RICHARD CORY:
SO WHAT?
F. Scott Fitzgerald once remarked, "The very rich are different than you or I," to which Ernest Hemmingway, in a now-famous rejoinder, punched him in the stomach. No, he didn't, but he probably thought of it - you get the impression that Ernest Hemingway was always thinking about slugging somebody. His actual comeback was, "Yeah, they have more money." When they put their minds to it, these two literary giants could come off like a couple of real goobers sitting on a rail fence, wondering why it seems warmer where the sun shines.
The very rich are different than us, but we're not supposed to tell them that. They believe we think they're the same as us, only better. If you know a very rich person, for God's sake don't let on how much we hate them, and be sure to not mention how much we hope they're all secretly hiding chronic depression: they might get mad and take their charitable contributions and their beautiful enhanced children and their hilarious eight-thousand-dollar bicycle contraptions and go somewhere where they are really appreciated, some isolated island or a gated community, leaving us with just... well, with each other. It's because they trust our belief in basic equality that they hand out luxuries that are wildly off the scale for those of us who say our thanks with a card or a box of Whitman Samplers. "Thanks for the heads-up on boysenberry season," your rich friend might tell you. "Beaumont here will carpet your house."
The great thing about "Richard Cory" is not what it tells us about the rich with its surprise ending. That's just good magic: Edwin Arlington Robinson(or “EAR”) gets readers to follow his right hand, and then lowers the boom with his left.
No, the true mastery of this poem is the way it captures the attitude of us, making us all feel we are "people on the street." Robinson enlists all readers into the club when he talks about this situation from the collective point of view, as "we."
Everybody wants to be rich, but nobody wants to admit being rich. We expect the rich to be unhappy. Writers tend to present the unexpected; therefore, anyone who seems to have it easy must be cursed. It didn't take "Richard Cory" to teach us that, not when we've had Kennedy family being assassinated, crashing planes, and skiing into trees, all for our general amusement. It would be unseemly for rich people to say, "I've got lots of stuff, and I feel great. How about you?" No, the proper way to handle it is to tell people, "Despite my wealth, I've got problems too."
But then, unlike literature which balances the decadent world of those who just plain have too much against the honest working folk, "Richard Cory" lets readers in on a dirty little non-secret: poor people can be pretty big assholes themselves.
Get a look at the common people's involvement in this poem. In the first stanza, they "looked at him," not going near.
In the second stanza, "pulses are fluttered" when Cory talks. In substance, this is the same thing as saying that their hearts raced, although “fluttered” hints at romance, more than just excitement. They see him glittering. But there’s no indication that anyone says “good morning” back to Richard Cory.
The third stanza, in spite of its flowery language – “admirably,” “grace,” and “fine” – gets down to the substance of the matter: jealousy. We don’t want to be like Richard Cory, we don’t want to be near him, we want to take his place. Of course, we all know there is only room for one of us at the top. All of those starry eyes described before now have daggers shooting out of them.
But it’s the first two lines of the final stanza – not the last two, which are the ones that everyone remembers – that establish this poet’s place in the Poetry Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, where such immortals as “Dizzy” Angelou and Pee Wee Keats are enshrined.
Working is good. Waiting for the light is fine. Going without meat shows us to be strong-willed, hearty individuals. But cursing the paltry little bit of bread we can scrounge? Grumbling about what little we've got!? We people of the street aren't the humble, salt-of-the-earth types everyone wants to think we are. We're petty and self-loathing. By comparison, secretly depressed Richard Cory at least had the guts to take his fate into his own hand.
No one comes out of this poem looking good. Money doesn't buy happiness, but poverty doesn't make one goodhearted, either. The best thing about this poem is that you can read it for its surprise ending and colorful language without ever having to realize just how evenly it dishes out doom.