There are other trails
which may be followed by the curious; notably, a passage which Mr. Ingram
selects from Poe's final review of "Barnaby Rudge":
"The raven, too, * * * might have been made, more than we now see
it, a portion of the conception of the fantastic Barnaby. * * * Its
character might have performed, in regard to that of the idiot,
much the same part as does, in music, the accompaniment in respect
to the air."
Nevertheless, after pointing out these germs and resemblances, the value of
this poem still is found in its originality. The progressive music, the
scenic detail and contrasted light and shade,--above all, the spiritual
passion of the nocturn, make it the work of an informing genius. As for the
gruesome bird, he is unlike all the other ravens of his clan, from the "twa
corbies" and "three ravens" of the balladists to Barnaby's rumpled "Grip."
Here is no semblance of the cawing rook that haunts ancestral turrets and
treads the field of heraldry; no boding phantom of which Tickell sang that,
when,
"shrieking at her window thrice,
The raven flap'd his wing,
Too well the love-lorn maiden knew
The solemn boding sound."
Poe's raven is a distinct conception; the incarnation of a mourner's agony
and hopelessness; a sable embodied Memory, the abiding chronicler of doom,
a type of the Irreparable.
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