Poe's Beak

I love it when Poe's manic "The Raven" speaker proclaims "Take thy beak from out my heart!" Shouting at that dumb bird as it pluckily perches on the pale bust of Pallas, he delivers an all-time great line. The irony here is that it is he, the manic speaker, unknown to himself, that speaks from a position of wisdom and not the bird who symbolically clings to Athena's brain. If only the speaker could hear himself.

Clearly the bird is the antagonist here; surely the speaker is antagonized. And yet, right there, smack dab in the very middle of his stress, he announces his own remedy.

"Take thy beak from out my heart!"

And yet it appears that he is so focused on the bloody bird that he fails to consider his own advice. Or rather, he fails to assign the correct person with the power in this scenario. Clearly he suggests the bird holds the power:

"Hey bird, take your stupid beak out of here!"

But surely it is the speaker--and only the speaker--who truly holds that power:

"Hey bird, I'm hurtin' here. I need to move away from that beak!"

Poe nails despair. True despair, the kind generated by high doses of grief, begets despair if left unchecked. And that dang raven is no friend. His job isn't to antagonize our gentle speaker to peace; he isn't there to help our speaker "work through it." In fact, the raven is there to plunge the speaker ever further down the slope, ironically shouting his own cures at himself on the way down. Too off balance to notice, too self-loathing to care. Every bit a despairing man.

"Take thy beak from out my heart!"

It's like a poetic version of carbon monoxide poisoning: I was always told that you can't save yourself from carbon monoxide (a stern reminder from my Driver's Ed teacher, about safety first). If Poe is right, then he seems to suggest the same thing about real despair and how to truly defeat it.

Buddy system, people.

What is College Worth?

John Cassidy's article from The New Yorker, College Calculus: What's the real value of higher education?