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).
The Concorde measured 204ft in length - stretching between six and ten inches in-flight due to heating of the airframe. She was painted in a specially developed white paint to accommodate these changes and to dissipate the heat generated by supersonic flight. The wingspan was 83ft 8ins - much less than conventional subsonic aircraft as the Concorde flied in a totally different way using "Vortex Lift" to achieve her exceptional performance. The height was 37ft 1ins. The characteristic droop nose was lowered to improve pilots' visibility for take-off and landing. Power Concorde's four engines - specially designed Rolls-Royce/ Snecma Olympus 593s - gave more than 38,000lbs of thrust each, with 'reheat'. This added fuel to the final stage of the engine to produce the extra power required for take-off and the transition to supersonic flight. They were the most powerful pure jet engines flying commercially. SpeedConcorde took off at 220 knots (250mph) (compared with 165 knots for most subsonic aircraft). She cruised at around 1350mph - more than twice the speed of sound - and at an altitude of up to 60,000 ft (over 11 miles high). A typical London to New York crossing would take a little less than three and a half hours as opposed to about eight hours for a subsonic flight. Travelling Westwards, the five-hour time difference meant Concorde effectively arrived before she left. She traveled "faster than the sun" . More than 2.5 million passengers have flown supersonically on British Airways' Concorde since she entered commercial service in 1976. The most frequent passenger, an oil company executive, clocked up almost 70 round trip transatlantic crossings a year.
On October 24, 2003 the Concorde made it’s last commercial flight from New York to London.
