“The Raven” as an Elegiac Paraclausithyron1

“The Raven” has spellbound readers and critics for generations with its ominous raven, the lost
Lenore, and the narrator’s descent into self-torment and madness, not to mention its haunting
meter and rhyme scheme. It has also inspired many to search for its literary origins. 1 One
previously unnoticed avenue to an enriched understanding of “The Raven” is to consider it as a
type of elegiac paraclausithyron, a Greek (and Roman) poetic form consisting of the lament of an
excluded, locked-out lover (exclusus amator) at the shut door of his beloved.2 Poe’s knowledge
of Greek and Latin is well documented,3 so he probably would have been familiar with the
paraclausithyron as it was well-known in Greek and Roman love literature, appearing not only in
elegy but in genres as diverse as the lyric, epigram, idyll, pastoral, comedy, and mime. 4 For
Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid, the paraclausithyron was central to love poetry. In fact, Ovid saw
poetry as the invention of the lover singing for admittance to his lady ad clausas fores (at the shut
door), and Propertius made the door a synonym of love itself.5

Characteristics of the Paraclausithyron

The Greek paraclausithyron originated in the komastic6 song of drunken revelry, but as it
developed into a literary form, the lover’s sorrow, helplessness, and self-pitying despair replaced
the original rowdiness.7 Paraclausithyra contain at least some of the following topoi:

1. The exclusus amator’s passage from a symposium through the streets to the door of his
beloved, where he is rejected and laments
2. His drunkenness
3. Torches
4. The lover’s vigil at the door
5. Bleak weather (wind, rain, snow)
6. The lover’s pleading and threatening
7. His complaints of suffering and his tears
8. His verses written on the doorway
9. A garland, worn on the lover’s head and often left at the door as a testimony of his
vigil.8

The Romans added five main topoi:

10. The personification of the door: the lover addresses not the beloved but the door itself,
as if it were a living being, in the hope of persuading it to open. The door is central in
Roman paraclausithyra, probably because it held great importance as a religious symbol.9
11. The use of Gebetsparodie, a parodic appropriation of Roman prayer form, in the
address to the door or other obstacles10
12. The treatment of the door as if it were a deity or an altar11
13. The concept of furtivus amor (furtive love), in which the beloved is not a free agent.
As a result, the figure of the custos (guardian) who watches over the puella (the beloved)12
1
Author Posting. ©2009 Washington State University. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by
permission of Washington State University for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was
published in POE STUDIES, VOL. 42, 2009, pp. 87-97. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1111/j.1947-4697.2009.00015.x
 for a leno (owner) or a vir (husband) is a common, even stereotyped, element, especially
in the elegy. As Roman elegy already made use of furtivus amor (in its love triangles), the
elegiac paraclausithyron had to take on this same characteristic.13
14. The exclusion of the lover (thus the term “exclusus amator”), in contrast to the Greek
paraclausithyron’s two possible endings: being locked out or admitted.

Paraclausithyron Topoi in “The Raven”

“The Raven” contains versions of the following topoi:

1. The The possibly implicit funeral procession to the beloved’s tomb (her new
procession residence). Note that not all elements need appear for the poem to be
through the considered a paraclausithyron.14
streets
2. Drunkenness Perhaps the lover had been drinking before; later on he wishes to “quaff this
kind nepenthe.” (PT, 85)
3. Torches “And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor” (PT, 81)
“the lamp-light gloated o’er . . . the lamp-light gloating o’er” (PT, 84)

4. The vigil at “Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust and door”
the door (PT, 84)

5. The bleakness “Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December” (PT, 81)
of the weather “Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!” (PT, 85)

6. Pleading and “Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!” (PT, 83)
threatening “tell me truly, I implore—
Is there—is there balm in Gilead?—tell me—tell me, I implore!”(PT, 85)

“‘Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!’ I shrieked, upstarting—
‘Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!’” (PT, 85)

7. The lament “surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore” (PT, 81)
(tears)
8. Verses Perhaps it is implicit that the erudite lover had written a eulogy for his beloved
and recited it outside her tomb.

