Poem Comparison Essay

All four poems that I read argon related in their purposes and goals however, they are also very different. Lucinda Matlock by Edward Lee Masters, Chicago by Carl Sandburg, Richard Cory by Edwin Arlington Robinson, and We Wear the Mask by Paul Laurence Dunbar are altogether about the joys and sorrows of animateness. How we look at life makes life wide-cut or bad.Lucinda Matlock is a story of a woman, who, by some standards, would have a life that we consider a mediocre. However, the narrator of the poem says that it was a good life and that life can only be truly apprehended if it is taken from you.Chicago by Carl Sandburg is the most closely related poems to Lucinda Matlock. In the poem, the mess of this city are dirty, evil, and happy. The people are not saying to themselves, Well, my life is horrible because this is where I live and this is my underpaying job. They are laughing and joyous because they have life. Chicago is unlike Lucinda Matlock because Carl Sandburgs ikon of life in Chicago is so much more misanthropic than that of Masters more optimistic characterization and depiction of life in the world.Richard Cory is a poem about an aristocratic man that under- appreciates life, and, as a result commits suicide. The narrator talks about how envious he/she is of Richard Cory. Only in the very end do they mention the accompaniment that he is actually a very sad man. This poem is a representation of the front that some people put up to hide out their inner selves due to embarrassment or many opposite impression of despair.Finally, we read We Wear the Mask by Paul Laurence Dunbar. This is very interchangeable to Richard Cory in its message. The message is again that there are some who sometimes cloister their inner selves behind a barrier of a put on personality. In the poem, Dunbar writesNay, let them only see us while/ We stick out the mask/ We smile, but oh great deliveryman, our cries/ To Thee from tortured souls arise.The second part of the character reference says that they have tortured souls. They smile to hide their pain and they cry to Christ for help.All of the poems share the common theme that life is what you make it and that people often hide their true identity behind a spurious one (As shown in Richard Cory, We Wear the Mask, and Chicago). Though the lowest two poems mentioned have more in common with each other than they do with the first couple poems that were talked about in class, all of the poems are similar in their ultimate subject matter.