What Did The Raven Quoth In Edgar Allan Poe's Poem?

In Poe's most famous poem, "The Raven," a man grieving for his dead beloved, Lenore, hears a tapping at his window "Once upon a midnight dreary" in cold December.
At first, the man thinks it is the ghost of Lenore, but when he throws open his chamber door, there, sitting on a bust of Pallas (Athena, Greek goddess of wisdom) is a large "Ghastly, grim, and ancient" raven. When the man demands the birds' name, it croaks, "Nevermore."
Astounded, the man reassures himself that a bird's utterances "little meaning, little relevancy bore." But in his desperate grieving, he decides the bird must be an emissary from hell and decides to test it with another question.
He ask the "grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore" "is there balm in Gilead?" -- a potion of forgetfulness from Greek mythology -- to release him from his thoughts of Lenore, and if he might, after death, once more clasp her in his arms.
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."
Enraged, the man shrieks at the Raven, damning it to hell, to which it replies, "Nevermore." The bird then becomes a permanent fixture in his imagination, taunting him with his own mortality and condemning him to eternal grieving.
Did the Raven really talk? Ravens are master mimics of any species' verbalizations, including those of humans.
Poe's poem is so well-known that the football team of his hometown, Baltimore, Maryland, is called the Ravens.