Page:The Raven; with literary and historical commentary.djvu/21

 Rh Poe's days, and that either of those attributes would have sufficed to repel him—whose search was ever after the outré—the bizarre. But the truth was Poe found as the most distinctive—the only salient—feature in his contemporary's poem the refrain,

"Thou art lost to me forever, Isadore."

Naturally, Poe's genius impelled him to improve upon the simple repetend: "I considered it," he says, "with regard to its susceptibility of improvement, and soon saw it to be in a primitive condition. As commonly used the refrain, or burden, not only is limited to lyric verse, but depends for its impression upon the force of monotone—both in sound and thought. The pleasure is deduced solely from the sense of identity—of repetition. I resolved to diversify, and so heighten the effect, by adhering in general to the monotone of sound, while I continually varied that of thought: that is to say, I determined to produce continuously novel effects, by the variation of the application of the refrain—the refrain itself remaining, for the most part, unvaried.

"These points being settled," continues Poe, "I next bethought me of the nature of my refrain. Since its application was to be repeatedly varied it was clear that the refrain itself must be brief, for there would have been an insurmountable difficulty in frequent variations of application in any sentence of length. In proportion to the brevity of the sentence would of course be the facility of the variation. This led me at once to a single word as the best refrain.

"The question now arose," pursues the poet, "as to the character of the word. Having made up my mind to a refrain, the division of the poem into stanzas