step barefoot into reality

There were those that returned to hear him read from the poem of
    life,
Of the pans above the stove, the pots on the table, the tulips
     among them.
They were those that would have wept to step barefoot into
     reality,

They would have wept and been happy, have shivered in the frost
And cried out to feel it again, have run fingers over leaves
And against the most coiled thorn, have seized on what was ugly

From “Large Red Man Reading” by Wallace Stevens