The Weeping Burgher

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.

"The Weeping Burgher" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's debut collection of poetry, Harmonium . It was originally published in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse in October 1919, and is therefore in the public domain in the United States.

Commentary

Stevens confesses to a strange malice that distorts the world as given by the poems in Harmonium,masking ill humors and poses. The masks are excesses that are his poetic cure for sorrow. The poet makes himself present to the reader as a ghost of himself, but an appealingly foppish ghost of "belle design", quite different from the weeping burgher who crafted the artifice. The poem immediately follows "The place of the solitaires", with which it may be instructively compared. The hands that do the writing are now seen as "sharp, imagined things" responsible for strangely malicious distortions.

Bates recounts the following anecdote.

Two years after "The Weeping Burgher" appeared in Poetry, Genevieve Taggard told Stevens of the rumor that his poems were "hideous ghosts" of himself, to which he replied, "It may be."

Compare with Marianne Moore's comment about the "shadow of acrimonious, unprovoked contumely" that she detected in Harmonium.

See also

Poems by Wallace Stevens

• Anecdote of Canna
• Anecdote of the Jar
• Anecdote of Men by the Thousands
• Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks
• Banal Sojourn
• The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws
• Colloquy with a Polish Aunt
• The Cuban Doctor
• The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician
• The Emperor of Ice Cream
• Fabliau of Florida
• Gubbinal
• A High-Toned Old Christian Woman
• Homunculus et la Belle Etoile
• Of the Surface of Things
• Peter Quince at the Clavier
• The Place of the Solitaires
• Ploughing on Sunday
• The Snow Man
• Stars at Tallapoosa
• Sunday Morning
• Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
• The Weeping Burgher

References

• Bates, Milton. Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self. 1985: University of California Press.

External links

• "The Weeping Burgher" in A Reader's Guide to Wallace Stevens