This is precisely why our speaker wants the raven to leave him and go away; the raven's presence itself represents, in a way, his inability to forget because while our speaker wants to forget and  even protests and despises his grief, he doesn't physically do anything to deal with it, similarly to how he doesn't physically remove the raven from his study, he just tells it to leave. Our speaker's inability to forget is a large part of the reason he feels such self resentment and self pity, and it is clearly represented by the raven in something as simple and mundane as its presence.