To the "people on the pavement," Richard Cory looked like he was on top of the world. The narrator of this 16 line poem (four a, b, a, b rhyming stanzas) tells how Cory was physically good-looking, well-dressed, humane, and very rich ("yes, richer than a king"). Yet "Richard Cory, one calm summer night, / Went home and put a bullet through his head."