In “The Masque of the Red Death” Poe uses a great symbolic work to depict fear of death and its inevitability for people. He has shown the unity of effect in the poem. According to Fletcher, he portrayed death in a form that destroys all the lifesaving plans of people in the kingdom. However, the poem lacks the realistic aspect of life, and it reflects the profound sense of horror among people. Poe’s short story ended with lines that narrated failure of rescue from death which is “like a thief in the night” (30). Therefore, he has shown psychological obsession in the form of horrific aspects of death.
On the other hand, Poe also uses symbols in “The Raven” to describe a never-ending remembrance and mourning caused to him by the death of his beloved. He depicted a sense of persistent devotion for the commemoration of Lenore and rejected the possibility of forgetting his love. Poe has used the short story as a symbol of memory and grief by quoting his words ‘nevermore.’ He has used the most appealing topic in his poem “The Raven,” which is the death of a young and beautiful woman (Fletcher). Such death has created unhealable pains for the narrator that will always make him depressing.
Similarly, the use of imagery and color is also evident in the short stories. For instance, in “The Masque of the Red Death,” there are seven rooms in the abbey and all were decorated in different styles and colors that symbolize different aspects of life and its progression. Rooms extended from east to west, and there was also a huge and scary clock in one of them. Once Prospero confronted a stranger in the seventh room of the abbey called the death room, he starts to follow that stranger and faces death. When other nobles also came to see Prince and stranger in Abbey, they noted that Red Death was not in any tangible form, and there was nothing beneath the mask. Red Death also chased them and led them to die despite their efforts to protect themselves from the plague.
Compared to “The Masque of the Red Death,” more images of violence and blood are depicted in “The Raven.” As Fletcher notes, it has displayed a clear picture of the narrator’s emotions and mind through a reflection of haunting and low-spirited personality. Towards that end, the story illustrates significant imagery to reveal the characteristics of Poe’s funs to facilitate an effective merging of several diverse stories into one image.
Work Cited
Fletcher, Richard M. The Stylistic Development of Edgar Allan Poe. De Gruyter Mouton, 2018.