Richard Cory

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
  We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
  Clean favoured, 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.

 - Edwin Arlington Robinson

My theatre class did a performance based on the poem, with a great degree of interpretation. We had one actor take the role of "Cory Richards", a depressed individual, who desired a glamorous lifestyle without putting forth effort to achieve it. Enter the succubus, who offers him first the power to get apart from the needs of his existence, (read homework, school, and parents) and later the necessary charm and opportunity to make it big as a rock star, Richard Cory.

To achieve each of his goals, he had to let "circumstance" kill each of the people who acted as barriers to his fate. Each of these people become ghosts that plague him at his most exultant moments. Eventually, he is the envy of every man, the object of desire of every girl, and therein comes his own part of the bargain, which with demons is always the transfer of the soul. To avoid letting the demoness take this, and because he was having a stressful time with the rapid change in lifestyle and moral stance, he shoots himself. As a group, we figured that the main issue of the poem was whyever he shot himself, and this was our rationale.