Writing Task

You have read “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe and “The Cremation of Sam McGee” by Robert Service.  In both passages, the authors use tone to establish mood.  Write an essay identifying the mood of both passages and how it is established through the authors’ word choice.  Be sure to use specific evidence to support your response.

Student Response

“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,” Edgar Allen Poe’s chilling poem, “The Raven” is a tale about a man who is visited by a raven whom he speaks to, the raven miraculously responding, but with a single word – “Nevermore.” Speaking to the bird, the man asks his lost love, Lenore, causing the narrator to begin spiraling into a fit of insanity. In a similar story, “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” by Robert Service, two men are making their way west to venture for gold in Canada.  One of the men being a titular southerner, Sam McGee.  Coming from the south, he’s never liked the cold, and in his final hours, as he gave in to the frost, he asks his companion to cremate his remains.  The friend agrees and goes through with his plan, and when checking on the body during the cremation, he sees Sam inside shockingly responding that “Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it’s the first time I’ve been warm.”  In both passages, the author uses tone to establish mood through his choice of words.  

By his choice of words, Poe establishes negative, creepy connotations in his writing to allude to the dark nature of this tale. From the very first line in the poem, Poe begins painting this scene for us, “Once upon a midnight dreary.” A usual opening line in the gothic and horror genre is that of a ‘dark and stormy night.”  This line has been so classical and cliché because of the fact it successfully leads the reader to feel cold at an early point in the story, Poe just adds a gothic twist to his vocabulary to appeal the same way.  He continues on later in the story drifting into using more references to old Greek mythology and wording that we recognize as the writing of an older generation.  Modern gothic poetry and horror exist, but usually, gothic media tends to gravitate towards older settings.  In paragraph fourteen, when stating “Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!” usage of words like “thy” “hath” and “thee” consistently in the entirety of the poem and the usage of uncommon words that are used more in writing than speech emphasize a written feeling that makes the story seem almost surreal.  This surreality encapsulates the reader as much as the story itself does, the intentional choice of words making it almost seem creepier than it is.  

Using repetition of the preface’s differing meanings and his choice of words, Service illustrates his story’s surprising twist ending to alter the reader’s mood. In a story taking place on the icy Yukon plains ending in a raging fire compared to that of Hell, the temperature is an important factor for the author while writing.  Sensory imagery is present in both environments, starting at the beginning of the third stanza, for example.  “Talk of your cold!  Through the parka’s fold, it stabbed like a driven nail.”  The usage of the simile to compare the winter’s harshness to a nail driven through one’s body is an extreme that conveys just how the character must have felt.  On the other side of the spectrum in stanza eleven, “The flames just soared and the furnace roared-such a blaze you’d seldom see” conveys two ideas.  The warmth is such a shock from the now usual freezing atmosphere that we’ve grown used to while reading.  This shock backs how the usage of words like “roared” makes the scene seem more fantastical.  

Reading and writing are quite interesting things and vocabulary is a key point to how the story and its message are perceived.  An author’s choice of words can make or break the aesthetic of their tale, while Poe and Service are prime examples of doing it right.  The vocabulary in their poetry conveys appropriate connotations adhering to the overall vibe of their writing.

Writing Details

This is an 8th Grade response from a PorterHasClass 2019 student. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future student examples, articles of the week, and blog posts.

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