The speaker refers to the raven in a number of different ways. At one point, it is simply “an ebony bird” (line 42); at another, it is a...

When the bird first steps through the window into his room, the narrator calls it "a stately raven of the saintly days of yore" (line 38), and he specifically talks about the way it conducts itself like a person of status almost as though it expects the narrator to respect it.  In the eighth stanza, the narrator describes the bird as a "'Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the Nightly shore'" (46), referring to...

When the bird first steps through the window into his room, the narrator calls it "a stately raven of the saintly days of yore" (line 38), and he specifically talks about the way it conducts itself like a person of status almost as though it expects the narrator to respect it.  In the eighth stanza, the narrator describes the bird as a "'Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the Nightly shore'" (46), referring to the raven as though he has come from the land of death (which he refers to as "Night's Plutonian shore" in the next line). 

A few lines later, he calls the bird an "ungainly fowl" (49), and then describes it as "sitting lonely on the placid bust" of Pallas Athena above his chamber door (55).  Calling the bird "ungainly" at this point seems to contradict his earlier statement that the bird conducted itself with the mien of a lord or lady; now he sees the raven as awkward and clumsy whereas, before, he saw it as "stately."  As his imagination really starts to get going, the narrator refers to the bird as "a grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt and ominous bird of yore" (71).  He seems to imagine that the bird is perhaps from one of the "quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore" over which he was poring at the beginning of the poem (2). 

The narrator then suggests that the bird is really a "'devil'" (91), or a "'fiend'" (97).  When he begins to imagine that the bird is a prophet from death sent to tell him whether or not he will ever see his lost Lenore again in heaven, and the bird croaks its one-word answer, the narrator gets angry and begins to call him names.  Finally, the raven is described as having eyes like "a demon's that is dreaming" (105), as being a presence which "throws his shadow on the floor" (107) from which the narrator feels he can never escape.  Thus, the poem ends very ominously, with the narrator in the raven's dark shadow.