The Crow and Ligeia ComparedAlthough the two stories are presented in different literary forms, the stories themselves deal with remarkably similar topics. So much so that it is possible to compare the style of each with only a small reference to the general themes of the two works. The Crow and Ligeia are both about loss. The narrators of both stories have lost the thing dearest to them, a woman of incomparable talent and beauty. The fact that the loss of this woman occurred for different reasons does not matter because it is how this loss manifests itself in the narrators' lives that provides the drama and intensity of the stories. In each we find that the narrator dwells on the woman he adored, and in each we find the peculiar way in which they approach this problem. In The Crow a man sits alone in his room reading ancient tomes, desperately trying to divert his mind from thoughts of his lost life. Lenore. But he hears sounds coming from outside the room which could perhaps be the ghost of his beloved. It is this irrational hope and fear that the limits of death can somehow be transcended and that he can once again speak with his love that begins to lead to his irrational behavior. When the protagonist Raven makes his appearance, the narrator is brought into such a fever of imagination and guilt. and fears perceiving the bird as an emissary from the beyond. This is how the constant repetition of "never again" is taken both as confirmation that Lenore's spirit lives on and as a denial of ever speaking to her again. The narrator still leaves us stuck with the bird projecting his own feelings of contempt and self-hatred onto it. Ligeia on the other hand is a more majestic version of the narrat...... middle of paper...... and what is identified with his current situation. When, after the raven seems to have disproved his fantasy of Lenore, he discovers that he hates the raven as an extension of himself and perhaps the raven is nothing more than the narrator's metaphor for himself or at least some darker aspect of his mind. The main difference between the two tales is that while Ligeia is expressed in very descriptive prose, the Crow makes much greater use of metaphor. That said, the style of the poem is very similar to that of the rhyming story and as such is also similar to the prose structure of the story. In conclusion it should be noted that both are excellent attempts to tackle a difficult and provocative topic and succeed in two similar but unique ways. It is the similarity that gives them both the power and stylistic differences that mark them as exceptional.