"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-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. 

 

         This poem is under the psychoanalytic theory because it reveals the unconscious works of human mind and how this affects the interaction of man to his surroundings. The use of the third person point of view (we, referred to townspeople) denotes how majority of the people were deceived by the appearance of other people. Richard Cory as a subject in the poem was being examined and judged by the people in terms of his achievement and wealth which are very common standard of judging a person. The adjectives being used in the poem is in exaggeration to emphasize the feeling of envy and admiration of the narrator (townspeople) towards Richard Cory. This also revealed how man’s mind differs in their perspectives. The people viewed Cory as a subject of perfection yet Cory himself is actually admitting that there is huge space in is a life- an emptiness that no one had ever seen. Committing suicide despite of the kind of status he had in life reflects is unrevealed sadness.