Tom Kitchen Draft 1 of Essay 1 9 February 2008 The End of “Richard Cory”: Nothing in His Life Became Him So Much As the Leaving of It A real gentleman, even if he loses everything he owns, must show no emotion. It’s hard to imagine that E.A. Robinson’s poem, “Richard Cory,” would have remained in publication for as long as it has if it were not for the powerful surprise that the poet springs on the reader in the final line: revealing that Richard Cory—whom the narrator of the poem has taught us, in onlytwelve lines, both to admire and to envy—has valued his own life so little that he ends it with “a bullet through his head” (line 16). The mere fact of the suicide is not, it seems to me, enough to explain the feeling of shock that I and so many other readers have felt upon reading this last line; while it is always sorrowful to contemplate a human being so wretched and unhappy with life as to seek self-destruction, theact of suicide is often enough heard and spoken of in our culture, so that it’s hard to imagine anyone who isn’t used to the concept, even if it is widely deplored. No, it seems to me that there must be something else to the surprise; and, since Robinson spends three-quarters of the poem persuading us that Richard Cory is a figure to “make us wish that we were in his place” (12), where I want to start looking for it is in the way that the poet uses our emotions and expectations to put us there. One of the most striking things about the poem is how its narrator chooses to speak in the first person plural. This speaker unites himself with the entire community with the phrase, “[w]e people on the pavement” (2). Everyone in that town, we are told, sees and reacts to Richard Cory in exactly the same way. This includes the narrator, of course, but, in an interesting way, it seems to include us readers, as well. Since literally everyone sees the same thing, we readers are compelled to see that, too, and discouraged from even imagining that any other...