The Casque of Amontillado, The Raven, and Lenore -- Blog 14

Edgar Allen Poe is one of the most favored poets in my household—William Ernest Henley takes the top place for me because of “Invictus”, but I digress—because, mostly, of my fiancée’s obsession with ravens, crows, and goth culture. My first experience will Poe was in Challenge Reading (think Honor’s English) in the sixth grade. We read Tell-Tale Heart and it terrified my little sixth-grade mind, but I loved every second of it. The dark, gritty nature of most of Poe’s writings inspired the tone of a number of my own short stories, especially those dealing with modern mythologies or superstitious ideas, e.g. angels, demons, ghost, magic, etc.

For today’s reading, I revisited The Casque of Amontillado, as well as “The Raven” and “Lenore.” In The Casque of Amontillado, the narrator takes his friend, Fortunato, into the crypt to look for a cask of Amontillado wine. As they traverse the long crypt, the narrator beseeches Fortunato to return to the party, for a number of reasons, but Fortunato pushes them on. As the story concludes, the reader realizes that the narrator had no intention of bringing Fortunato back. He chains Fortunato to the wall and builds a wall, trapping him in a small recess at the end of the crypt. In that crypt, Fortunato eventually dies, in pace requiescat. The Casque of Amontillado is a great text because the end is almost a plot twist. It hints that the narrator and Fortunato are not as close as the latter seems to think, but his assassination comes nearly as a surprise. In the classroom, this text could be used in a lesson about subtlety and plot twists.


“The Raven” and “Lenore” go hand in hand, since, presumably, the speaker of both is the same. “Lenore” tells the story of the death of the titular character as told by her lover or admirer soon after her death. “The Raven” revisits the same speaker later as Lenore’s death torments him. At least one of these poems should be included in every poetry unit. They are both captivating, full of things to discuss, and well written.

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