The Weeping Burgher
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"The Weeping Burgher" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. Originally published in 1919, it is in the public domain.[1]
The Weeping Burgher
It is with a strange malice
That I distort the world.
Ah! that ill humors
Should mask as white girls.
And ah! that Scaramouche
Should have a black barouche.
The sorry verities!
Yet in excess, continual,
There is cure of sorrow.
Permit that if as ghost I come
Among the people burning in me still,
I come as belle design
Of foppish line.
And I, then, tortured for old speech,
A white of wildly woven rings;
I, weeping in a calcined heart,
My hands such sharp, imagined things.