wallace stevens

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.