Reversals in Poe and Stevens

Abstract

Reversals in Poe and Stevens Samuel Jay Keyser Reversal in Poe's "The Raven" IN APRIL of 1846, in Graham's Magazine, Edgar Allan Poe published an essay that would become one of his most frequently anthologized texts, "The Philosophy of Composition." In it he proposed an account of what we would now call the "algorithm" according to which he created his most successful poem, "The Raven," published only the year before. His self-declared aim was to dispel the notion that art is created in "a species of fine frenzy—an ecstatic intuition" (749): It is my design to render it manifest that no one point in its composition is referrible [sic] either to accident or intuition—that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem. (750) Many critics have taken Poe's essay as a joke. Yet some serious scholars, including the famous linguist Roman Jakobson, have questioned the easy dismissal: Although Poe's letter of August 9, 1846, to his friend Cooke recommended this commentary as the "best specimen of analysis," an alleged oral statement by the writer was quoted post-humously: a supposed confession that he had never intended this article to be received seriously. French poets, however, admiring both Poe's poetry and his essays on poetry, have wondered in which instance he was jesting: whether in writing this marvelous commentary or in disavowing it . . . . (55-56) In his analysis of Poe's essay, Jakobson identifies a property of "The Raven" that is as remarkable as it is unexpected. Commenting on the famous refrain "Quoth the raven, 'Nevermore,'" Jakobson notes that [End Page 224] The utterance is inhuman, both in its persistent cruelty and in its automatic, repetitive monotony. Hence an articulate but subhuman creature is suggested as speaker, and in particular a corvine bird, not only because of its gloomy appearance and "ominous reputation" . . . but also because in most of its phonemes the noun raven is simply an inversion of the sinister never. Poe signals this connection by adjoining the two words: Quoth the raven "Nevermore." (54) The fact that raven and never are almost perfect reversals of one another is a form of chiasmus, a classical rhetorical device defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as "a grammatical figure by which the order of words in one of two parallel clauses is inverted in the other." This is the device John F. Kennedy used in his now famous exhortation: In "The Raven," to be sure, it is phonemes, not words, that are being reversed: The similarity between raven and its almost perfectly palindromic mirror image never is an accident of English, which by the same token guarantees the near-impossibility of translating the poem into another language, especially since the reversal is not a mere ornamentation. As we shall see, it is emblematic of the basic narrative structure of the poem. A good place to start this discussion is by looking at Poe's own commentary about the conclusion of "The Raven": Here then the poem may be said to have its beginning—at the end, where all works of art should begin—for it was here, at this point of my preconsiderations, that I first put pen to paper in the composition of the stanza: "Prophet," said I, "thing of evil! prophet still if bird or devil!By that heaven that bends above us—by that God we both adore, [End Page 225] Tell this soul with sorrow laden, if within the distant Aidenn,It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore—Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore." Quoth the raven "Nevermore." (753) Of course, we know that the poem does not really end here. This stanza is the antepenultimate one. The final stanza runs as follows: And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sittingOn the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon that is dreaming,And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;And my soul from out that shadow that...