A first example of this fusion can be retraced back to Coleridge's Juvenile poem "The Raven. A Christmas Tale, Told By A School Boy To His Little Brothers And Sisters." Here Coleridge narrates the story of a weird raven who picked up an acorn fallen from a huge oak tree and "buried it straight/By the side of a river both deep and great." After long wanderings, the raven comes back to the river and with his mate builds a nest for their young ones, on the now grown up oak. One day, however, a woodsman arrives and with "an axe in his hand, not a word he spoke/but with many hem! And sturdy stroke,/At length he brought down the poor raven's own oak./His young ones were killed;/For they could not depart,/And their mother did die of a broken heart". At this point the raven's displaced revenge takes place: he follows the ship made from the oak wood and witnesses its wreck and the death of all the crew.

What is interesting in this poem is the fact that the figure of the raven is invested with a supernatural, weird agency, as well as with human traits. The poem narrates the story of the life of this raven without the mediation of any human voice.

On the one hand, the title suggests a direct connection with Poe's poem ; on the other hand, though, the poem also represents a kind of prelude to the "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" as far as the relation between human beings and nature in the guise of an animal is concerned. The eeriness of the relation between the human self and the animal as it is represented in the "Rime" constitutes the ground on which Wordsworth, in the second edition of the "Lyrical Ballads" moves the poem at the end of the collection. But I believe that it is exactly this eerie relation that connects the "Rime" to Poe's the Raven.

In both poems the encounter between the lyrical narrator and the figure of an animal stands as the origin of the poetic experience. The tale of the Ancient Mariner, however, is the product of a chain of ambiguous and unmotivated events which imply a wide range of narrative levels, whereas " The Raven" seems to reconnect itself to a single point of Coleridge's poem: that of the encounter between the lyrical self and the animal. That point which in the economy of the "Rime" is somewhat self-serving, in "The Raven" becomes the crucial theme which sets in motion all the other discursive levels. As a matter of fact, in the "Rime" the encounter between the Ancient Mariner and the albatross is framed within the experience of both an alienating compulsive self account and a likewise hallucinatory compulsive listening of the Wedding Guest. It seems to me that in Poe's mis-reading, this framework is discharged, and the compulsive quality of the relation affects directly the relationship between the human language and the animal voice.

I would like to start by considering the contexts where such an encounter takes place. In the "Rime" this meeting occurs during a travel to a distant land which frames it into a temporal and spatial depth. The poem opens with the Ancient Mariner sailing out the harbour and gradually approaching an unknown space where he comes across the albatross. Only when he reaches the equator do the natural elements begin to show a mysterious and adverse countenance with the "tyrannous STORM-BLAST".

There, when the Ancient Mariner already finds himself in a distant and weird place, the albatross appears on the scene: "At length did cross an albatross". This appearance, sudden yet strangely expected ("at length"), immediately shows its symbolic quality: "As if it had been a Christian soul/We hailed it in God's name".

Differently from the Ancient Mariner, the lyrical self of "The Raven" does not need to undertake such a long journey to meet the unknown and the uncanny. The disturbing appearance of the raven is framed within a domestic context, where death, however, has already left its mark, and where the originating experience of this self is that of the violent parting and loss of the beloved one. In the guise of a raven, the uncanny easily enters the every-day and familiar sphere of existence of the self, as if its original place were in the dark which wraps up the house, just beyond the domestic threshold.

Now, I would like to focus my attention on the relation which the two narrators and the animals establish between each-other, because from there two radically different poetic discourses develop. When the Ancient Mariner comes across the albatross, a change has already taken place in him, and the killing of the animal is the consequence of it. This killing also marks the beginning of a new journey which starts under the recollection of the dead albatross: "But no sweet bird did follow,/Nor any day for food or play/Came to the mariner's hollo!"

Furthermore, the evil deed of the Ancient Mariner is not directly represented by the tale but it is filtered by the words of the Wedding Guest who reads the consequences that such an act has pictured into the Mariner's face. The different interpretations that the mariners give of the albatross - at the beginning it is the bird of "good omen", "that made the breeze to blow"; then it becomes a symbol of misfortune "the bird/that brought the fog and mist"; and finally it transcends into a symbol of innocence and salvation "Instead of the cross, the Albatross/About my neck was hung" - show how from the very beginning the albatross has been regarded as a shifting signifier, which makes a univocal interpretation impossible. The ambiguous and apparently unmotivated killing of the albatross now casts a demonic shadow on the slow journey back of the Mariner and of his mates. After the journey into distant lands, the experience of the violent death of the animal constitutes a further threshold which, once crossed, opens to the Mariner the dimension of silence and absence.

