A History of American Literature

Making It New: 1900–1945 347

impression that nothing more is really being said. Perhaps there is indeed “nothing

more to say.” Nevertheless, Robinson keeps on trying to say more; and in “Richard

Cory” he explores the anonymous surfaces of life in another way – by suggesting,

however cryptically, the contrast between those surfaces and the evident hell that

lies beneath them. The character who gives the poem its title is described in

admiring detail, from the perspective of his poorer neighbors. “He was a gentleman

from sole to crown,” the reader is told, “Clean favored, ... imperially slim” and

“rich – yes, richer than a king.” Comments like these hardly prepare us for the

horror of the final stanza:

So on we worked, and waited for the light,

And went without the meat, and carved the bread;

And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,

Went home and put a bullet through his head.

The irony of these lines, and the poem as a whole, depends on the contrast between

the serenity of Cory’s appearance and the violence of his death; its melancholy, upon

our recognizing that Cory – for all his privileges – is as acutely isolated and spiritu-

ally starved as anyone else. “There is more in every person’s soul than we think,”

Robinson observed once. “Even the happy mortals we term ordinary ... act their

own mental tragedies and live a far deeper and wider life than we are inclined to

believe possible in the light of our prejudices.” This is precisely the lesson that the

“we” of the poem, Cory’s neighbors in Tilbury Town, never learn: the night on which

Cory shoots himself remains “calm” in their view, and the use of that word only

underlines the distance between him and them.

Quiet desperation, the agony that Richard Cory’s neighbors failed to notice, is a

distinguishing feature of many of Robinson’s characters. The despair may come,

apparently, from emotional poverty (“Aaron Stark”), the pain of loss and bereavement

(“Reuben Bright,” “Luke Havergal”), or the treadmill of life (“The Clerks”): whatever,

it is palpably there in an awkward gesture, a stuttered phrase, a violent moment as in

“Richard Cory” or, as in “The House on the Hill,” the sense that behind the stark,

simple words lies an unimaginable burden of pain. Many of Robinson’s poems, in

fact, derive their power from reticence, a positive refusal to expand or elaborate. In

“How Annandale Went Out,” for example, the reader only gradually realizes that

“Annandale” is the name of a man who has been reduced by some incurable disease

or accident to the vegetable state, and that the narrator is a doctor who has evidently

been merciful enough to relieve him of his life. Such is the cryptic indirection, the

emotional austerity of lines like “They called it Annandale – and I was there / To

flourish, to find words, and to attend,” that the meaning is not immediately clear.

New Englanders, Robinson observed, are not like “those / Who boil elsewhere with

such a lyric yeast,” at least not on the surface. Their dramas, whatever they may be,

are enacted within. So the power of many of his poems stems from the reader

recognizing just how much emotional pressure there is behind the spare diction, the

poignant contrast between the enormity of feeling implied and the bare, stripped

GGray_c04.indd 347ray_c 04 .indd 347 8 8/1/2011 7:53:49 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 49 AM