Unit 5: Selection Vocabulary 4

And I tried to hear the monkeys in your lofty far-off sky.

And now, in the Eighth-month, yellowing butterflies
Hover, two by two, in our west-garden grasses

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.

I love thee freely, as men strive for right

Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore—

“Sir,” said I, “or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;
But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,
And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,
That I scarce was sure I heard you”

Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore

What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore
Meant in croaking “Nevermore.”

Instead of being reunited with Lenore, the speaker encounters a raven, a bird traditionally associated with bad omens.

Before the raven flies into the study, the speaker whispers “Lenore?” a refrain that is converted into “Lenore!” over the course of the poem.

Within the first stanza, the reader is told the speaker is “weak and weary,” and the unidentified noise is initially described as “rapping, rapping at my chamber door.”

Echoes and rhymes are symbolic of solitude.

These approximate rhymes, also known as half rhymes, help reinforce an image of the speaker’s stagnation. The incompletion of the rhyme reflects the speaker’s inability to move forward with his life.