How can you compare and contrast "The Masque of the Red Death" and "The Raven"?

What an interesting question. I must admit, I don't
automatically connect these two texts together when I think of Poe's fiction. Clearly,
there appear to be more differences than similarities, such as the way in which one is a
poem and the other is a short story, one is written in the first person and the other is
written from the omniscient point of view. However, having said this, I think one
connection we can make between them is the way in which both texts concern man's attempt
to escape death and its impact, and the depressing failure with which such escape
attempts are met.

In "The Raven," for example, the speaker
is trying to desperately get over the death of his beloved Lenore. However, the
appearance of the raven and the sinister way in which the speaker tortures himself by
expressing his own doubts and his own grief about her death clearly indicates that the
impact of her death upon the speaker is not something that he will be able to shake off
lightly and forget about. Consider how the poem concludes with a description of the
raven and its impact on the speaker:

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And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's
that is dreaming,

And the lamplight 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!

Clearly
the grim realities of death are something that will haunt the speaker for the rest of
his life. They are not soemthing from which he can
escape.

In the same way, "The Masque of the Red Death"
concerns the futile attempt of Prince Prospero to cheat death and escape the plague that
is ravaging the country. Note the scenario that is
given:

When
his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and
lighthearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these
retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys... The courtiers, having
entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts. They resolved to leave
means neither of ingress or egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from
within... With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to the
contagion.

The story is of
the attempt to cheat death, and of its ultimate failure, as death himself, personified
in the figure wearing the mummer's mask, appears as the masque and lays waste to all
inside. The final, apocryphal paragraph of the tale makes clear the way that death
cannot be cheated or gainsaid by its reference to the "illimitable dominion" of
"Darkness and Decay" over this land.