9. A garland The possibly implicit wreath of flowers left at the beloved’s tomb.

10. The See “ Part 2 of “The Raven”: The Role of the Raven as Doorkeeper” below.
personified
door
11. Gebetsparodie “Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!” (PT, 83)
“Is there—is there balm in Gilead?—tell me—tell me, I implore!”(PT, 85)
“‘Prophet!’ said I, ‘thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us—by that God we both adore’” (PT, 85)
12. The door as “a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door” (PT, 83)
an altar “Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer
Swung by seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor” (PT, 85)

“I determined, then, to place the lover in his chamber—in a chamber rendered

sacred to him by memories of her who had frequented it” (“Philosophy of
Composition,” in ER, 21).

13. Furtivus amor The master of the house would be Death, to whom Lenore now belongs.

14. Predetermined “The student . . . is impelled, as I have before explained, by the human thirst
exclusion for self-torture, and in part by superstition, to propound such queries to the
bird as will bring him, the lover, the most of the luxury of sorrow, through the
anticipated answer ‘Nevermore.’ With the indulgence, to the utmost extreme,
of this self-torture” (“Philosophy of Composition, in ER, 24; emphasis added).

Recognizing elements of “The Raven” that recall the paraclausithyron reinforces early critical
approaches involving the narrator’s inner landscape.15 The “torches” and the bust of Pallas reflect
the mood of the lover. First, there is a dying fire (the dying hopes of the lover) and then a
“gloating” lamplight that throws the raven’s shadow (a dismal state of mind) over him.
Furthermore, the raven’s eyes burn into his core. The bust of Pallas on which the raven alights is
“placid” at first but by the end of the poem becomes “pallid.” Pallas Athena, the goddess of
wisdom born from Zeus’s head, can thus symbolize the lover’s state of mind, at first somewhat
calm but ultimately overcome by the burden of mournful and never-ending remembrance.16

Part 1 of the “The Raven”: The Door as the Gate of Death

It could be put forward that the primary purpose of the episode of opening the door is to establish
it as the gate of Death in the lover’s subconscious mind; 17 when he opens it, there is only
darkness, silence, and nothing more (remembering that Death, whom Poe elsewhere names “No
More,” is the “corporate Silence” [PT, 77]):

here I opened wide the door;—

Darkness there and nothing more . . .
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token
(PT, 82)

Occasionally in paraclausithyra, the exclusus amator actually sings in the vain hope that he can
persuade the girl to come out.18 Here the girl, Lenore, is dead, and the exclusus amator, thinking
that she has knocked upon his chamber door, opens it, hoping she has come out of the darkness of
death.19 Poe’s lover is then taunted by what seems like Death itself in a mocking answer to his
desperate question:

And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore?”
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, “Lenore!”
(PT, 82)
The echo is an exclamation (“Lenore!”), not a repetition of the interrogative “Lenore?” 20 and the
echo is personified as murmuring.
The most interesting parallel to “The Raven” in this sense appears in a paraclausithyron of
Propertius at the beginning of his elegy on Cornelia (4.11.1-8) Here, Paullus, like an exclusus
amator, makes a plea at the tomb of his wife Cornelia, but she responds that the gate of Death can
open to no power:

Cease, Paullus, to burden my tomb with tears:

it opens to no prayers, the black door.
When once the cortege has passed within the jurisdiction of Hell,
in adamant deaf to all pleas ends every road.
Though you pray, and though the god of the dusky palace hear you, why!—
your tears are drink for a shore unhearing.
Men’s prayers move Heaven; when Hell’s gateman has taken up his penny,
his wan gate blocks the way to the grassy tomb.21

