Richard Cory was written in 1897 by Edwin Arlington Robinson. This sixteen-line poem tells a lot about human irony. Richard Cory, a very rich man, admired and envied by those who consider themselves less fortunate than him, unexpectedly commits suicide. The most fascinating part of this poem is why he shot himself when he had everything? Through their own mental prejudices and exaggerations of reality, people, by placing Cory at a higher level than them, also created a communication barrier that then pushed Richard to commit suicide. In the poem we only know Richard Cory by what people see and think of him. His feelings, aside from when he commits suicide, are never truly expressed. Throughout the poem the only thing we learn about Richard Cory are the images that common people have of a man seen almost as a king. In the second line of the poem, the villagers express that they feel inferior to Cory when they say, “We people on the sidewalk watched him” (2). People who call themselves “people on the sidewalk” might infer that people are homeless; according to them Richard Cory is seen as a king “He was a gentleman from top to bottom” (3). and they are only his admiring subjects. The name Richard Cory is also an allusion to Richard Coeur-de-lion, or King Richard I of England. Then, the audience goes on to describe Richard as a true gentleman, “And he was always silently dressed, / And he was always human when he spoke” (5-6). These lines show that the audience thinks that Richard Cory never truly became very rich because he believed that even the poorest person deserved kindness and respect. The word “always” in lines five and six might suggest that th...... half of the paper ......h will always remain a mystery. People can read the poem and make many different hypotheses about why Richard Cory ultimately killed himself, but we will never be sure which one is right. This ironic and situational story shows that appearances do not always reflect the true picture of man's inner being. Richard Cory is not a king; he is humanWorks CitedBible Gateway." Bible Gateway. Np, nd Web. 3 December 2013. "Richard I Coeur de Lion ("The Lionheart") (r.1189-1199)." The British Monarchy. Np, nd Web December 3, 2013. Roberts, Edgar V. and Robert Zweig Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing ed.