The analysis of Richard Cory

The analysis of Richard Cory

Ⅰ

.

The poem

Richard Cory

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,

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.

Ⅱ

The author

——

Arlington Robinson

The poem is one work of Arlington Robinson and was first published in 1897

in

The Children of the Night.

Arlington

Robinson

is

an

American

poet,

who

was

born

in

the

village

of

Head Tide in the town of Alna, Maine, on December 22, 1869. He did not have a

happy childhood. He described his childhood in Maine as

late

1891,

at

the

age

of

21,

Edwin

entered

Harvard

University

as

a

special

student. He took classes in English, French, and Shakespeare, as well as one on

Anglo-Saxon. Edwin's father, Edward, died after Edwin's first year at Harvard.

Edwin returned to Harvard for a second year, but it was to be his last one as a

student there. He moved to New York, where he led a precarious existence as

an impoverished poet while cultivating friendships with other writers, artists,

and

would-be

intellectuals.

In

1896

he

self- published

his

first

book,

The

Torrent and the Night Before.

His second volume,

The Children of the Night

,

had a somewhat wider circulation. He won the Pulitzer Prize three times in the

1920s. Robinson died of cancer on April 6, 1935 in the New York Hospital (now

New York Cornell Hospital) in New York City.

Ⅲ

The background

“Richard Cory,” remains one of Robinson's most popular poems, recalls the economic

depression of 1893. At that

time, people could not afford meat and had a diet mainly

of bread. This hard- times experience made the townspeople even more aware

of Richard's difference from them, so much so that they treated him as royalty.

Ⅳ

The content of the poem

Although the people

were surprised that Richard came to town dressed “quietly” and

that he was “always human when he talked”, they nonetheless distanced themselves from him.

This distance is suggested by the narrator's words “crown,” “imperially,” “grace,” “fluttered

pulses,” and “glittered.” The townspeople never stopped to co

nsider why Richard dressed and

spoke the way he did, why he came to town when everyone else was there, or even why he

tried to make contact with them by saying “good morning.”

Richard was wealthy, but he was not rich at the life-core of himself. Despite

his efforts at communal connection, Richard's wealth isolated him from others.

He was alone. If the townspeople wished they were in his place because of his

wealth, he in turn wished he were one of them because they were rich in one

another's company. The townspeople failed to appreciate the value of their

mutual support of one another, their nurturing communal togetherness. So one

hot, breezeless summer night, Richard lay awake, unable to sleep or to stop

painful thoughts. Depressingly lonely, he ended his wealthy and miserable life.

The poem's reader is supposed to understand what the townspeople did not

understand about Richard's suicide: that there was a price, in a human rather

than in a monetary sense

, that he paid for being perceived to be “richer than a king.”

Ⅴ

The theme

The content of the poem is very impressing. It gives us a picture of the life

of a wealthy, gentle and well-behaved man, Richard Cory. He is the happiest

person in the world from other people

’

s perspectives. However, the suicide of

the

“

happiest

”

Richard Cory shows that people are not always who they appear

to be. Moreover, the people that seem to have it all may still be emotionally

unstable and act irrationally such as committing suicide. P

eople cannot determine

another person’

s happiness by their appearance. Everyone has his own frustration

that he cannot make through in his life. So, money isn't everything. And this

poem makes one think about true happiness and what it entails. From the

outside one may appear to have everything but happiness does not come from

wealth, it comes from within oneself and the narrator didn't take the time to

really get to know Richard Cory enough to observe his inner thoughts. So, the

most important theme of the poem is about the importance of the spiritual life.

Ⅵ

The structure of the poem

Besides the content and the theme of the poem, we can feel the beauty of it

in every stanza.

There are 4 stanzas and each contains four lines and serves to

reveal a different piece of information.

The first stanza shows us the town

’

s consensus about Richard Cory,

“

he

was a gentle man from sole to crow, clean favored, and imperially slim

”

. the

people who admired Cory because of all he possessed personally and financially

did not expect such an act. To them he seemed to have everything worth living

for, while they struggled to put food on the table. The second stanza gives us

some information of his personality,

“quietly

arrayed

”

,

“

he was always human

when he talked

”

,

“

he glittered when he walked

”

.

Even though Cory was “quietly

arrayed,” not arrogant or haughty, and even though he chatted like a regular guy, still he made

people a little nervo

us when he addressed them, and he looked like gold as he

passed by