Part 2 of “The Raven”: The Role of the Raven as Doorkeeper

In Ovid’s paraclausithyron in Amores 1.6, the exclusus amator addresses, not his beloved or the
door that bars him from her,22 but rather the ianitor (doorkeeper). In ancient Rome the ianitor was
a slave chained to the door and in charge of admittance. 23 Ovid’s lover pleads, adulates, promises,
and threatens to no avail, so he admits defeat and insults the ianitor and the door. There is also a
refrain at eight-line intervals within the poem, in which the lover contends that the ianitor should
open the door because the night is passing. In “The Raven,” the ianitor is the raven itself, 24 which
enters to perch upon a bust of Pallas just above a literal and symbolic door. However, it is made a
ianitor by Poe’s lover himself, eager to delight in self-torment.25 Once it alights, it never again
departs from its perch; thus raven and door are fused, paralleling the ianitor chained to his door. 26
Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and transitions, was also the deity of the door and the
celestial doorkeeper (thus the latin term for doorkeeper, ianitor).27 The gates of his temple were
kept open in times of war and shut in times of peace, 28 hence the religious importance of the door
associated with him. Having two heads facing in opposite directions, he could see both ways at
the same time and also had the ability to see both past and future. 29 Similarly, the utterance of the
raven, emblematic of never-ending remembrance, suggests to the lover that his future shall
always be the past, in that he will never forget, and always mourn, Lenore. Unable to pass the
ianitor, he will forever remain stuck in his “bleak December” and never pass into the fresh
beginning of January the month of Janus, looking back onto the past year and forward to the new.

Curiosities

There are a number of oddities within the poem that could be accounted for by the
paraclausithyron and its associations with classical Greece and Rome, including Pallas, and the
psychological state those associations help develop in the narrator:30

1. Athene’s bird is commonly understood to be the owl, not the raven: According to Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, the crow (essentially a smaller version of the raven) rather than the owl was
originally linked with Pallas Athene (the crow was a virgin princess so transformed by Pallas
 to save her from Neptune’s advances). Later, Athene entrusted a casket to three girls with
instructions not to open it, but one of them did. Inside was her baby foster child,
Erikhthonios, the future legendary king of Athens, with a snakelike body below the waist.
Because the crow reported the incident to Athene, serving as the messenger of ill tidings, she
replaced it with the owl.31
2. As T. S. Elliot asked, how could the raven be stately, have the mien of a lord or lady,
and come from the saintly days of yore—yet also be ghastly grim, ungainly, and grave
and stern in decorum?32 A simple answer would be that, although the raven is ungainly in
appearance, its character is stately, lordly, grim, grave and stern. In “the days of yore”, it was
also originally white and as beautiful as the dove or the swan, but Apollo turned it black for
telling him of his lover Coronis’s unfaithfulness. 33
3. Why is the bust of Pallas above a door? This accentuates the importance of the door as
adapted from the paraclausithyron, since it is an extremely unusual place to put a bust.
4. Why is the raven’s crest “shorn and shaven”? Why did the lover say that the raven was no
craven even though it had a shorn and shaven crest? There was an ancient belief that shaving
the head produces cowardice.34 However, the heads of ancient Roman slaves were shaven to
signify their slave status;35 as the ianitor (here the raven) was a slave, he would also have had
a shaved head. As a result, the lover was here indicating that the raven’s shorn and shaven
crest was a sign not of cowardice but of the raven’s ianitor position.

