Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.

Tolling Bells

Each of the speakers in “Lenore” reference the tolling of a bell in recognition of a death. Early in the poem, the chorus calls out, “Let the bell toll!” (line 2). Guy de Vere later commands, “Let no bell toll!” (line 22). These competing calls neatly encapsulate the conflict at the poem’s heart. Whereas the chorus wants to perform appropriately solemn funerary rites for Lenore, Guy de Vere doesn’t. However, the motif of the tolling bell also alludes to an essay written by the seventeenth-century English poet and scholar, John Donne. In this prose work, Donne coined what today remain two famous phrases: “No man is an island, entire of itself. . . . Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” This passage insists on the importance of remembering that we all belong to the human community. For this reason, every death should cause us to feel a sense of loss. This is the chorus’s basic message in the poem. When Guy de Vere resists it, he isolates himself, implicitly claiming that he’s an island and can survive on his own.

Funerary Songs

The poem’s speakers reference several types of funerary songs, which alternately lament or celebrate the dead. In the first stanza, the chorus calls for Guy de Vere to authorize “an anthem for the queenliest dead. . . . / A dirge for her the doubly dead in that she died so young” (lines 6–7). A dirge is a slow, mournful song intended to lament the dead. When Guy de Vere responds to the chorus, he rejects the dirge due to its solemnity. Instead, he references another type of funerary song when he asks, “How shall the ritual, then, be read?—the requiem how be sung[?]” (line 10). Like a dirge, a requiem is performed on behalf of the dead, but as a form of honor rather than a lament. Guy de Vere reiterates his emphasis on honoring the dead when, in the fourth stanza, he compares the dirge to a more celebratory song: “No dirge will I upraise, / But waft the angel on her flight with a Pæan of old days!” (lines 20–21). A paean (PEE-enn) is a song of enthusiastic praise or triumph. This is the only type of funerary song Guy de Vere will authorize, because he refuses to process his grief.