[In the following essay, Burkhart analyzes the role of word choice in “Richard Cory,” pointing out that Robinson creates a series of contrasts between Cory and the townspeople as well as between Cory's inward and outward selves.]

The paradox on which [Edwin Arlington Robinson's] “Richard Cory” is constructed is one familiar enough that the poem itself may seem to lack poetic “surprise,” despite the neatness of the anecdote and the effectively colloquial, almost vulgar, terseness with which Robinson concludes it. The surprise of the poem seems closer to O. Henry than to poetry. One can treat it as no more than an exemplum, and it lends itself to several clichés—appearances are deceiving, the grass is always greener, etc.—so easily that it may seem merely to point a prosaic and tritely ironic moral and to lack all richness of implication.

Without quite dismissing the obtrusive didacticism of the poem, however, one can find in Robinson's methods an organic scheme which enhances the interest of it and enlarges its intention considerably. The entire poem is built upon the use of contrasts which support the fundamental contrast between the splendid appearance of Richard Cory's life and the harsh reality of whatever disease of the soul led him to end it.

Cory is made a king, an isolated and remote figure in contrast to the people of the town: he is “imperially slim,” “crown” is connotative in “from sole to crown,” he “glittered when he walked,” he is even “richer than a king.” So superhumanly grand does he seem that the spokesman of the townspeople finds it necessary to point out that “he was always human.” The townspeople, themselves “on the pavement,” with its suggestion of poverty and debasement relative to Cory, lead too-human lives of monotonous work (“So on we worked”) and ordinary deprivation (“went without the meat, and cursed the bread”).

The townspeople are passive, and Cory is active—the irony of his activity being that it culminates in the deed of suicide. Cory moves in a variety of ways throughout the poem: he goes downtown, he talks, he glitters, he walks, he goes home, he shoots himself. The townspeople, however, are relatively stationary; arrested by Cory's appearance, they stand on the pavement to look at him, they wait, they go without. What action they do engage in is so monotonous as to contrast with the variety and apparent independence of Cory's actions: “So on we worked.” The effect of his movement on them is to grant them, in a pathetic echo of his own glittering progress a momentary and miniature activity: Cory “fluttered” their “pulses.” Their admiration and envy of Cory is static, a familiar illusion which brightens their drab lives.

Probably the most operative word in the poem is “glittered.” Not only does a prince among men glitter with crown and riches, but also the glitter is that of the light of knowledge which Cory apparently possesses. Cory seems to be “schooled in every grace,” while the unschooled townspeople in their dark ignorance “waited for the light.” Yet it is Cory whose soul is black with despair, since finally he ends his activities in suicide. The phrase “calm summer night” unites the light-dark imagery, since “summer” alone would suggest “light” and “night,” “dark.” Basically the glittering Cory's schooling is useless; it ends in the darkness of death.

What effect does Cory's death have on the townspeople? An answer is perhaps implicit in the tone of the last two lines. Here the technique of contrast is most open: it is on a “calm” summer night that Cory commits his final and violent deed. Although Cory has seemed to have the isolation of royalty, his deed shows that he was much more humanly beset than the townspeople in their ordinary human predicament. The brutal phrase “put a bullet through his head” seems to indicate that the effect of Cory's death is to give the townspeople a grim measure of knowledge at last. Their idol destroyed, and the illusion he created among them of life as possibly brilliant and rich, a more reasoned and less animal pessimism is possible. The light they waited for turns out to be the lesson of Cory's fate. Such a lesson is not a happy one. On this level, the exemplum becomes deeply ambiguous: that knowledge may be an illusory good is the rich core of “Richard Cory.”