[Verse 1]
Richmond raised him, parentless and poor,
his mother coughed to silence, he was two, and nothing more,
the foster mother followed, the same slow fading breath,
then his bride Virginia, courted again by death.
Grief became the inkwell that he kept on dipping into,
every stanza was a window to a face he used to know.
[Chorus]
Poe, the man who turned his mourning into sound,
Poe, the architect of midnight, gloom, and ground,
one bird, one word was all it took to prove
that sorrow wears a feather, and the feather learns to move.
[Verse 2]
January, eighteen forty-five, a paper hits the stand,
the Evening Mirror printed him and the city lost its hand —
by sunrise half of New York hummed the self-same eerie line,
parlor pianos borrowed him, mocked him, called him fine,
they paid him just a few thin dollars, barely covered rent,
but his name went farther, faster, than the money that they spent.
[Chorus]
Poe, the man who turned his mourning into sound,
Poe, the architect of midnight, gloom, and ground,
one bird, one word was all it took to prove
that sorrow wears a feather, and the feather learns to move.
[Verse 3]
Picture a scholar, "once upon a midnight dreary,"
the fire dying low, the purple curtains heavy, weary —
he grieves a woman gone, a name he calls Lenore,
when a tapping, gentle tapping, comes upon his chamber door.
In flew a raven, settled high, and answered clear and flat,
one word only — "Nevermore" — no feeling under that.
[Verse 4]
Critics called him bitter, called his vision strange and small,
yet students of the shadow learned to walk his darkened hall,
he mapped the human terror that the daylight tries to hide,
the guilt that beats beneath the floor, the voice that won't subside.
Baltimore would claim his end, a mystery in the rain,
found half-conscious, wearing someone else's clothes and pain,
no one knows the story of his final wandering days,
but the raven kept on calling through the fog's uncertain haze.
[Bridge]
Gothic is the gloom, the creak behind the wall,
an omen is the warning sign that whispers before the fall,
melancholy's sadness that won't ever loosen hold —
that's the chill Poe built from shadow, ink, and cold.
He first imagined a parrot perched beside the chair,
quick with chatter, but too light to carry despair,
so he kept the gift of speech and traded off the cheer —
a bird of old ill omen for a solitary tear.
[Outro]
One scholar, one candle, one answer, flat and stark,
a scavenger from the gallows, speaking from the dark,
Poe gave him just one word to drop like falling slate —
and the whole house learned to listen for the shape of "Nevermore."
[Final Chorus]
Poe, the man who turned his mourning into sound,
Poe, the architect of midnight, gloom, and ground,
one bird, one word was all it took to prove
that sorrow wears a feather, and the feather learns to move,
that sorrow wears a feather, and the feather learns to move.