Early Writings Read online

  We carry singing girls, drift with the drifting water,

  Yet Sennin2 needs

  A yellow stork for a charger, and all our seamen

  Would follow the white gulls or ride them.

  Kutsu’s3 prose song

  Hangs with the sun and moon.

  King So’s4 terraced palace

  is now but barren hill,

  But I draw pen on this barge

  Causing the five peaks to tremble,

  And I have joy in these words

  like the joy of blue islands.

  (If glory could last forever

  Then the waters of Han5 would flow northward.)

  And I have moped6 in the Emperor’s garden, awaiting an

  order-to-write!

  I looked at the dragon-pond, with its willow-coloured water

  Just reflecting the sky’s tinge,

  And heard the five-score nightingales aimlessly singing.

  The eastern wind brings the green colour into the island

  grasses at Yei-shu,

  The purple house and the crimson are full of Spring softness.

  South of the pond the willow-tips are half-blue and bluer,

  Their cords tangle in mist, against the brocade-like palace.

  Vine-strings a hundred feet long hang down from carved

  railings,

  And high over the willows, the fine birds sing to each other,

  and listen,

  Crying—“Kwan, Kuan,”7 for the early wind, and the feel of it.

  The wind bundles itself into a bluish cloud and wanders off.

  Over a thousand gates, over a thousand doors are the sounds of

  spring singing,

  And the Emperor is at Ko.8

  Five clouds hang aloft, bright on the purple sky,

  The imperial guards come forth from the golden house with

  their armour a-gleaming.

  The Emperor in his jewelled car goes out to inspect his flowers,

  He goes out to Hori, to look at the wing-flapping storks,

  He returns by way of Sei rock, to hear the new nightingales,

  For the gardens at Jo-run9 are full of new nightingales,

  Their sound is mixed in this flute,

  Their voice is in the twelve pipes here.

  By Rihaku, 8th century A.D.

  THE RIVER-MERCHANT’S WIFE: A LETTER

  While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead

  I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.

  You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,

  You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.

  And we went on living in the village of Chokan:

  Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

  At fourteen I married My Lord you.

  I never laughed, being bashful.

  Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.

  Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

  At fifteen I stopped scowling,

  I desired my dust to be mingled with yours

  Forever and forever and forever.

  Why should I climb the look out?

  At sixteen you departed,

  You went into far Ku-to-yen,1 by the river of swirling eddies,

  And you have been gone five months.

  The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

  You dragged your feet when you went out.

  By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,

  Too deep to clear them away!

  The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.

  The paired butterflies are already yellow with August

  Over the grass in the West garden;

  They hurt me. I grow older.

  If you are coming down through the narrows of the river

  Kiang,2

  Please let me know beforehand,

  And I will come out to meet you

  As far as Cho-fu-Sa.3

  By Rihaku

  EXILE’S LETTER

  To So-Kin of Rakuyo, ancient friend, Chancellor of Gen.

  Now I remember that you built me a special tavern

  By the south side of the bridge at Ten-Shin.

  With yellow gold and white jewels, we paid for songs and

  laughter

  And we were drunk for month on month, forgetting the kings

  and princes.

  Intelligent men came drifting in from the sea and from the

  west border,

  And with them, and with you especially

  There was nothing at cross purpose,

  And they made nothing of sea-crossing or of mountain-

  crossing,

  If only they could be of that fellowship,

  And we all spoke out our hearts and minds, and without

  regret.

  And then I was sent off to South Wei,

  smothered in laurel groves,

  And you to the north of Raku-hoku,

  Till we had nothing but thoughts and memories in common.

  And then, when separation had come to its worst,

  We met, and travelled in Sen-Go,

  Through all the thirty-six folds of the turning and twisting

  waters,

  Into a valley of the thousand bright flowers,

  That was the first valley;

  And into ten thousand valleys full of voices and pine-winds.

  And with silver harness and reins of gold,

  Out came the East of Kan foreman and his company.

