Ron & Bill's "It"

Yester-day I listened to the second disc in a two-disc set of Smokey Robinson & the Miracles.  It includes their first two albums and some bonus tracks.  I noticed something about "It," one of the bonus tracks.  It's credited to Ron & Bill, whom the liner notes explain are Ronald White and Smokey Robinson.  The first verse seems to take a lot of inspiration from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven."  It starts:

I was home last night tryin' to read a book
There was a knock on my door, so I took a look
But when I reached the door, there was no one there
Not on the porch or anywhere

The narrator of Poe's poem is also "ponder[ing]... / Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore" when "suddenly there came a tapping, / ... at my chamber door" (lines 1-4).  When he finally gets around to opening it, he finds "Darkness there, and nothing more" (line 23).

There aren't as many similarities in the rest of "It," but in the second verse the speaker/singer says that he "really wanted it for my pet," so it's clearly an animal and possibly a raven.  In the bridge, the "it" is rolled over and presumably killed by a train, yet in the third verse, it calls the speaker/singer on the telephone, and there's the same "Oh" phrase that marks its appearance in the first two verses.  There's some similarity between this and Poe's narrator's mentioning that the raven comes from "the Night's Plutonian shore" (lines 46 and 97).  Pluto is the god of the dead (in the Greek and Roman pantheons, as far as I can tell), so the raven's coming from the "Plutonian shore" seems to mean that it's come back from the dead, just like the "it" in Ron & Bill's song.