Life Lesson #2

Everyone experiences the feeling of inadequacy.  One of my all-time favorite poems capture that feeling in the utmost stupefying way. I want to share it with you.  The author which is Edwin Arlington Robinson lived from 1869-1935; which fascinates me even more.  The feeling of inadequacy is obviously human-nature, and simply inevitable.  This poem is set in a fictional New England village, and recounts a tragic event.  The book in which I was able to locate the poem explains it as an, "ironic and inexplicable tragedy".  I will have to disagree.

Richard Cory
By: Edwin Arlington Robinson

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him;
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich- yes, richer than a king-
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.