[link to original on tumblr]
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The other thing I noticed when I listened to Tales of Mystery and Imagination a few days ago is in "(The System of) Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether." I'd previously noted that the melody from "The Raven" appears near the end, but it wasn't until now that I realized the implications of its reappearance.
It's not really revealed in the APP song (although looking at the lyrics just now, I noticed that the line "At the far end of your tether" Spoonerizes "Tarr" and "Fether" to "far" and "tether" [albeit missing an R]), but in the Poe story "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether," the narrator comes across a party in a house, and he later discovers that the house is an asylum and that the party-goers are the inmates who have escaped their cells (I read it about two years ago, so I might have a few things wrong, but that's the basic story).
The significance here is that "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether" involves an asylum. Since the melody from "The Raven" reappears at the end of the APP song, it indicates either that the singer/speaker of "The Raven" was so overcome by the bird that he's now in the asylum or - based only on the APP lyrics and disregarding Poe's story - the titular system is something that the singer/speaker of "The Raven" is trying to benefit by. Of course, it could be both too (or neither).
