Page:The Raven; with literary and historical commentary.djvu/20

 6 "after sitting up late at study,—the thought of losing her who slept near him at his toil having suddenly crossed his mind in the stillness of midnight."

Here we have a statement which must have met Poe's gaze, and which establishes the first coincidence between the poems of Pike and of The Raven's author: both write a poem lamenting a lost love when, in fact, neither the one has lost his "Isadore" nor the other his "Lenore":—the grief is fictitious. In The Philosophy of Composition Poe states that he selected for the theme of his projected poem, "a lover lamenting his deceased mistress." Pike, we are told by Willis, in the statement certainly seen by Poe, wrote his lines "in the stillness of midnight," "after sitting up late at study," and the initial stanza of The Raven begins,—

The key-note has been struck, and all that follows is in due sequence. Poe, in his Philosophy of Composition, says that when he had determined upon writing his poem, "with the view of obtaining some artistic piquancy" in its construction, "some pivot upon which the whole structure might turn," he did not fail to at once notice that of all the usual effects, or points, adopted by writers of verse, "no one had been so universally employed as that of the refrain. The universality of its employment," he declared "sufficed to assure me of its intrinsic value, and spared me the necessity of submitting it to analysis." Now it may be noticed in passing that the refrain was neither universal—nor common, save with ballad makers—up to