Which poem by Poe starts with 'Once upon a midnight dreary'?

The poem by Edgar Allan Poe that begins “Once upon a midnight dreary” is The Raven. First published on January 29, 1845, it became Poe’s most famous poem and one of the best-known works in American literature.

The poem follows an unnamed narrator mourning the loss of a woman named Lenore. On a bleak December night, a raven enters his chamber and perches above the door on a bust of Pallas, the ancient Greek goddess of wisdom. The bird repeatedly answers the narrator’s questions with the word “Nevermore.”

The opening phrase establishes the poem’s Gothic mood: midnight, winter, loneliness, and grief. Poe carefully combined musical repetition, internal rhyme, and theatrical imagery to make the narrator’s emotional collapse feel increasingly inevitable. The raven’s single word becomes a cruel echo of the narrator’s fear that he will never reunite with Lenore.

Lenore is the lost beloved within The Raven, not the title of the poem. Annabel Lee and The Bells are separate Poe poems, each with its own imagery and rhythm. The Raven was later discussed by Poe in his essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” published in 1846.