1
See Eliza Richards, “Outsourcing ‘The Raven’: Retroactive Origins,” Victorian Poetry 43, no. 2 (2005): 205-7,
212, where she gives the usual list of sources: “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” (Barrett), Barnaby Rudge (Dickens),
“To Allegra Florence in Heaven” (Thomas Holley Chivers), “To a Ruined Fountain in a Grecian Picture” (Henry B.
Hirst), and “Isadore” (Albert Pike). For other possible sources, see Esther F. Hyneman, Edgar Allan Poe: An
Annotated Bibliography of Books and Articles in English 1827-1973 (Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1974), 229-233;
Jana L. Argersinger and Steven Gregg, “Subject Index to International Poe Bibliography: Poe Scholarship and
Criticism, 1983-1988” Poe Studies/ Dark Romanticism 23 (1990): 36; Jana L. Argersinger and John P. Gonzales,
“Subject Index to International Poe Bibliography: Poe Scholarship and Criticism, 1989-1993” Poe Studies/ Dark
Romanticism 29.2 (1996): 58
2
See Frank Olin Copley, Exclusus Amator: A Study in Latin Love Poetry (Madison: American Philological
Association, 1956), 1. For a study that links “The Raven” very generally to classical traditions of the elegy as lament
(but not to the paraclausithyron), see Philip Edward Phillips, “Teaching Poe’s ‘The Raven’ and ‘Annabel Lee’ as
Elegies,” in Approaches to Teaching Poe’s Prose and Poetry, ed. Jeffrey A. Weinstock and Tony Magistrale (New
York.:  MLA, 2008), 76-80.
3
Haldeen Braddy, Glorious Incense: The Fulfilment of Edgar Allan Poe (Washington D.C.: The Scarecrow Press,
1953), 81. Also Killis Campbell, The Mind of Poe and Other Studies (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), 6,7, 10.
4
J. C. Yardley, “The Elegiac Paraclausithyron,” Eranos Acta Philologica Suecana 76 (1978): 19; Copley, Exclusus
Amator, 1.
5
Copley, Exclusus Amator, 70, 78. Copley emphasizes that for Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid, “the lament of the
exclusus amator is . . . the first, the chief, and the most characteristic manifestation and symptom of love, and as such
becomes the vehicle for the expression of the totality of love.”
6
A komos is a drunken revel that sometimes followed a symposium; the young men went out to look for further
diversion going to a friend’s house, that of a lover or even a brothel, where they demanded admission. If locked out,
they might attempt to break the door down, or most likely, just sing a song; such a komos song before a shut door
was the usual aftermath. See Copley, 4-5 and Yardley, 20.
7
Copley, Exclusus Amator, 15, 34.
8
Copley, Exclusus Amator, 1, 33-34. See also Yardley, “Elegiac Paraclausithyron,”23, 24, 26, 34.
9
Copley, Exclusus Amator, 35, 36. See also Yardley, “Elegiac Paraclausithyron,” 23.
10
Yardley, “Elegiac Paraclausithyron,” 24-27.
11
Yardley, “Elegiac Paraclausithyron,” 26, 27.
12
The beloved in Roman elegy is called a puella (girl); she could be anywhere from seventeen to about forty-five.
See Sharon L. James, Learned Girls and Male Persuasion: Gender and Reading in Roman Love Elegy (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 2002), 236.
13
Copley, Exclusus Amator, 36-40; Yardley, “Elegiac Paraclausithyron,” 21, 22.
5. In the expression “bird or beast above my chamber door,” how could a beast fit there?
The serpent, a beast that could fit on top of a bust, was also associated with Athene, as her
goatskin aegis (breastplate) was bordered with serpents and carried a depiction of Medusa’s
head in its center.36 Furthermore, her foster child, Erikhthonios, had a serpent’s tail as a baby.
6. The location of the lamp, the light of which casts the raven’s shadow on the floor: It has
been suggested that the lamplight falls upon the raven from behind a transom; 37 this is not
possible, since it would mean that there would be light from outside the door, but when the
lover opens it there is only “darkness there and nothing more.” Perhaps the lamp is where Poe
said it would be: high up above the door and bust.38 Furthermore, in a paraclausithyron it is

