Citizenship & Commitment.

“The Raven” is one of the most famous poems by American author Edgar Allan Poe, but its also one of his darkest, and for a good reason.

The values we were set to compare with this story were citizenship and commitment, and I genuinely feel like citizenship doesn't have anything to do with this poem, mainly because the topics that are chosen for this poem don't have anything to do with citizenship or what citizenship stands for, and also because we don’t really know the place where the speaker lives, and we also don’t know what or how strong are his feelings for the place he lives in, or if he’s ever been interested in the health and progress of town, or city, or country, the information is just plainly not available for our discussion or even present enough so that we can deduct it, and even if we only had even the name of the place in which the speaker lived, the poem presents us with far more important and relevant topics that would probably overshadow everything we could say about how the speaker feels about the place where he lives.

Commitment is a different story, because commitment is one of the values that are needed for a person to have a good relationship with another person, and in this story we see that the speaker held a very dear relationship with his lover, Lenore, who sadly has passed away, and obviously left the speaker with a clear toll on his emotions and probably his mental health too.  So, from this we can infer that in the relationship that the speaker and Lenore had, there was probably some commitment, even from one of the sides, or even both; we could support this argument in the fact that since Lenore had a really big impact on the speaker’s life, they must have had a relationship that included some sort of form of commitment, and even if it did not, the speaker still feels some sense of this value even after Lenore’s passing, because she affected his life in such a deep and meaningful way that the speaker still thinks about her, talks about her, worries about her, and still looks toward meeting her again some day.

We could also try to compare this value to other events on this story, like how the raven “committed” itself to the speaker, and how he would not leave his side, or his chamber; at least that is what the speaker believes of the raven, since he believes the raven responded that it shall not leave, even when the speaker demands the bird to exit his house, after the speaker got incredibly mad at the bird.

Talking more about this two values (specially citizenship) and how I found them in the poem would probably be forcing them too much on a poem that just doesn’t display this kind of characteristics that much, but rather decides to take on the topics of obsession and guilt, and death (ones which are displayed in a great manner in the poem, by the way) and many other things that stray very far away from what the two values presented mean, citizenship more than commitment, though.

In my opinion a different set of values would have provided me with more material to make a deeper and more meaningful connection with the poem, who itself has a  very closed group of topics but from whom we can infer many other values discovered upon reflection, yet the value of commitment gave an opportunity to explore beyond to the relationship that the speaker might have held with Lenore, a relationship that was incredibly crucial to this poem.