The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry

by Tony Barnstone

  so how could I give up this poor nest?

  In spring I carry my hoe all alone,

  yet still water the land at sunset.

  The county governor's clerk heard I'd returned

  and summoned me to practice the war drum.

  This military service won't take me from my state.

  I look around and have no one to worry about.

  It's just me alone and the journey is short,

  but I will end up lost if I travel too far.

  Since my village has been washed away,

  near or far makes no difference.

  I will forever feel pain for my long-sick mother.

  I abandoned her in this valley five years ago.

  She gave birth to me, yet I could not help her.

  We cry sour sobs till our lives end.

  In my life I have no family to say farewell to,

  so how can I be called a human being?

  Song of a Thatched Hut Damaged in Autumn Wind

  Wind howled angrily in high autumn's September

  and tore off three layers of reed from my thatched roof.

  The reeds flew over the river and scattered on the bank.

  Some flew high and hung from the trees.

  Some flew low and swirled and sank into pools.

  The kids from the southern village took advantage of my old age,

  played pirate and stole my reeds while I watched them

  openly carrying armfuls into the bamboo groves.

  My lips cracked, my throat dried, and I couldn't yell out.

  I returned home and leaned on my stick, sighing.

  In a moment the wind stopped and clouds stood ink black,

  the autumnal sky stretched into darkness in desert silence.

  My cotton quilt is tattered from use and cold as iron.

  In an ugly dream, my small son rips the lining with his feet.

  The roof is leaking by my bed's headboard and nowhere is dry.

  The rain like yarn spins down forever.

  I've had little sleep since the An Lushan Rebellion.

  Such a wet and long night, when will it end!

  I wish I had a house with thousands of rooms

  to shelter all the cold people under the sky and give them happy faces.

  We'd be calm as mountains when it stormed and rained.

  Oh, let this big house appear before my eyes

  and I will die of cold in my damaged hut, happy.

  The Song of a Roped Chicken

  My young servant tied up a chicken to sell at market.

  Roped tight, the chicken struggled and squawked.

  My family hates seeing the chicken eating worms and ants,

  not knowing that once sold the chicken will be cooked.

  What's the difference between chickens and insects to a human being?

  I scolded the servant and untied the chicken.

  I can never solve the problem of chickens and insects

  so just lean against my mountain pavilion, gazing at the cold river.

  Poem to Officer Fang's Foreign Horse

  This famous foreign horse comes from Dawan,

  with sharp joints and slender bones.

  Two ears stand firm like bamboo slips,

  wind carries his four hooves lightly.

  Space disappears when he gallops.

  You can trust your life and death to him.

  With strength and speed

  he prances over ten thousand miles.

  Qu River

  (Two Poems)

  1

  Spring subtracts itself with each falling petal.

  I am sad to see ten thousand dots swirling in wind.

  I watch the last petals pass through sight,

  but don't complain of suffering when wine passes my lips.

  Green birds nest in the small house by the river.

  Tall tombs by the flowers, their qiling guardian statues1decayed.

  I meditate on this, decide to live this life with joy.

  Why let this body stumble over floating reputation?

  2

  Each day I return from the court, and pawn spring garments.

  Each day I return from the river roaring drunk.

  It is nothing to have wine debts wherever I go,

  since from ancient times few have lived to seventy.

  Deep, deep in the flowers butterflies can be seen.

  Dragonflies stop and go, touching the surface of water.

  Let my words come to the wind and light, and we'll flow together

  for a moment, appreciating each other without disappointment.

  1 Originally qiling statues. A qiling is a Chinese mythical guardian creature, a combination of a dragon, a lion, and a horse, that guards against negative forces and energies.

  Leaving in My Boat

  A longtime guest in the southern capital, I plow southern fields;

  though the north-gate view hurts my spirit, I still sit by the north window.

  One morning I take my old wife on a small boat and when it is sunny,

  watch my little son bathe in the clear river.

  Butterflies flying in pairs chase each other.

  Twin lotus flowers are blooming on one stalk.

  We carry all the tea and sugarcane juice that we need,

  and porcelain bottles are as good as jade jars.

  Guest's Arrival: Happy About

  County Governor Cui's Visit

  North and south of my house flow spring waters.

  Every day only gulls come to visit me.

  I've never before swept petals from the path for guests,

  but my wood door is open today for you.

  The market is far off so I cook no taste twice.

  My poor house offers only unfiltered wine from last year.

  If you don't mind drinking with my neighbor as well,

  I'll call him over the fence and we'll drain our cups.

  A Lone Goose

  The lone wild goose doesn't peck or drink,

  just flies and cries out, seeking its flock.

  Who cares for this tiny piece of shadow

  lost in ten thousand layered clouds?