15
For example, Edward Davidson, in Poe: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1957), describes “The
Raven” as “a dream, a rather special dream,” an “interior monologue” in which “we see the [narrator’s] mind in
disintegration” at the “very moment . . . he is losing all hold on external reality” (102-3). Richard Wilbur, in his 1959
introduction and notes to the Laurel Poetry Series Poe (New York: Dell, 1959), finds “The Raven” to be the Poe
poem that “most resembles a short story”;  compares its ending with the “dream” ending of “Ligeia” and the
scholar’s chamber to the “dream-chamber” in “the Assignation”; suggests that “the bust represents not Pallas but the
image of Lenore retrieved in a dream”; and observes of line 3 that “the hero is ‘nodding’ to begin with, and the poem
makes a steady progress into day-dream and trance” (142-44). Wilbur, of course, in both the introduction to the Dell
volume and his 1959 Library of Congress Anniversary Lecture, “The House of Poe,” argues that the typical Poe hero
is  “enclosed or circumscribed” because of “the isolation of the poetic soul in visionary reverie or trance . . . in the
process of dreaming his way out of the world”; that in Poe’s writings “the room is a state of mind, and . . . everything
in it is therefore a thought, a mental image”;  and that the “typical Poe story [or poem] occurs within the mind of the
poet,” its characters standing, not as “independent personalities,” but as “allegorical figures representing the warring
principles of the poet’s divided nature” (from The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Criticism since 1829,
ed. Eric Carlson [Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1966], 261, 271, 274-75).
16
On the bust of Pallas, see Patricia Merivale, “The Raven and the Bust of Pallas: Classical Artifacts and the Gothic
Tale,” PMLA 89 (1974): 960-66.
17
“The idea of making the lover suppose, in the first instance, that the flapping of the wings of the bird against the
shutter, is a ‘tapping’ at the door, originated in a wish to increase, by prolonging, the reader's curiosity, and in a
desire to admit the incidental effect arising from the lover's throwing open the door, finding all dark, and thence
adopting the half-fancy that it was the spirit of his mistress that knocked” (“Philosophy of Composition,” in ER, 21-
22).
18
Yardley, “Elegiac Paraclausithyron,” 19: “He sings his song in the almost inevitably vain hope of being admitted
(or, sometimes, of persuading the girl to come out).” See also James, Learned Girls and Male Persuasion, 136.
19
As Barton Levi St. Armand notes in “Poe’s Emblematic Raven: A Pictoral Approach” (ESQ: A Journal of the
American Renaissance 22 [1976]: 197), “Poe’s adjective ‘Plutonian’ seems to imply that this darkness might also be
the very tenebrae exteriores of Hell itself, a Hades to which Persephone, the lost Lenore, has been abducted.”
20
According to the Poe Society of Baltimore’s website, http://www.eapoe.org/works/info/pp073.htm#rtexts, the
question mark appears in the following versions: Semi-Weekly Examiner, 25 September 1849, (Mabbott text T
considered to be the final authorized version); the September 1848 Whittaker Manuscript (Mabbott text R); the J.
Lorimer Graham copy of The Raven, and Other Poems , with revisions 1846-49 (Mabbott text S); and Griswold’s
The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe (1850), 2:7-11 (Mabbott text W). The website lists these as texts 18, 16 and
17, and as the WORKS reprint.
21
Copley, Exclusus Amator, 80-81, with the translation as a footnote.
22
James notes that in some Roman paraclausithyra the lover addresses (begs or threatens) a person rather than the
door: the ianitor (door guard), the beloved, or even the vir (husband) himself (Learned Girls and Male Persuasion,
136 and n. 67).
23
Paul Allen Miller, Latin Erotic Elegy: An Anthology and Reader (London: Routledge, 2002), 127.
24
George H. Green observes that “the raven sits over the door, on the bust of Pallas Athene, symbolically barring
egress from the room” (“The Composition of ‘The Raven,’” Aberystwyth Studies 12 [1932]: 19-20).
25
David Halliburton speaks from the lover’s position: “The raven is a mediator, a means through which my
victimization may be brought about. The raven has the capacity to block off futurity, to bar me from any
reconciliation with the one for whom I grieve. This capacity has been conferred upon the bird; I did not give it to
him. But only I can activate it” (Edgar Allan Poe: A Phenomenological View (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press,
1973), 129).
 the lover who makes use of torches, so the light should be on his side of the door, in this case
within the room.

