In a small town, Richard Cory is the man everyone watches and envies. He is polished, slim, well-dressed, and rich beyond imagining—“richer than a king”—and he never seems rude or superior when he speaks. The speaker and other working people see him as the perfect life they lack. While they struggle, skip meat, and curse their hard luck, Cory appears to glide above it all.
Then the final stanza reverses everything. On a calm summer night, Richard Cory goes home and shoots himself. The speakers never saw it coming, and neither does the reader. That shock is the point: the poem quietly suggests that wealth, charm, and admiration do not equal happiness, and that we can never really know someone’s inner life from the outside. The mood is understated and melancholy, with a bitter irony underneath.