Read "The Weeping Burgher" by Wallace Stevens online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
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.