Conclusion

“The Raven” has many elements of a paraclausithyron with its focus on the lover’s lament for his
lost Lenore and his despairing pleas to the ianitor-bird on the bust above his door. It can also be
seen as reworking the conventions of the paraclausithyron since it is the exclusus amator who
creates the ianitor to torment himself and makes the door a barrier of death; furthermore, the
action is set not outside but inside a house, suggesting that the lover’s “inner” psychological
transformation is the poem’s true subject. Poe could thus be said to have applied a motif
esteemed by Ovid and Propertius as the essence of romantic poetry to “the most poetical topic in
the world,” the death of a beautiful woman.

Acknowledgements:

I would like to extend my indebtedness to Dr. Jana L. Argersinger for her insights and experise.
26
Again, Halliburton: “I will never again speak of the door without speaking of the raven, and will never regard the
door
Notes as anything but that which the bird is upon or above” (Edgar Allan Poe: A Phenomenological View, 125).
27
Rabun Taylor, “Watching the Skies: Janus, Auspication and the Shrine in the Roman Forum,” Memoirs of the
American Academy in Rome 45 (2000): 1; Betty Rose Nagle, ed., Ovid's Fasti: Roman Holidays (Bloomington:
Indiana Univ. Press, 1995), 40-41.
28
Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed., s.v. “Janus, in Roman Religion.”
29
See Raffaele Pettazzoni, The All-knowing God (London: Taylor and Francis, 1978), 164.
30
For more on logical problems in “The Raven,” see Richards, “Outsourcing ‘The Raven,’” 209-10; and S. L.
Varnado, “Poe’s Raven Lore: A Source Note,” American Notes and Queries VII (November 1968): 36-37.
31
Ovid’s Metamorphoses, ed. Sir Samuel Garth, trans. John Dryden et al. (Ware, UK: Wordsworth Editions, 2001),
56-58.
14
For Copley, the essential topoi are “the lover’s passage through the streets, his repulse at the door, and his lament”:
“If these elements are present, either explicitly or by implication, the poem may properly be styled a
paraclausithyron. Accompanying these are certain optional elements, which may be included or omitted, as best
serves the poet’s purpose. These are drunkennes, the garland, the verses hung or written on the doorway, and the
lover’s vigil” (Exclusus Amator, 4). Of course, being repulsed at a door would presuppose a passage through the
streets to the girl’s house, so only the repulsion and the lament are crucial. Copley also notes that the
paraclausithyron “is subject to variation in treatment, depending on the genre employed and the interest of the poet”:
“It may be long, as in the elegy, or very brief, as in the epigram. One or more of the details of the story may be
omitted or assumed, or some individual feature may be singled out and given special prominence. Under the
circumstances it is difficult, if not impossible, to find a paraclausithyron which preserves the motif complete in all its
details” (Exclusus Amator, 1-2). Also see James, Learned Girls and Male Persuasion, 141.
32
T.S. Elliot, “From Poe to Valery,” Hudson Review II, 333 (Autumn 1949), quoted in Varnado, “Poe’s Raven
Lore,” 36-37: “Since there is nothing particularly saintly about the raven, if indeed the ominous bird is not wholly
the reverse, there can be no point in referring his origin to a period of saintliness, even if such a period can be
assumed to have existed. We have just heard the raven described as stately; but we are told presently that he is
ungainly, an attribute hardly to be reconciled, without a good deal of explanation, with stateliness.”
33
Ovid, Metamorphoses, 55-56, 58-59.
34
Varnado, “Poe’s Raven Lore,” 37.
35
Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 14, s.v. “Tonsure.”
36
Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed., s.v. “Aegis.”
37
Richards, “Outsourcing ‘The Raven,’” 210.
38
James A. Harrison, Life and Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. II (New York: Thomas P. Crowell and Co., 1902-
1903), 206-207 contains Poe’s observation: “My conception was that of the bracket candelabrum affixed against the
wall, high up above the door and bust, as is often seen in the English palaces, and even in some of the better houses
of New York.”
I would like to extend my indebtedness to Dr. Jana L. Argersinger for her insights and experise.

Notes