It is the encounter and the successive killing of the animal, however, that set in motion the process which eventually leads to the birth of the poetical voice of the Ancient Mariner and to the tale, compulsively repeated, of the origin of this voice. Once the ship has again arrived nearby the equator, the wind which has so far pushed the ship northwest, along the back course, calms down, and the ship enters a <<silent sea>>, which is a prelude to the silence and to the death that are taking over the whole ship. The natural elements now change, showing a horrific and threatening aspect, and in the effort to read them and interpret the signs of their change, the mariners find in the killing of the albatross a possible cause of what is now happening to them.

After the change in the aspect of the natural elements, now an uncanny silence seizes the men, whose throats get so dry for burning thirst that they are deprived of the faculty of speech. As in the first section of the poem the rushing in of an impetuous storm-wind marked the beginning of a journey within the journey towards the demonic, now the dropping of the wind becomes a metaphor for the self's loss of the power to articulate language and express itself. The violent extinction of the animal's life produces as its immediate effect the silence of the self in the natural context.

With an act of self-vampirism, as Susan Eilenberg shows, the Ancient Mariner breaks the absolute stillness in which the ship was trapped, and finds anew, but only for a few moments, the power of speech: "I bit my arm, I sucked the blood,/And cried, a sail a sail!" But his words only foretell the approach of a more radical experience: that of life in death and death in life; of life in the dimension of pure negativity - "The game is done! I've won I've won!" Prisoner of "Life in Death", the Ancient Mariner goes through the dimension of negativity in all its forms: from speechlessness, to the death of all his mates, to absolute solitude- "Alone, alone, all, all alone/Alone on a wide, wide sea".

At this point, when nature acquires a supernatural aspect, the spell is broken, and the Mariner recovers his power of speech, also discharging himself of the albatross which was hanging at his neck. Now that the ghostly corpse of the animal has vanished away, and that the mariner is again able to speak, the wind too lets hear its sound. But it is a strange wind which starts anew to push the ship: "And soon I heard a roaring wind:/It did not come anear;/But with its sound it shook the sails."

Also the voice that the Mariner has now recovered is no longer the same. The experience of negativity has caused the death of his human voice and the birth of the poetic one. When the Hermit asks the Mariner "What manner of man art thou?" He answers with a voice which does not tell only his story and which is no longer in his control: "Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched/With a woeful agony,/Which forced me to begin my tale;/And then left me free."

The poetical language seems to spring out as a demonic voice, grounded in the experience of negativity which dissolves the historic identity of the Ancient Mariner and makes him a simple medium of his own voice: "Since then, at an uncertain hour,/That agony returns:/And till my ghastly tale is told,/This heart within me burns."

Now, let's take into consideration Poe's poem to see what kind of relationship connects the lyrical self to the figure of the animal. The irruption of the raven on the scene is preceded by six stanzas which describe the state of mind of the lyrical self and follow his thoughts which lead him to associate a noise outside his house with the memories of the "lost Lenore". Already under the effect of a melancholic mood and sinister thoughts, troubled by the repetition of this noise, the self imagines that it could be the knocking of a ghostly visit by Lenore. The "nothing more" with which each stanza closes, far from having a tranquilizing effect on his fervid imagination, evokes weird suggestions which go beyond the literal meaning.

The arrival of the animal inside the house of the narrator surprises him but at the same time calms him, because it accounts for the noise that until this moment has bewildered him. As if it were a real guest, the lyrical self asks the raven "what thy lordly name is". The surprise of hearing the animal speak an answer is caused not much by the fact that the raven uttered a cry, but by the fact that in such a cry he recognized the sound of a voice of the bird: "Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly". It is not the meaning of the word "nevermore" which bewilders the poetic self, but the relation which connects this word to the speaker. Although this word has been uttered by an animal, the self cannot help perceiving it as a voice, and not as a plain, natural sound.

