Read The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry Online
Authors: Tony Barnstone
A poet stands between heaven and earth
and watches the dark mystery.
To nourish myself I read the classics.
I sigh as the four seasons spin by
and the swarm of living things kindles many thoughts.
In rough autumn it hurts to see leaves stripped away,
but how tender the soft sprigs in budding spring.
Morning frost is awe in my heart,
my ambition floats with high clouds,
I devote songs to ancestors
and sing the clean fragrance of their virtue.
I roam the classics through a forest of treasures
and love their elegant balance of style and substance.
Inspired, I lay down the book I was reading
and let words pour out from my brush.
At first I close my eyes. I hear nothing.
In interior space I search everywhere.
My spirit gallops to the earth's eight borders
and wings to the top of the sky.
Soon, misty and brightening like the sun about to dawn,
ideas coalesce and images ignite images.
When I drink the wine of words
and chew flowers from the Six Books,
I swim freely in the celestial river
and dive into the sea's abyss.
Sometimes words come hard, they resist me
till I pluck them from deep water like hooked fish;
sometimes they are birds soaring out of a cloud
that fall right into place, shot with arrows,
and I harvest lines neglected for a hundred generations,
rhymes unheard for a thousand years.
I won't touch a flower already in morning bloom
but quicken the unopened evening buds.
In a blink I see today and the past,
put out my hand and touch all the seas.
Search for the words and sphere of thought,
then seek the proper order;
release their shining forms
and tap images to hear how they sing.
Now leaves grow along a branching thought.
Now trace a current to its source.
Bring the hidden into light
or form the complex from simplicity.
Animals shake at the tiger's changing pattern
and birds ripple off when a dragon is seen;
some words belong together
and others don't join, like jagged teeth,
but when you're clear and calm
your spirit finds true words.
With heaven and earth contained in your head
nothing escapes the pen in your hand.
It's hard to get started at first,
painful like talking with cracked lips,
but words will flow with ink in the end.
Essence holds content as the trunk lifts the tree;
language is patterned into branches, leaves, and fruit.
Now words and content match
like your mood and face—
smile when you're happy
or sigh when your heart hurts.
Sometimes you can improvise easily.
Sometimes you only bite the brush and think.
Writing is joy
so saints and scholars all pursue it.
A writer makes new life in the void,
knocks on silence to make a sound,
binds space and time on a sheet of silk
and pours out a river from an inch-sized heart.
As words give birth to words
and thoughts arouse deeper thoughts,
they smell like flowers giving off scent,
spread like green leaves in spring,
a long wind comes, whirls into a tornado of ideas,
and clouds rise from the writing-brush forest.
Sometimes your writing is a lush web of fine thoughts
that undercut each other and muffle the theme:
when you reach the pole there's nowhere else to go;
more becomes less if you try to craft what's made.
A powerful phrase at the crucial point
will whip the writing like a horse and make it gallop;
though all the other words are in place
they wait for the crop to run a good race.
A whip is always more help than harm;
stop revising when you've got it right.
Perhaps thoughts and words blend together
into a lucid beauty, a lush growth;
they flame like a bright brocade,
poignant as a string orchestra.
But if you fail to make it new
you can only repeat the past.
Even when your own heart is your loom
someone may have woven that textile before,
and to be honorable and keep integrity
you must disown it despite your love.
Flowering forth, a tall rice ear
stands proudly above the mass,
a shape eluding its shadow,
its sound refusing echoes.
The best line is a towering crag.
It won't be woven into an ordinary song.
The mind can't find a match for it
but casts about, unwilling to give up.
After all, jade in rock makes a mountain shimmer,
pearls in water make the river seductive,
green kingfishers give life
even to the ragged thornbrush,
and classic and folk songs
blend into a fine contrast.
My heart respects conventional rules
and laws of composition.
I recall the great works of old masters
and see how my contemporaries have failed—
poems from the depth of a wise heart
may be laughed at by those who are blind.
Poems fine as jade filigree and coral
are common as beans on the plain,
endless like air in the world's great bellows,
eternal as the universe;
they grow everywhere
but my small hands hold only a few.
My water jar is often empty. It makes me worry.
I make myself sick trying to expand my pieces.
I limp along with short poems
and patch up my songs with common notes.
I'm never happy with what I've done,
so how can my heart be satisfied?
Tap my work: I fear it clunks like a dusty earthen bowl
and I'm shamed by the song of musical jade.
As to the flash of inspiration
and traffic laws on writing's path,
what comes can't be stopped,
what leaves will not be restrained.
It hides like fire in a coal
then flares into a shout.
When instinct is swift as a horse
no tangle of thoughts will hold it back:
a thought wind rises in your chest,
a river of words pours out from your mouth,
and so many burgeoning leaves sprout
on the silk from your brush,
that colors brim out of your eyes
and music echoes in your ears.
But when the six emotions are stagnant,
the will travels but the spirit stays put,
a petrified and withered tree,
hollow and dry as a dead river.
Then you must excavate your own soul,
search yourself till your spirit is refreshed.
But the mind gets darker and darker
and you must pull ideas like silk from their cocoon.
Sometimes you labor hard and build regrets
then dash off a flawless gem.
Though this thing comes out of me,
I can't master it with strength.
I often stroke my empty chest and sigh:
what blocks and what opens this road?
The function of literature is
to express the nature of nature.
It can't be barred as it travels space
and boats across one hundred million years.
Gazing to the fore, I leave models for people to come;
looking aft, I learn from my ancestors.
It can save teetering governments and weak armies;
it gives voice to the dying wind of human virtue.
No matter how far, this road will take you there;
it will express the subtlest point.
It waters the heart like clouds and rain,
and shifts form like a changeable spirit.
Inscribed on metal and stone, it spreads virtue.
