Call of the Raven: The unforgettable Sunday Times bestselling novel of love and revenge (De Ballantyne-serie, 0.5)

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Alliteration is one kind of repetition that’s used in ‘The Raven.’It occurs when the poet repeats the same consonant sound at the beginning of multiple words. For example, “weak and weary” in the first line of the poem and “soul” and “stronger” in the first line of the fourth stanza. The establishment of the Wilbur & Niso Smith Foundation in 2015 cemented Wilbur's passion for empowering writers, promoting literacy and advancing adventure writing as a genre. The foundation's flagship programme is the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize. Poe makes use of several literary devices in ‘The Raven.’These include but are not limited to repetition, alliteration, and caesura. The latter is a formal device, one that occurs when the poet inserts a pause, whether through meter or punctuation, into the middle of a line. For example, line three of the first stanza. It reads: “While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping.” There are numerous other examples, for instance, line three of the second stanza which reads: “Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow.” The speaker admits that he cannot help but be fascinated by this raven. He basically sets up his chair so that he is seated right in front of the bird, watching it intently. He starts to focus his thoughts on the raven and what it could possibly mean by repeating the specific word “nevermore.” He had enjoyed his time in Cambridge. He had learned everything he could, made some influential friends who might serve him well later in life, and met more than a few young ladies like Clarissa Manners who were eager to share their charms with him. But he would be glad to be home.

Rehman, Noor. "The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe". Poem Analysis, https://poemanalysis.com/edgar-allan-poe/the-raven/. Accessed 1 November 2023. Poe stated that the raven itself was a symbol of grief, specifically, that it represented "mournful and never-ending remembrance." He purposely chose a raven over a parrot (a bird species better known for its ability to speak) because he thought a raven suited the dark tone of the poem better. We hope you will find Call of the Raven a fascinating exploration of the dying days of the slave trade. It feels like an important contribution to our understanding of a period in history which continues to throw long shadows into the darkest aspects of the human soul. Wilbur Smith & Corban Addison in a letter to the readers Perhaps what I say offends your moral sensibilities. I will not apologise for that. Instead, I beg you to look beyond your distaste and examine the proposition with clear-eyed honesty. If you sweeten your tea with sugar from the West Indies, or smoke Virginia tobacco then you support slavery. If your father owns a mill where they spin Alabama cotton; or a bank that underwrites the voyages of Liverpool ship owners, then I say again you support slavery.’ In "The Raven," Poe wanted to show the fine line between rational thought and madness and how strong emotions, such as grief, can push a person into irrationality, even during mundane interactions like the one the narrator had with the raven.

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As Manners retreated his friends moved in. They circled around Mungo, with the shambling gait of men who have been drinking. Mungo watched them carefully, calculating the effect the alcohol would have. It might make them slower – but also more unpredictable. The man is amused by how serious the raven looks, and he begins talking to the raven; however, the bird can only reply by croaking "nevermore."

Though not all of them. As the applause rose, so too did an answering barrage of boos and catcalls. Yells of ‘murderer’ and ‘blood on your hands’ were heard. However, as the poem continues, the narrator's irrationality increases as he asks the raven questions it couldn't possibly know and takes its repeated response of "nevermore" to be a truthful and logical answer. He then descends further into madness, cursing the bird as a "devil" and "thing of evil" and thinking he feels angels surrounding him before sinking into his grief. He has clearly come undone by the end of the poem. Throughout, Poe uses repetition more broadly as well. For example, his use of parallelism in line structure and wording, as well as punctuation. He also maintains a very repetitive rhythm throughout the poem with his meter and rhyme scheme. Mungo carefully put down his drink, then gave a conspiratorial wink. ‘I may say, your sister is a perfectly devout young woman. Always on her knees in chapel.’ An allusion is an indirect reference to something, and Poe makes multiple allusions in "The Raven." Some key ones include:

As Mungo battles his own fate and misfortune, he must question what it takes for a man to regain his power in the world when he has nothing, and what he is willing to do to exact revenge . . . Nepenthe is a drug mentioned in Homer's ancient epic The Odyssey, and it is purported to erase memories. But no blood would be spilled tonight. This was the Cambridge Union Society: the oldest debating club in the country and the proving ground for the nation’s future rulers. The only sparring would be verbal, the only wounds to pride. At least, those were the rules.