Quoth the Hippo, “Nevermore.”
The Raven, by Edgar Allan Poe, is noted for the solemn symmetry of its verse, the dreamy repetitive rhyme scheme and meter, its haunting sing-song pace that seems to imprison the speaker’s mounting hysteria, the pervading sense of great feelings submerged beneath the surface as though the whole terrestrial weight of the world lay upon the narrator’s shoulders.
Who can forget the ebony bird of ‘grave and stern decorum,’ the bird of the title, issuing his one word response, over and over?
“Nevermore!”
Poe shows his genius in these and many other ways, but particularly in his choice of animals.
Consider his situation as he sat down to write the poem.
Much is on his mind, but near the top of the list is to sketch out his cast of characters.
“OK, I’ve got this fellow, a bit of a sad sack if you want to know the truth, but who is he talking to?”
And then it came to him!
“An animal, yes, a dialogue with an animal, yes! I think I’m on to something! Somehow representing the brute and utter nonresponsiveness of Nature to the things of man! But which animal? Which? Which? Which?!!”
Even in his internal dialogues the lad was given to repetition and exclamation points.
This comes with the territory with our friend Edgar. He sometimes in fact would emit a string of !!!!!’s entirely free-standing of any words altogether.
We may picture the animal kingdom at about this time as a crowd of varied species all crowding forward with their hands, wings, forelegs, paws, or in the case of bats or iguanas, their clawed appendages, raised hopefully.
“Choose me! Choose me!” they cry, having themselves been infected with the whole exclamation point thing.
It was an unusually rich opportunity for PR status and a shot at the limelight.
I mean, do you think we’d be talking about a raven now if he hadn’t appeared in the poem under discussion?
Branding is everything in these situations. You have to present yourself in a bold, memorable way and extend the reach of your influence so that the next time a casting director is looking around for a spokesanimal he snaps his finger and tells his assistant, “Get me that zebra who made such a splash on that denture commercial! I think she’d be great for this!”
We can consider the varied specimens as contestants in these dance or singing or cooking contests you see on the television all the time.
They’ve been wandering in the darkness all these years and wondering if their talents were ever going to be recognized. For the longest time only they have been aware of their own genius; now is their time to unveil it before a paying audience.
The number of animals and the various sub-categories under the main categories in the world is a long one however.
Poe was generally a tender-hearted fellow and no doubt wished to give everyone their fair shot, which made for a long audition process.
What about “Quoth the walrus ‘nevermore’”?
He ponders. How would that come across? He invites the good fellow in.
Poe, with his finely tuned ear for the rise and fall of the English language, the underlying cadences of speech, would have carefully considered the range of noises that a walrus can make with his deep set vibrating vocal cord.
His reputation — the walrus’s, not Poe’s — suggests a repertoire limited to growls, bellows, and grunts. ‘Explosive harsh barks’ would be another way to put it.
Don’t be deceived by the common wisdom, my friend.
As it turns out the crafty fellow has a range belied by his somewhat ordinary or working man appearance.
Generated within inflatable sacs called pharyngeal pouches located on either side of the animal’s esophagus, walruses can project delicate bell tones and whistles. Did you know that? Whistles! He’s a veritable soundtrack to the latest video game!
This exclamation point this catching! Isn’t it?!!!
But perhaps the walrus isn’t quite it.
“We were looking for something a little more urban,” Poe might explain. “More in keeping with a mournful late Victorian dirge-like, droning, elegy set in a decaying cemetery overgrown with moss. Great stuff though! Make sure you leave your card!”
Brushtail possums have a bit of a reputation as voice artists. These small marsupials pack a wallop far above their weight class, providing in an audition setting a revving chortle which resembles nothing so much as the noises made by broken machinery. “Rrrrr, rrrrrr, rrrrr, clunk,” that type of thing.
“Is there something there?” Poe asks himself, “this broken machinery thing? I mean it is heartbreaking to go out to the driveway on a freezing winter morning and sit and try to start the car, and try and try and try to start the car!, and get nothing but that grinding sound, which nonetheless is better than that clicking sound! Is that a good effect for what I’m trying to get across in this poem?”
Let us suppose that the brushtail possums also do not make the cut, hanging with the walrus backstage or in one of those hallways where they film you leaving the building, trying to show some grace in defeat, but having a damned hard time of it. Excuse me, having a damned hard time of it!
Piranhas have a unique menacing growl, and koala bears pith their vocalizations so low that they sound like small dinosaurs, as they can not only use their larynx like humans but also have special folds in their nose similar to dolphins. Neither, unfortunately, quite put it across as Poe has heard the poem in his inner ear.
Besides, both piranhas and koala bears would be a perfect disaster to the rhyme scheme. These are animals that are hard to rhyme to! Piñata is the only thing that comes close for the hopeful if murderous fish, and koala bears sounds far too close to cola wars to maintain the sense of solemnity so central to the poem.
A lot of animals just freeze in an audition situation and don’t say a thing. I know the clam did for one.
The elephant would bring a certain mournful gravity to the proceedings, there’s no denying that, but considering that an elephant’s larynx is eight time larger than a human’s there would be a disconnect in the volume levels, with the human speaker going on in what can be called a tone of muffled hysteria and the elephant trumpeting his reply, “NEVERMORE!!!” more or less blowing the speaker out of the other side of the room.
He gives it a try perhaps, but the big fellow just overwhelms, just overwhelms the space set aside for this mournfully mocking, senselessly repeating creature.
About now Poe is entering the deep hysterical state of someone who has to make a quick decision if the damned poem is going to get written at all, and this is a fellow who starts pretty danged hysterical right out of the box if you want to know the truth, and he considers the screech of bats (too obvious), the cluck of chickens (inappropriately scolding), the scream of chimpanzees (too much, just too much), the moo of cows (lacks underlying malice), the click of dolphins (annoying the first time you hear, absolutely drives you bonkers over the course of a longish poem), the quack of a duck (inadvertently humorous), the hee haws bray of the donkey (umm, no), the maniacal laugh of the jackal (not bad, not bad, but the speaker in the poem already has more or less cornered the market on maniacal laughter), well, and so on, all the way through the whales and their ‘singing’ (if you want to call it that, I’ve never been convinced and it seems like Poe felt the same way.)
As he narrowed his search down to birds he could sense he was getting closer, and thought that he had found his leading man with the male ostrich who fill a sac in their long necks with air and produce a low-pitched hollow booming sound. Effective in its own way. But when Poe found that this only happens when in pursuit of the female of the species he backed right out of that one. Who needs that kind of backstage drama in a dirge-like poem more or less detailing the narrator’s descent into madness?
What a moment it must have been when the raven itself walked, or better put if you have ever seen one of these characters, waddled into the audition and put on his whole dark stately thing, his demonic fiery eye and what can only be called his limited vocabulary. A method actor if there ever was one, in the mold of Brando, that whole inarticulate brooding thing.
Good enough, I suppose, and nothing against a professional making a living, but it’s not unfair to say that the raven got the gig more or less because he was the only one left after all the others had been eliminated.
Still, it’s what we are left with, this ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the nightly shore, and I suppose Poe could have done worse, though I was always rooting for the walrus. He put a lot of himself into it. Seems a damned shame.
