Sound and Sense 3 & 4

Giru Lee

1.       Best Poem – Richard Cory

While the poem Richard Cory successfully delivers the image of Richard Cory by careful selection of phrases such as “he was a gentleman from sole to crown, clean favored, and imperially slim,” and “he glittered when he walked,” it also delivers the poet’s insight on the nature of the people we envy, those who seem to have everything but actually have less than we possess.

2.      Three points

A.        The difference between the writer using language to communicate information and the poet is this: the practical writer will always attempt to confine his words to one meaning at a time; the poet will often take advantage of the fact that the word has more than one meaning by using it to mean more than one thing at the same time.

B.         The poet seeking to express his experience of a spring day must therefore provide a selection of the sense impression he has.

C.         Poetry indirectly appeals to our senses through imagery, the representation to the imagination of sense experience.

3.      Anecdote

This poem reminded me of the CEO of Hyundai who committed suicide by jumping from a building. As a son of Hyundai’s founder and the leader of the big cooperation, he seemed to have everything he wanted. Many people must have wanted to be as rich and as powerful as he was, just like people in this poem envied Richard Cory. Yet, the wealth and power eventually put him into death. It was an incident that made me wonder about the relationship between wealth and happiness and the true nature of power.