Flowing with pipes and strings, each day the poem is new.
Pan Yue, along with Lu Ji, was among the finest poets of his time, but only twenty of his poems have survived the centuries. He was born in today's Henan province to a family of officials, and he himself held a succession of important official posts. As legend has it, his extraordinary beauty was such that he was mobbed by crowds of women when driving through the streets of the capital. His involvement in a political scheme against the crown prince
led to his execution in 300. His three poems to his dead wife are his most famous works, though he was also renowned as a writer of rhyme prose (
fu).
Slowly winter and spring fade away;
cold and heat suddenly flow and change.
She has returned to the underground spring,
separated forever from me by heavy soil.
Secretly I want to join her there, but I can't,
so what is the use?
I'll obey the imperial order
and return to my old official position.
Yet seeing our house I remember her.
Our life together haunts the four rooms.
I cannot find her behind the curtains or drapery,
only her ink calligraphy.
Her fragrance lingers,
her things still hang on the walls.
In a trance I sometimes feel her presence.
It hurts to return to my senses.
We were a pair of birds nesting in the woods.
One woke in the morning to find himself alone.
We were a pair of fish swimming eye to eye.
Halfway one found the other gone.
Spring wind sneaks in through a gap in the door.
The eaves weep a morning flow in the gutter.
I can't forget her, trying to sleep in our bed.
My sorrow piles deeper each day.
I hope this grief will fade till like Zhuangzi after his wife died
I can beat on a jug and sing.
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*
According to ancient regulations, an official should remain in mourning for his wife for a year before starting to work again. This poem was written when the mourning period was just over.
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The Daoist sage Zhuangzi had a very unconventional understanding of death—that it could be a good thing in disguise. When his wife died, he did not mourn; instead he sang a song while beating a jar with a stick.
Daoist poet Tao Qian (also known as Tao Yuanming) is famous for his prose “Preface to the Poem on the Peach Blossom Spring” and for his remarkable poems celebrating a return to nature and an epicurean love of wine. He lived during the politically unstable Six Dynasties Period (220–589), and his work expresses the anxiety and weariness of that time. He held a succession of official posts, working as a military adviser and a magistrate, but he was unsatisfied with this life and retired to the country, where he lived out his remaining years as a farmer. His work reflects this life: he is primarily known as a poet of nature, China's first great landscape poet, contrasting nature's purity and simplicity (exemplified by his own self-representation as a farmer-sage) with the “dusty” world of the court and the marketplace: “After all those years like a beast in a cage/I've come back to the soil again.” Like Thoreau in his beanfield, Tao Qian became the quintessential model of the official who has escaped “the world's net” for a life closer to spiritual values. While countless later poets (notably Wang Wei) echo his lines when they write about the country life, Tao Qian was not appreciated in his own time. The dominant mode of poetry in his day was flowery and artificial. The great poets of the Tang and Song dynasties, however, came to treasure Tao's poetry for its measured simplicity, its lack of adornment, and its conscious use of common words. Approximately 130 of his poems survive.
When young I couldn't bear the common taste,
I loved the mountains and the peaks,
yet I fell into the world's net
and wasted thirteen years.
But trapped birds long for their old woods
and fish in the pool still need deep waters,
so I'm breaking earth in the south field,
returning to the country to live simply,
with just ten acres
and a thatch roof over some rooms.
Elm and willow shade the back eaves,
rows of peach and plum trees by the front hall.
A distant village lost in haze;
smoke twines from neighbors' houses.
From deep in the lanes, dogs bark;
a cock chuckles high up in a mulberry tree.
No dust or clutter within my courtyard door,
just empty rooms and time to spare.
After all those years like a beast in a cage
I've come back to the soil again.
No social events in the fields,
no carriage wheels whir through these back roads.
Bright sun, but I close my cane door
and empty myself in empty rooms.
Sometimes I meet the peasants
going here and there in palm-leaf raincoats,
but we speak of nothing
except how the crops are doing.
Each day my hemp and mulberries grow taller
and my land gets wider every day
but at any time the frost or hail
could beat them flat as a field of weeds.
I plant beans under South Mountain.
The weeds flourish but not bean sprouts.
Morning, I get up to weed the fields.
I return, shouldering the moon and my hoe.
On narrow paths through thick grass and brush,
evening dew soaks my clothes,
but wet clothes don't bother me
so long as I follow my heart.
After so long away from these mountains and lakes,
today I'm wildly pleased in the woods and fields.
Now nephews and nieces hold my hands
as we part brush and enter the wild ruin of a town.
We search through hills and grave mounds
and the lingering signs of ancient houses,
scattered wells and traces of hearths,
rotten stumps of bamboo and mulberry groves.
I ask a man gathering wood here,
“What happened to all these people?”
The woodsman turns to me and says
“They're dead, that's all, there's not one left!”
In thirty years, at court or market, all things change.
I know now these are not empty words,
that we live among shadows and ghosts
and return at last to nothingness.
I was upset, walking home alone with my staff,
zigzag through brush and weeds
and by a mountain brook clear and shallow,
just deep enough to wash my feet,
but now I filter the new-made wine
and cook a chicken to entertain neighbors;
the room darkens as the sun sets,
we use firewood as bright candles,
all is joy, the night seems too short,
and it's dawn before we know it.
Hunger came and drove me on,
though I didn't know where to go,
walking, walking till I hit a village.
I knocked on a door, short for words,
but the owner of the house saw my need,
gave me aid, didn't let me come for nothing.
We talked in harmony till sunset,
raised cups and drained them dry.
Happy to have a new friend,
I improvise this poem.
I'm moved that you treated me like the washerwoman
who fed Han Xin,
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and wish I were as talented as him.
Deep in my heart I know how to thank you:
I will repay you after death.