No More Learning

At last, by thinking of the time before she was born,
By thought and reason I drove the pain away.
Since my heart forgot her, many days have passed
And three times winter has changed to spring.
This morning, for a little, the old grief came back,
Because, in the road, I met her foster-nurse.


ILLNESS

Sad, sad--lean with long illness;
Monotonous, monotonous--days and nights pass.
The summer trees have clad themselves in shade;
The autumn "lan"[51] already houses the dew.
The eggs that lay in the nest when I took to bed
Have changed into little birds and flown away.
The worm that then lay hidden in its hole
Has hatched into a cricket sitting on the tree.
The Four Seasons go on for ever and ever:
In all Nature nothing stops to rest
Even for a moment. Only the sick man's heart
Deep down still aches as of old!

[51] The epidendrum.


THE DRAGON OF THE BLACK POOL

A SATIRE

Deep the waters of the Black Pool, coloured like ink;
They say a Holy Dragon lives there, whom men have never seen.
Beside the Pool they have built a shrine; the authorities have
established a ritual;
A dragon by itself remains a dragon, but men can make it a god.
Prosperity and disaster, rain and drought, plagues and pestilences--
By the village people were all regarded as the Sacred Dragon's
doing.
They all made offerings of sucking-pig and poured libations of wine;
The morning prayers and evening gifts depended on a "medium's"
advice

When the dragon comes, ah!
The wind stirs and sighs
Paper money thrown, ah!
Silk umbrellas waved.
When the dragon goes, ah!
The wind also--still.
Incense-fire dies, ah!
The cups and vessels are cold. [52]

[52] Parody of a famous Han dynasty hymn.

Meats lie stacked on the rocks of the Pool's shore;
Wine flows on the grass in front of the shrine.
I do not know, of all those offerings, how much the Dragon eats;
But the mice of the woods and the foxes of the hills are
continually drunk and sated.
Why are the foxes so lucky?
What have the sucking-pigs done,
That year by year _they_ should be killed, merely to glut the foxes?
That the foxes are robbing the Sacred Dragon and eating His
sucking-pig,
Beneath the nine-fold depths of His pool, does He know or not?


THE GRAIN TRIBUTE

Written _circa_ 812, showing one of the poet's periods of retirement.
When the officials come to receive his grain-tribute, he remembers that
he is only giving back what he had taken during his years of office.
Salaries were paid partly in kind.

There came an officer knocking by night at my door--
In a loud voice demanding grain-tribute.
My house-servants dared not wait till the morning,
But brought candles and set them on the barn-floor.