No More Learning

He composes a memorial, but it is rejected and unread,
He is left stranded, like a fish in a dry pond.
Without--he has not a single farthing of salary:
Within--there is not a peck of grain in his larder.
His relations upbraid him for his lack of success:
His friends and callers daily decrease in number.
Su Ch'in used to go preaching in the North
And Li Ss? sent a memorandum to the West.
I once hoped to pluck the fruits of life:
But now alas, they are all withered and dry.
Though one drinks at a river, one cannot drink more than a bellyful;
Enough is good, but there is no use in satiety.
The bird in a forest can perch but on one bough,
And this should be the wise man's pattern.


THE DESECRATION OF THE HAN TOMBS

By Chang Tsai (third century A. D. )

At Pei-mang how they rise to Heaven,
Those high mounds, four or five in the fields!
What men lie buried under these tombs?
All of them were Lords of the Han world.
"Kung" and "W? n"[27] gaze across at each other:
The Yuan mound is all grown over with weeds.
When the dynasty was falling, tumult and disorder arose,
Thieves and robbers roamed like wild beasts.
Of earth[28] they have carried away more than one handful,
They have gone into vaults and opened the secret doors.
Jewelled scabbards lie twisted and defaced:
The stones that were set in them, thieves have carried away,
The ancestral temples are hummocks in the ground:
The walls that went round them are all levelled flat.
Over everything the tangled thorns are growing:
A herd-boy pushes through them up the path.
Down in the thorns rabbits have made their burrows:
The weeds and thistles will never be cleared away.
Over the tombs the ploughshare will be driven
And peasants will have their fields and orchards there.
They that were once lords of a thousand hosts
Are now become the dust of the hills and ridges.
I think of what Yun-m? n[29] said
And am sorely grieved at the thought of "then" and "now. "

[27] Names of two tombs.

[28] In the early days of the dynasty a man stole a handful of earth
from the imperial tombs, and was executed by the police. The emperor was
furious at the lightness of the punishment.

[29] Yun-m? n said to M? ng Ch'ang-chun (died 279 B. C.