The Raven Comes A Tapping

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
'Tis some visitor,' I muttered, `tapping at my chamber door
Only this, and nothing more.

'Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow; - vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow - sorrow for the lost Lenore
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named Lenore
Nameless here for evermore.

Above we have the first 12 lines of "The Raven" which is a narrative poem by American writer and poet Edgar Allan Poe. It was published for the first time on January 29, 1845, in the New York Evening Mirror. Noted for its musicality, stylized language and supernatural atmosphere, it tells of the mysterious visit of a talking raven to a distraught lover, tracing the lover's slow descent into madness.

"The Raven", like other works by Poe such as "The Black Cat," "The Imp of the Perverse," and "The Tell-Tale Heart," is a study of guilt or "perverseness" (in Poe's own words, "The human thirst for self-torture"). Although we are told in those stories that the narrators have killed someone, in "The Raven" we are only told that the narrator (appropriate term for poetic voice) has lost his love, Lenore. (Lenore is imported from an earlier poem, "Lenore" (1831) which was itself a massive reworking of "A Pæan"; both are also about the death of a young woman).
The narrator believes that the raven is "from the night's plutonian shore," or a messenger from the afterlife because Pluto is the Roman god of the underworld (also known as Hades in Greek mythology).