Breaking Away from Tradition: Metrical Subversion in 'The Raven'

On the internet, there are a lot of student help pages concerning poetry and how to read it and we are often introduced to familiar concepts such as internal rhyme, metre and a wide variety of other poetic terms. When we regard the “cheatsheets” for Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Raven' most of these pages stress the structure of it, but end up accepting the fact that it is a trochaic octameter, without delving into the specifics of what that actually suggests for the reading. My reading of this poem is troubled by this acceptance, as the form and style of the poem attempts to subvert the metrics and rhythm of itself. I will present two different lines that stand in contrast with the highly stylised lines of trochaic octameter, to show how the poem's rhythm is constantly broken by the metrics of the poem.

'The Raven' can easily be described as rhythmically arranged, since it is possible to boil it down to a four-beat structure. Since 'The Raven' has become a cornerstone in almost any anthology concerning American poetry, there have been a movement towards a unified reading of the poem and the fact that it is probably the most famous poem composed in trochaic octameter, it is held as a shining beacon of this particular metre. The first line of the poem holds itself completely to this form, but already in the second line we find it straining against the confines of the chosen metre. Wikipedia has a scansion of the first stanza that I would argue is faulty for reasons that will be explained after introducing the scansion of the second line:

                                          | /  .   | /   .   .  | /           .  | /   . .    | /    .    | /    .  | /    .   | / | (Wikipedia)

                                          Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore (Poe ll. 2)

The heavy use of dactyls are not particularly problematic as many foot substitutions are allowed in different metres and I do not have a complete list of allowed substitutions in trochaic octameter, if such a list even exists. My main argument against this scansion is the manner in which of is analysed. It is almost unheard of to stress a function word and in this scansion, it seems as a particular interference with the reading. The rhythm of the reading does indeed give us the impression that of should be stressed, but the line would scan more easily if volume was a spondee and of for- would be a pyrrhic. In this way, there would not have to be stress on a function word.

The substitutions introduced in the second line are not a definite proof that the poem does not use trochaic octameter throughout, but we find that several lines have similar struggles with staying inside the metrical arrangement of the metre. I would argue that these lines are not a breach of metrics, but rather the poet remaining unrestrained by tradition and form. Instead, he is highlighting how metre can be subverted to serve a purpose of highlighting certain facts in a poem. The most obvious line to use for this is the opening line of stanza nine:

                                     | /        .   | /    .           .  | .    /   .    | /      .  | /      /   | /         .   | / . |

                                     Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,

The line is extremely convoluted and the addition of a dactyl in the second foot and then the extremely rare amphibrach in the third. The stresses of the line highlight the words ungainly and fowl. These words hold semantic context to the complicated elements found in the metrics and, therefore, the metre gives an increased value to our understanding of the poem. The line is, of course, still acceptable in terms of metre, but it is an extreme example of how to use any sort of metrical line and it would most likely have been seen as a breach of “decorum” to use a line like this in most earlier poetry. The internal rhyme of the line is also off-centre as, ungainly and plainly are the rhyming constituents, but ungainly is the third foot and the rhyme should have been fowl with plainly. This non-rhyme is a pun on 'fowl-foul' and denotes that something has gone awry for our speaker. These subtle elements are what sets 'The Raven' apart from other poems of its age and these parcels of information that can be gleaned from paying attentive detail to the construction of the poem accentuate more diversity and poignancy in his poetic framing.

I have not shown that 'The Raven' is unmetrical, but I have attempted to highlight how subversive the use of metre has become by this point in time and I do believe that there is something uniquely rebellious and American in Poe's poetry. Poe adherence to metrics seems to be founded in something other than tradition, as we can find inventiveness in his attempt to break it away from a simple reading. His command of metrical poetry is not used to solidify form but rather to blur the meaning and the strict adherence in most of the lines of this poem suggests the very eeriness that the poet intended.

References

Poe, Edgar Allan. 'The Raven'. The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. New York:

Barnes and Noble. 2006.

'Trochaic Octameter'. Wikipedia.