{
 "id": "langston-hughes/beggar-boy",
 "title": "Beggar Boy",
 "ordinal": null,
 "subtitle": null,
 "poet": "Langston Hughes",
 "poet_slug": "langston-hughes",
 "language": "en",
 "book": "The Weary Blues",
 "book_slug": "the-weary-blues",
 "book_kind": "volume",
 "sequence": 42,
 "container": null,
 "epigraph": null,
 "first_published": {
  "year": 1922,
  "venue": "The Crisis (September 1922)",
  "note": "Located in the bound Crisis volume 23–24 on disk (Archive.org crisis2324dubo): printed on page 219 in the group its contents page lists as “Poems. Margaret Loring Thomas, James Waldo Fawcett, Langston Hughes 219”, in the issue whose masthead reads Vol. 24 No. 5, September 1922, Whole No. 143. Collected in The Weary Blues (1926), which remains the text this record carries.",
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  "rights": "public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931)"
 },
 "verification": {
  "level": "structural-only",
  "last_checked": "2026-08-12"
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 "stats": {
  "n_lines": 8,
  "n_stanzas": 2,
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 "stanzas": [
  [
   {
    "text": "What is there within this beggar lad",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "That I can neither hear nor feel nor see,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "That I can neither know nor understand",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And still it calls to me?",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ],
  [
   {
    "text": "Is not he but a shadow in the sun⁠—",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "A bit of clay, brown, ugly, given life?",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And yet he plays upon his flute a wild free tune",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "As if Fate had not bled him with her knife!",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ]
 ]
}