There are two major avenues for interpreting “The Raven.” The first reads the poem as wholly literal: a raven appears in (or is summoned to) the chamber of a grieving man. The raven may be a supernatural being; ravens have historically been seen as birds of ill omen in various cultures, and in western culture are often linked with the Devil. In his grief the speaker is reading books of “forgotten lore.” Could they be related to witchcraft or magic? Perhaps he is trying to mitigate his sadness by reading spells to summon the dead. Perhaps he has succeeded; we never learn who first knocked “gently […] faintly” at the chamber door. Poe keeps the reader on tenterhooks about the supernatural possibilities in stanza 5 with the spoken word “Lenore,” which ends the line. Until the next line’s phrase “This I whispered,” we aren’t sure who has spoken: the speaker, or someone else.

It is also possible to read the poem literally and to understand the raven as merely an animal rather than a supernatural presence. Even the most fantastical elements of the raven’s arrival—that it knocks on the window, that it enters the room and refuses to leave—would not have been too outlandish to the nineteenth-century reader, who would have been familiar enough with animals trying to escape the winter cold.