“The Raven” is written with a distinctly Gothic tone: dark and ominous, mirroring the “dreary” midnight in which the story is set. The suspense is set up almost immediately with the enigmatic tapping noise that torments the narrator, and Poe’s word choice sustains the thrill by weaving foreboding, supernatural language into the narrative.
Even before the reader learns of the narrator’s grief for Lenore, Poe has used the language of death to establish his tone: during this “bleak” December night, he writes, “each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.” When the enigmatic opening stanzas create a certain unease in the reader, even the objects in the narrator’s chamber seem to respond in kind: the purple curtains move with an “uncertain” rustle that overwhelm the narrator with “fantastic terrors never felt before.” There is little relief to be found as the piece continues, for the arrival of the Raven—that “ghastly grim and ancient” bird—brings an even more pronounced layer of dread to the tone. Poe returns to this refrain again, later in the poem, adding even more unsettling adjectives to describe the Raven: it is a “grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore” whose “fiery eyes” burn into the narrator’s very “core.” Through his descriptive language, Poe carefully crafts the tone of the piece to carry forth his Gothic vision.
