"Richard Cory" by Edwin Arlington Robinson

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,

We people on the pavement looked at him:

He was a gentleman from sole to crown,

Clean favored and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,

And he was always human when he talked;

But still he fluttered pulses when he said,

"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich-- yes, richer than a king--

And admirably schooled in every grace:

In fine, we thought that he was everything

To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,

And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;

And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,

Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Many moons passed as I skimmed through thousands of poems trying to find the perfect one. They all were beautiful poems, but didn’t quite fit my taste. Then, I came across “Richard Cory” by Edwin Arlington Robinson. I am a fan of poems with a twist at the end, and this one was the best.

This poem is a story that follows the man that everyone thinks is perfect and has a life of luxury, but no one notices what is on the inside. Richard Cory is a renaissance man; he is gorgeous, slim, and wealthy. He is simply admired by all. I thought the poem was going to be a love fest of Richard Cory until I read the last stanza… he shot himself?!

The anaphora in this poem is the first two lines of the second stanza, Robinson repeats the phrase “And he was always…” which signals that he in fact was NOT always doing what the author suggests. If he was always quietly arrayed, then he was definitely not really that way; that is simply what is shown on the outside. The poem was written in rhyme with a constant end rhyme that continued throughout the entire poem.

This poem relates back to a theme we covered last year in British Literature that we discovered through “The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: Preparing a face to meet the faces that you meet.

Richard Cory skillfully prepared the face: he showed the people on the pavement what they wanted to see, but that simply wasn’t who he was. We are all masters at portraying a fake face, especially in situations where we aren’t comfortable. I like to think this was Richard Cory, he was simply not comfortable living the perfect life. He longed to be much more than the Richard Cory everyone knew and admired. Just like Prufrock, he had an internal struggle of being someone and wanting to be someone else. Prufrock was socially awkward and unliked by women, but he wanted to be adventurous, dangerous, and a ladies man. The author doesn’t give much insight as to what Richard Cory wanted to be, which is the iceburg effect that we talked about in class. We desperately want to know what he is thinking internally, but it isn’t realistic to be given all the information.  All we know is the pain drove him to the point of wanting to die.

This poem is heavy, but the content is so rich.