When he hears the next "nevermore" uttered by the animal, the self begins to feel in that voice a will, an intention to mean, which cannot be resumed only in a natural dimension. To the ear of the self, the voice of the raven acquires a semiotic potentiality, and the animal cry begins to appear to him also as a medium of some possible meaning unknown to him.

By imagining that beyond the "nevermore" uttered by the raven there is a story whose protagonist is a human being - "some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster/Followed fast and followed faster till his song one burden bore-/Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore/Of Never - Nevermore" - the poetic self is seeking for an explanation capable of accounting not for the word itself, but for the very voice of the raven and its origin. He begins to interpret that word as if it were expressive in itself reaching, thus, a border line, where the human and the animal languages begin to merge.

While the lyrical self remains sitting "engaged in guessing but no syllable expressing/to the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom's core", a change takes place in him: his thought associates the word uttered by the raven with the recollections of his lost Lenore.

Once associated with these memories, the nevermore of the raven acquires a semantic articulation and becomes an expression of the interiority of the self, who repeats this casual word borrowed from an animal to voice, this time, his own feelings and state of mind: "Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!/Quoth the raven nevermore."

At this point the lyrical self falls into a state of alteration of his own consciousness and starts to address the raven as a supernatural presence. The dimension of horror opens the moment in which the self is no longer able to discern a difference between his voice and the animal voice, between the natural and instinctive nevermore of the raven and the nevermore as a correlative of his state of mind. From this point on, the voice of the animal pervades the conscience of the self from without, molding it and even voicing his expression. In the obsessive repetition of the nevermore, this cry-word almost vampirizes the self's consciousness.

Thus, the identity of the poetic self is gradually deconstructed by the raven's voice. The self experiences the animal voice as a form of estranged self expression, suffering a process of voiding of his own interiority. This demonic voice has appropriated from outside the intimate experience of the self, alienating it from him and opening an abyss inside his interiority: "And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor/Shall be lifted - nevermore!" The voice of the animal and the voice of the self are now unrecognizable one from the other.

It seems to me that on this point Poe brings Coleridge's poetical discourse to its extreme consequences, blurring the border between poetical language and natural language: the animal cry becomes also a poetical line.

When Poe in "The Philosophy of Composition" and in "The Poetic Principle" locates the focus of poetry on the effect as the result that a poem as a complex structure, as a product rather that as a living being must achieve, he clearly rejects the Coleridgean idea of poetic language. In this way, he metaphorically "murders" the romantic notion of the poem as a kind of living being, which is implicit in the "Rime". He also distorts to his own purposes the Coleridgean concept of imagination and rejects the idea of the poetic language as an entity in itself, with a history of its own, which Coleridge elaborates in the "Biographia Literaria". In Poe the poetic language no longer coincides with the unfolding of forms which the faculty of the imagination produces in its manifold workings. With these premises in mind, it can be argued that the moment when the poetic principle is no longer located in an expressive process, the philosophical gap between poetic language and "natural" language is completely shadowed.

I now would like to shift my attention on the deep but also uncanny relationship that both the poems establish among voice, poetical language and memory. Through the compulsion to repeat, the obsessive memory of the Ancient Mariner achieves a voice and a body. The voice of the Mariner relating his story is memory in presence, materialization of a past which, in the "duree " of the tale, revives one more time. The demonic power of such a memory lies in its coming out of the body of the mariner and articulating itself as a voice. Compelled to endlessly repeat his tale, the Mariner can never get rid of his haunting memories, but he is forever obliged to infuse new life in them. Only while he makes his demonic experience live again, he is allowed some moments of freedom from it in as much as his tale takes possession of somebody else's existence, finding a "guest" who receives it and lets it become part of his own consciousness. In this sense the writing itself of the poem appears to be an effort to exorcise that memories and their demonic, endless looming over the self. The memory that the "Rime" romantically evokes, even though embodied in the figure of the Ancient Mariner, is the poetic analogue of the story of the imagination which Coleridge sets out to retrace in the "Biographia Literaria". This is why to the Ancient Mariner memory is a power which in dehumanizing him, ultimately also seems to empower him.

