Reading Derek Ratcliffe’s wonderful ornithological, corvi-cultural study, The Raven, returns me to a closing query of my previous entry: “What sort of animal meaning . . . does [the raven] present in Coleridge’s “The Raven”? Ratcliffe quotes one R. Bosworth Smith:
A bird whose literary history begins with Cain, with Noah, and with Elijah, and
who gave his name to the Midianite chieftain Oreb; whose every action and cry
was observed and noted down, alike by the descendents of Romulus and the ancestors of
Rolf the Ganger; who occurs in every second play of Shakespeare; who forms the subject
of the most eerie poem of Edgar Alan Poe, and enlivens the pages of the Roderick
Random of Smollett, of the Rookwood of Ainsworth, of the Barnaby Rudge of Dickens,
is a bird whose historical and literary pre-eminence is unapproached. (cited Ratcliffe 9)