Who Are We to Judge Anyone? Sometimes it is easy to form an opinion about someone based on what you see from the outside, but by no means is this an effective way of assessing the way someone is inside. Just like you cannot judge a book a book by its cover, you cannot judge a person without getting to know them. Both Edwin Robinson's, Richard Cory, and Wystan Auden's, The Unknown Citizen try to do this. Who is to say that their analysis of the two characters is correct? The two poems are based only on what is observed, not what is known. Richard Cory is structured in a very consistent, easy to read manner, but is as harsh and radical as the form is classical and neat. The poem is an extended description of a man, a very rich, successful man, named Richard Cory. The narrator of the poem spends a good part of the poem, the first three stanzas, doing nothing but genuinely praising this man. In the first stanza, Richard Cory is portrayed as the envy of all those around him, the object of everyone's attention. He refers to Cory as a "gentleman from sole to crown", and even uses language that sounds suited to describe royalty when he calls Cory "Clean favored, and imperially slim." The second and third stanzas go on in much the same way. In the second stanza, the narrator describes Cory's social standing. In the narrator's eye's, Cory continues to be the perfect, polite gentleman, as he was "always human when he talked.". Cory was certainly not the picture of a snobbish or rude man. Cory was also a very popular fellow, as he "fluttered pulses" with a simple "Good-morning", Cory was an impressive social figure indeed.However, the poem takes a sudden, dark twist in the last stanza. Robinson does this by first revealing a little more about the narrator. In the first two lines of the fourth stanza, the narrator says: "So on we worked, and waited for the light, And went without meat and cursed the bread . . .." This is obviously a reference t...