Accordingly, also in "The Raven" the compulsion to repeat is at work, but in a radically different way. Here it mainly affects the figure of the animal and no longer constitutes the "engine" of the poetic process. It becomes a theme, one of the chief motives of the poem. It represents the deterministic bridge which links together the raven and the word "nevermore". Yet this theme also undergoes a deep transformation. At first sight, the memories of the self only work as a background here, as a kind of imaginary setting of the poetic discourse. But the motive of the struggle of the self with its own memory remains a central one also in this poem. If memory first appears only as a thematic backdrop of the poem, then, when the link which binds together the raven and the "nevermore" entangles also the self, memory seems to find a natural body in the raven and an expression in its animal voice. The memory of the self is projected onto something external to him, which has a life of its own. From this standpoint, the "Raven" also represents a form of struggle against this memory which has become alienated from the self and deeply undermines his own subjectivity.

Now I would like to compare directly the role which the two figures of the animal play in the poetical discourses of these poems. In the "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" the albatross does not have an autonomous status with regards to the tale of the Mariner, but is mirrored in the identity which the Mariner has acquired since that encounter. The albatross is not an external element with reference either to that identity, or to the poetic voice which narrates the tale.

In "The Raven", by contrast, the animal has its own autonomous and distinct voice, which entails a dialectic relation with the voice of the self, and which appears directly in the poetic language, by virtue of its own poetic status. If the identity of the Ancient Mariner is dissolved by the encounter with the albatross, such an identity is recovered, reconstructed in a meta-historic one. To the eyes of the Wedding Guest, the Mariner appears as an ancient figure, coming from a spatial and temporal alterity. The temporal rhetoric of the poem, the vision of the poetic language that this poem displays, encloses the Mariner in a cyclic time, fixing him into an endless repetition that makes him a mythical figure.

The protagonist of "The Raven" undergoes a parallel but different destiny. The struggle between the self and the raven undermines the coherence of the self's identity and displaces its centrality in the poem, in the moment in which he must measure himself with the presence of another voice. Enfeebled, bewildered and dispossessed of his own voice, the self cannot but accept the raven not only as an occasional "visitor", but as a permanent guest: "And the Raven never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting/On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;/And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,/And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;/And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor/Shall be lifted - nevermore!"

In this way the intrusion of the raven unhinges that process of development and expansion of the self into the natural element, which, to some extent, can be considered as a fundamental trait of the American self-understanding, from which many of its myths and cultural paradigms derived, such as the wilderness, the frontier, the selfhood and its infinite potentialities, through which America forges its own ideology of so called "liberal democratic individualism", as Myra Jehlen suggests in "American Incarnation". "The Raven" enacts a paradoxical inversion of this process, where the expansion does not take place from the self towards the outer world but the other way round. Here it is the domestic and even the inward space of the individual self which is deconstructed.

In 1845, the same year in which Poe writes "The Raven", Thoreau decides to go and live in the woods for some time, and there he begins to think of writing "Walden". He also narrates of encounters with wild animals and birds with a disquieting sound, but they never question the centrality of the individual self and its strength. In this case the self, leaving behind the civilized world, enters the reign of nature precisely to elaborate his own separation from it and assert his own identity.

Emerson's notion of the "oversoul" and his reliance in the possibility to read and interpret the natural signs so as to become a "transparent eyeball" show here a demonic face with regards to a self who is no longer so sure of his relevancy and constitutional fullness of significance and centrality. Nor can the self here appeal to a history capable of reassuring him of any cultural identity.

Finally, I would like to focus on the relation that the two figures of animal entail with the surrounding space. The albatross appears from a thick fog, amid a boundless space with indefinite borders; with a typically romantic spiral movement it descents from the sky and lands on the ship. During his journey from the sky to the ocean it metaphorically passes through the body of the Ancient Mariner, when it is hung to his neck, but in the end it leaves him and disappears into the abyss of the ocean. Differently, in "The Raven" the invasion of the domestic space operated by the bird implies a readjustment of that space which is now co-inhabited by both the self and the animal. This cohabitation of the individual self with a demonic presence compels him to a desperate struggle of negotiation: of the domestic space, of language, of memory and identity, even of the right to have an autonomous voice. The poem is the enactment of this struggle between two voices which, although different from each other, yet disclose a weird and disturbing likeness.