What is the narrator's first query to the raven (stanza 8)? The narrator's first question to the Raven is, "What is your name?" The narrator grows increasingly enraged with the raven as the poem goes. Here are some of his most violent insults: "Get away from me! / I'll scare you off, if you don't go!"
The narrator uses several different methods to try and get information from the bird. He calls it names, accuses it of spying, and even threatens it with death. But the raven just laughs at him. So at last, the narrator decides to act.
He grabs a stone and throws it at the raven, hitting it in the chest. Then he runs up to it and hits it with his fist. After that, the raven flies away.
What does this tell us about human nature? Humans are capable of great violence even though they have something much more important than blood on their hands - the blood of millions of victims - especially people who insult them or ignore them.
Also, humans are not very intelligent. Even though the raven is behaving like a real jerk, the narrator decides to kill it anyway. This shows that even animals can irritate humans to the point of murder!
"The Raven" is told in the first person by an unknown, untrustworthy narrator. He is bereaved by the loss of his love, Lenore, and his mental state deteriorates throughout the poem. The narrator becomes delusional and believes he is talking with her again when, in fact, she is dead. He also believes that she has come to tell him something important but can find no way to ask her what it is.
Thus, the speaker is not reliable. He knows nothing about life after death (or at least claims he does not), and his imagination runs away with him as he tries to communicate with Lenore. Even so, there are moments when we believe what he says: when he tells us that her eyes are stars, for example, or that she is beautiful even in death. These moments make "The Raven" worth reading even if you do not believe every word of it.
By the way, according to some scholars, "The Raven" was not actually written by Edgar Allen Poe but by another poet named William Henry Leonard.
In lines 91-96, what inquiry does the speaker pose to the raven? The speaker wants to know if Lenore is in paradise.
Lines 91-96: And so I asked a raven, / From whose black wing the angels took / My sweet love-bird away; / "Is she in heaven?" / He did not speak, / But his silence filled me with doubt.
The speaker asks the raven if Lenore is in paradise. The raven doesn't speak but instead gives a silent message to the speaker that she is not. This makes the speaker doubtful of whether or not Lenore is in paradise.
Paradise refers to a place where people go after they die. In this case, the speaker believes that if Lenore was sent to paradise then she would be there now. However, since the raven didn't speak, the speaker realizes that maybe Lenore wasn't sent to paradise after all.
"Nevermore," the crow says again. The strange appearance of a talking bird indicates that the poem's narrator is hallucinating and experiencing a mental slip.
Throughout the poem, the speaker's explanation shifts from a reasonable to a supernatural one. The speaker's argument is first sensible and conventional: he thinks that the raven was trained by its former owner to say this one phrase, and the utterance is meaningless. But then he has a vision in which a spirit tells him that this bird will one day be his messenger, and upon hearing this prophecy, the bird repeats it word for word.
This last part of the story seems incredible, but it turns out that many people have had similar dreams or seen strange things happen after meeting with the dead. For example, Thomas Hardy's famous novel The Mayor of Casterbridge features a similar scene where a young man sees his murdered friend come back to life before his eyes. So we can assume that this dream is not completely imaginary.
According to some scholars, this incident may have inspired Shakespeare when he wrote King Lear. In that play, an old king imagines that all his children are dead until they show up alive at the end.
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