The first poem pictorializes a takeover of a once populated and appealing locale by desolation as foreboding restlessness arises in all natural phenomena there. “The City in the Sea” partly derives from the biblical account of the destruction of the sinful cities Sodom and Gomorrah and partly from the legend of Atlantis, the fabled sunken city that periodically resurfaces and sinks again into the ocean. “The Coliseum” closes on a more positive note than the others because the stones that once teemed with the activities of sports and spectators retain an ability to captivate a contemporary beholder. Mood is everything in these poems, and Poe’s melodic sound effects suggest the meandering visionary experiences of the onlookers, who call up visions via song (enchantment) for readers. A similar principle informs “Dream-Land,” with its speaker who has gone imaginatively free-floating and who returns recalling lasting effects of the surreal world, “Out of SPACE—out of TIME.” where his emotions have transported him. While “Dream-Land” leaves the protagonist shaken by what he saw and heard, “Sonnet—Silence” is a tour de force of contrasting sound effects with a theme of the terrifying soundlessness of the “shadow” silence, evil double of the “corporate Silence” (a silence that results from geographic desolation). The fateful silence is that which desiccates the will.

Kindred silence descends upon the speaker and his antagonist at the end of “The Raven,” Poe’s most famous poem. Silence becomes even more terrifying here because the inexorably repeated “still” in the closing lines means absolute cessation of speaking, hearing, motion—physical representations of the will’s powerlessness. The setting resembles those in other works in its gradual constriction of the protagonist. The raven may not actually be terrifying, but he certainly paralyzes the narrator emotionally and physically. Folklore often has ravens in league with the devil; Poe’s raven may, however, be no more than a very ordinary creature seeking shelter and warmth on a cold winter night. That this bird has been taught to articulate the single word “nevermore” may be unusual but not necessarily supernatural. The bird’s speech is turned ghastly by the overwrought narrator, whose “Lenore” may in fact be as imaginary as the raven’s diabolic power.

Ambiguities abound in “The Raven.”3 That a bird admitted to the indoors on a cold December night would immediately seek the highest spot for his safety may be wholly plausible; that that perch is the head of a white marble bust of Pallas (Athena), goddess of wisdom and intellectuality, is also plausible. The protagonist may have been poring over books of magic spells as he nodded (and the incantatory sounds in the poem strengthen this possibility); somehow, his interaction with these books may have conjured the bird, consequently unleashing forces that bode ill for the conjurer. After all, the hour is midnight during the season of the death of the year, and the narrator does mention a “ghost” as emanating from his hearth, all of which might hint at supernaturalism. Learning that “ghost” was nineteenth-century slang for the shadow formed by dying embers, however, we may suspect that Poe’s narrator is not really beset by otherworldly torments, but that his mind is gradually disintegrating. Is Lenore an actual dead woman or a significant emotional part in the protagonist’s self that he has managed to “kill” or repress? She never appears as a physical being. She is “nameless,” and yet the narrator keeps invoking her; her name derives from the same root as “Helen,” and we have already seen that that name conveys brilliant light and great beauty. Could this “rare and radiant” Lenore be an ideal, without which the narrator goes mad? His “chamber” may symbolize the interior of a mind, and a closing mind at that. The protagonist doesn’t venture outside his opened door, and seeing “darkness” beyond may momentarily placate him, but creating such an entryway, along with opening the window, could in magical lore suffice to admit the bird and the nonrationality it represents. Once this power is implicitly invited inside, there’s no telling how it may operate. Using the means of Gothic themes (anxiety, fear, loss) and setting (a haunted chamber), “The Raven” gives us the interior of a human head/mind as its “world.”

A companion piece in suspense and terror, “Ulalume” moves us through foreboding outdoor scenery as the nameless speaker and his companion, Psyche, journey during what may be Halloween night. Psyche, the nurturer and illuminator (of the soul more so than the body), attempts to dissuade the speaker from proceeding, though he feels compelled to do so. Although they are outdoors, where they can easily observe planetary signs in the skies, there is an unmistakable sense of constriction and limitation connected with initially oblique hints about love (toward which planetary manifestations are unfavorable). The pair appropriately come to a decided stop when they arrive at Ulalume’s tomb, a destination the speaker hadn’t seemed to notice they were approaching. Confronted by the actual abode of death, as well as being melancholy over the loss of Ulalume, the speaker represents death-in-life as the poem ends. He rapidly becomes as emotionally “withering and sere” as the leaves. His stasis occurs because Psyche’s counsel went unheeded. Therefore we may detect in the speaker an inability to yield to any female presence in his makeup. The consequences of such egotism are disastrous.