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Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean-favoured 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 in his head.
Edwin Arlington Robinson
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Tuesday, December 31, 2002 |
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Read poems about / on: summer, people, home, light, night, school, work
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Comments about this poem (Richard Cory
by
Edwin Arlington Robinson
) |
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Ruthie Bode (1/5/2012 2:33:00 AM)
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Perhaps Richard Cory was gay and closeted. After all, gay people are much more likely to commit suicide than straight people.
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Mike Zvirblis (8/4/2010 12:14:00 PM)
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I always felt Richard Cory had a physical problem. People see too much in this poem.
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M Erecke (4/6/2010 2:44:00 PM)
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Richard Corey is a poem of the narcissist. Caught in a double-bind in which he must present with exaggerated dignity and mastery in order to feel adequate, and having so sold himself, can never allow himself to be truly known for the inferior he secretly feels himself to be.
His ability to mimic the superior status he must maintain in order to feel justified results from his having sold it to himself almost completely-the better convince others... but at the expense of his true emotions, which are toxic with shame, and which he began repressing so long ago in order to receive the success he hoped would prove them wrong, that he has on most levels forgotten that long-past decision, become willfully ignorant of his corrosive interior life, and become doomed to a treadmill which he has slowly realized is not only leading nowhere, but which ensures through its repeated success that he will become less able to free himself from emotional torture, and self-actualize through self-expression, as his continued upward socioeconomic trajectory only makes it more impossible that his 'weakness' might be acceptable in the eyes of those who have grown to admire him.
Rather than ruin the false self he's created, and end up a despised imposter in the eyes of those whose admiration has become his one small solace, he opts for a last stroke of honesty-his admission of abject helplessness..and through suicide ensures that he will not remain to face the jeers of the admirers who have placed him on a pedestal, secretly hoping to see him fall.
He reduces the gulf between his emotional self and public self with one fell-swoop-anhilating both in what seems the only possible means of resolving the no longer tolerable stresses of subterfuge in the face of a problem only growing, rather than receding, at his lifelong efforts.
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Elliot F. Nieves (3/31/2010 4:37:00 PM)
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Richard Cory's major flaw as a character will never be known, except to himself. The reader can assign him whatever flaw he or she wishes, but it will always be after the fact of his killing himself at the end of the poem. To the reader, Richard Cory didn't have any visible or conceivable flaws, until he shockingly kills himself.
Well, he became sort of a legend, as the poem goes, by taking his own life, and not that of any of his ogleing, fellow humans. In another discussion of this poem during my college years, it was suggested that Richard Cory was a pimp! How about that!
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Sarah Loves (2/18/2010 11:56:00 PM)
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he can't commit suicide! he has child support to pay! !
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Yacov Mitchenko (2/18/2010 11:01:00 PM)
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This is well done, the sort of writing aspiring poets should study. Notice the clean-cut statements, the precision, concision, the utter lack of cliche. The message of the poem is clear: as happy and contented as one appears to be, the fact may be otherwise. I think one of the readers here who took issue with it, claiming it indulges in bashing people of high intellectual and social stature, misses the point. He reads too much into it. It's a simple poem relating a common situation. It talks about the rich often being secretly miserable, but it in no way suggests that the poor do not have their own masks.
I give this poem a 9, which says a lot. Typically, I don't rate poems on this site, as that might cause a great deal of resentment among amateurs. The fact is that a poem worthy of a 9, much less a 10, is about 1 in a 1000 - at least. The reason this poem doesn't get a 10 is not because of technique or grace in expression, but because it isn't sufficiently fecund. It lacks a necessary ambiguity, which would allow for multiple interpretations. The poem is just too clear for its own good, and a touch too simple. Still, I enjoy reading and re-reading it.
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Herman Chiu (2/18/2010 10:31:00 PM)
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What an excellent poem! There is evidence of a statement of great misconception among those that 'wish to be in his place'. The statement is unusually strong for a poem of its type, and the structure works well with the description of this Richard Cory. 'Blame it on the Girls', by Mika, carries a similar theme.
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Michael Pruchnicki (2/18/2010 3:45:00 PM)
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It's too bad that some of us on this site confuse Edwin Arlington Robinson with the poet from Illinois who wrote the verse epitaphs that he entitled SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY - Edgar Lee Masters! And the resident expert on this site who does NOT understand that 'quietly arrayed' suggests the kind of discreet and expensive tailor-made suits Cory wore that denoted his good taste in clothing. No sweatpants and gym shoes for Mr Cory! And how in the world does the phrase 'he glittered when he walked' imply the staggering gait of an alcoholic in his rambles about the town! Why must Cory's interior be so disheveled, as one writer notes? Perhaps he simply went home one calm summer night and executed the deed as calmly as he had lived his life. Readers who make comments like that resemble those in town who 'worked and waited for the light'! The hoi polloi, those who long for an equality that exists only in the socialist dreams that Straw alluded to!
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Shanice John (2/18/2010 2:56:00 PM)
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I remember my first timE reading this poem and i thought it was boring until i reached the end.E.A.Robinson made the poem seem predictable as he kept talking positively about Richard Cory making readers expect that the poem would end on on a positive note but it didn't.Readers are deceived by the poem's outcome as well as by Richard Cory.What a clever way to highlight the the theme of deceit.
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Sarah Fetzer (2/18/2010 12:11:00 PM)
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I love these named poems from E.A. Robinson that were inspired by tombstones. (This is just one of a set) . They are great interesting little reads often with a dark twist.
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