  Does he see them where vision ends?

  Does he hear them through his deep sorrow?

  The wild ravens have no feelings.

  They just caw raucously, flapping, flapping.

  A Traveler's Night

  A traveler's sleep never arrives,

  yet the autumnal sky refuses to dawn.

  I roll up the curtain and see a shadow of leftover moon,

  stack my pillows high and listen to the far off river.

  I'm at my wit's end for clothes and food.

  At road's end my life depends on friends.

  My old wife has brushed many letters to me

  and knows the emotion of this unreturned traveler.

  from Five Poems About Historical Sites

  3**

  Through mountains and valleys I come at last to Jing Gate.

  The village where Ming Fei grew up is still there.

  She left the Purple Palace for endless desert.

  Now only a green tomb remains in the evening sun.

  Portraits don't know her face with a smile like spring breeze.

  Jade rings echo in emptiness when her ghost returns in moonlight.

  For a thousand years her zither makes a foreign song

  and the melody sings clearly of her grudge.

  On Yueyang Tower**

  In the past I heard of Dongting Lake,

  and now I climb Yueyang Tower

  and see Wu and Chu unfold east and south.

  Heaven and earth float there night and day.

  Not one word from my family and friends,

  I'm old and sick and have just my lonely boat.

  War horses charge north of the mountain passes.

  I lean against the railing and sob.

  Climbing High

  Gibbons wail into a hi
gh sky of wild wind.

  Birds circle a pure isle of white sand.

  Leaves drift and shift from countless trees.

  The Yangtze River boils and rolls without end.

  I've wandered forever, a thousand miles of autumn woe.

  I climb the terrace alone, sick as always in my lifetime.

  Bitter pain has turned my temples to snow.

  I'm so poor I can't even afford muddy wine.

  Traveler's Pavilion

  An autumn window still shows the color of dawn

  as leafless trees bend further in high wind.

  The sun emerges from cold mountains

  and the river flows in last night's leftover fog.

  No one is abandoned by the celestial court,

  but withered and sick, I've become an old man.

  What is left for me in what life remains?

  I drift helplessly like a rootless tumbleweed.

  * Written while captive in Changan, separated from his family.

  1 A poetic epithet for the city of Chengdu in Sichuan province.

  * In the Han dynasty the Emperor Yuan asked the palace painter to do portraits of all the women in the palace so he could look at the pictures and choose which one to have. Many women bribed the painter to have their portraits done to make them look attractive. Only Ming Fei (also known as Wang Zhaojun) did not bribe the painter, who made her very ugly. When for political reasons the emperor had to marry off one of his palace women to a barbarian tribal leader to the north, he went through the portraits of the thousands of women in his harem and chose Ming Fei. On the day of Ming Fei's departure, the emperor summoned her to his presence. When he realized that she was the most beautiful woman in the palace, he was furious. He couldn't stop the marriage but took his revenge by killing the painter. It is in the Chinese tradition for the poet to talk about his political career from a woman's perspective to avoid offending the emperor.

  * Du Fu is looking down on Dongting Lake from Yueyang Tower and worrying about a Tibetan invasion of Lingwu and Binzhou in October 768, which has kept him from returning to the North.

  LIU CHANGQING

  (c. 710-c. 787)

  Liu Changqing came from a distinguished family who lived in Hejian, Hebei province. He passed the highest imperial examinations in 733 and held a number of official posts in the provinces (he was a magistrate and was, by 780, governor of Suizhou), but his official career was a rocky path: he incurred the emperor's disfavor, was sent to prison and demoted, and was demoted again later in his career under trumped-up charges, banished, and finally dismissed from office. More than five hundred of his poems survive. He is often described as a master of five-character verse and as a poet in the landscape tradition of Wang Wei and Tao Qian.

  Spending the Night at Hibiscus Mountain When It Was Snowing

  Dark mountains recede when the sun sets.

  So cold the white-thatched cottage seems shabbier.

  A dog barks at the firewood gate:

  someone approaching in the night storm.

  To Official Fei on His Demotion to State Ji

  Apes gibber as the guests leave this evening by the river.

  For a man with a hurt heart, sorrow flows naturally as water.

  We are both exiled, though you are sent farther away:

  ten thousand miles of green mountains, and one lonely boat.

  JIAO RAN

  (730–799)

  Jiao Ran was a monk poet from Changcheng in what is today Changxing County, Zhejiang province. He was the tenth-generation grandson of Xie Lingyun (385–443), the important Six Dynasties Period poet and politician. He was born in Zhejiang and after 785 resided in the Miaoxi Temple on Xu Mountain in Wuxing. Deeply steeped in the Daoist, Buddhist, and Confucian traditions, he was considered a very important poet, and his complete works were collected on the emperor's orders. He wrote significant literary criticism and was an important influence on the Ancient-Style Prose Movement of his time.

  On Lu Jianhong's Absence During My Visit to Him

  You moved to the city outskirts,

  on a wild path leading through mulberry and hemp.

  Chrysanthemums newly planted by your fence;

  it's autumn but they're not in bloom.

  No dog barks when I knock on the door.

  I go to ask your neighbor to the west:

  he says you disappear into mountains

  and return through the slanting sunset.

  MENG JIAO

  (751–814)

  Meng Jiao came from Huzhou-Wukang (present-day Deqing County, Zhejiang province) and was the oldest and among the best of the circle of writers who gathered around the great prose master Han Yu in the last decade of the eighth century. He met Han Yu in Changan in 791. A year later Han Yu passed the imperial examinations; Meng Jiao failed, as he did again in 793. He finally passed in 796 but did not receive a position for four years, and even then it was a humiliatingly insignificant post in the provinces. Meng Jiao lost this post within a few years and settled in Luoyang, where he lived for the rest of his life, dependent on patrons and friends. His personal life was one of tragedy and loss: his three sons died young, and he lost his wife as well. Approximately five hundred of his poems survive, most of them in the “old style” (gu shi).

  Meng Jiao was fairly popular in his own time, but his reputation went into a tailspin some centuries after his death, because his brash, disturbing, and jarring verse was seen to lack grace and decorum. His verse has inspired not so much neglect as active hatred, even in such a distinguished reader as Su Shi, who states baldly in his two poems “On Reading Meng Jiao's Poetry” that “I hate Meng Jiao's poems,” which sound to him like a “cold cicada wail.” There is no doubt that Su Shi is a master of the literary put-down, and while a number of Meng Jiao's poems do come across as shrill, self-obsessed, and self-pitying, therein lies much of his interest. The great Song dynasty politician and poet Ouyang Xiu admired Meng Jiao precisely because he was a “poor poet… who liked to write lines reflecting his hard life.” Ouyang writes: “Meng has a poem on moving house: ‘I borrow a wagon to carry my furniture/but my goods don't make even one load.' He is saying that he's so poor he hasn't anything to move. He has another poem to express his gratitude to people who have given him some charcoal. ‘The heat makes my crooked body straight.' People say one cannot write lines like this without actually experiencing such suffering.”1

  The glaze of decorous objectivity that is so beautiful in much of Chinese poetry is scraped off in Meng Jiao's poems, revealing a didactic would-be Confucian moralist who ends up writing startling, ghostly, and elegiac poems about his sorrows and idiosyn-cracies, happy to portray himself as despised and sick with illness and self-doubt. If it seems strange to celebrate so fallible a figure, consider his own words: “these sour moans/are also finished verse.”

  Complaints

  Let's compete with our tears,

  let them pour into a lotus pond;

  then we'll wait this year and see

  whose flowers drown in salt water.

  Song of the Homebound Letter

  Tears and ink brushed into a letter

  sent to my family ten thousand miles away.

  My soul leaves with this letter.

  My body becomes a dumb shell here.

  Statement of Feelings in a Shabby Residence on an Autumn Evening

  Sleeping in a cold bed, dreams don't go far.

  As I listen to autumn, our separation feels sour.

  Wind through high and low branches,

  thousands and thousands of leaves whisper.

  A shallow well won't give enough drink.

  Fields of thin soil are unplowed and abandoned.

  People don't deal with each other as in ancient times:

  no one listens to a poor man's words.

  Visiting Zhongnan Mountain

  South Mountain fills both earth and sky;

  sun and moon emerge from its peaks.

  Sunset lingers int
o night behind a tall summit.

  Deep valleys stay dark in broad daylight.

  Mountain people are straight and natural,

  minds level though the road is rugged.

  Long wind drives pine and cypress trees,

  skims ten thousand gullies and flows out clear.

  At this moment I regret studying books,

  morning after morning chasing empty fame.

  Frustration

  Write bad poems and you're sure to earn a post,

  but good poets can only embrace the empty mountains.

  Embracing mountains makes me shake with cold.

  My face is sad all day long.

  They are so jealous of my good poems

  swords and spears grow out of their teeth!

  They are still chewed by jealousy

  of good poets who are long dead.

  Though my body's like a broken twig

  I cultivate a loftiness and plain austerity,

  hoping in vain to be left alone.

  The mocking crowd glares at me and howls.

  Borrowing a Wagon

  I borrowed a wagon to move my furniture,

  but my goods don't make even one load.

  Don't snap your fingers, wagon owners;

  poverty is not worth one sigh.

  I run like a servant for my hundred years.

  All things bloom and fall like flowers.

  After Passing the Highest Imperial Examinations