  And there came also the “True man” of Shi-yo to meet me,

  Playing on a jewelled mouth-organ.

  In the storied houses of San-Ko they gave us more Sennin music,

  Many instruments, like the sound of young phoenix broods.

  The foreman of Kan Chu, drunk, danced

  because his long sleeves wouldn’t keep still

  With that music playing,

  And I, wrapped in brocade, went to sleep with my head on his

  lap,

  And my spirit so high it was all over the heavens,

  And before the end of the day we were scattered like stars, or

  rain.

  I had to be off to So, far away over the waters,

  You back to your river-bridge.

  And your father, who was brave as a leopard,

  Was governor in Hei Shu, and put down the barbarian rabble.

  And one May he had you send for me,

  despite the long distance.

  And what with broken wheels and so on, I won’t say it wasn’t

  hard going,

  Over roads twisted like sheep’s guts.

  And I was still going, late in the year,

  in the cutting wind from the North,

  And thinking how little you cared for the cost,

  and you caring enough to pay it.

  And what a reception:

  Red jade cups, food well set on a blue jewelled table,

  And I was drunk, and had no thought of returning.

  And you would walk out with me to the western corner of the

  castle,

  To the dynastic temple, with water about it clear as blue jade,

  With boats floating, and the sound of mouth-organs and drums,

  With ripples like dragon-scales, going grass green on the water,

  Pleasure lasting, with courtezans, going and coming without

  hindrance,

  With the willow flakes falling like snow,

  And the vermilioned girls getting drunk about sunset,

  And the water, a hundred feet deep, reflecting green eyebrows

  —Eyebrows painted green are a fine sight in young moonlight,

  Gracefully painted—

  And the girls singing back at each other,

  Dancing in transparent brocade,

  And the wind lifting the song, and interrupting it,

  Tossing it up under the clouds.

  And all this comes to an end.

&n
bsp; And is not again to be met with.

  I went up to the court for examination,

  Tried Layu’s luck, offered the Choyo song,

  And got no promotion,

  and went back to the East Mountains

  White-headed.

  And once again, later, we met at the South bridge-head.

  And then the crowd broke up, you went north to San palace,

  And if you ask how I regret that parting:

  It is like the flowers falling at Spring’s end

  Confused, whirled in a tangle.

  What is the use of talking, and there is no end of talking,

  There is no end of things in the heart.

  I call in the boy,

  Have him sit on his knees here

  To seal this,

  And send it a thousand miles, thinking.

  By Rihaku

  TENZONE1

  Will people accept them?

  (i.e. these songs).

  As a timorous wench from a centaur2

  (or a centurion),

  Already they flee, howling in terror.

  Will they be touched with the verisimilitudes?

  Their virgin stupidity is untemptable.

  I beg you, my friendly critics,

  Do not set about to procure me an audience.

  I mate with my free kind upon the crags;

  the hidden recesses

  Have heard the echo of my heels,

  in the cool light,

  in the darkness.

  THE GARDEN

  En robe de parade.1

  —Samain

  Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall

  She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,

  And she is dying piece-meal

  of a sort of emotional anæmia.

  And round about there is a rabble

  Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.

  They shall inherit the earth.

  In her is the end of breeding.

  Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.

  She would like some one to speak to her,

  And is almost afraid that I

  will commit that indiscretion.

  1915: FEBRUARY

  The smeared, leather-coated, leather-greaved engineer

  Walks in front of his traction-engine

  Like some figure out of the sagas,

  Like Grettir1 or like Skarpheddin,2

  With a sort of majestical swagger.

  And his machine lumbers after him

  Like some mythological beast,

  Like Grendel3 bewitched and in chains,

  But his ill luck will make me no sagas,

  Nor will you crack the riddle of his skull,

  O you over-educated, over-refined literati!

  Nor yet you, store-bred realists,

  You multipliers of novels!

  He goes, and I go.

  He stays and I stay.

  He is mankind and I am the arts.

  We are outlaws.

  This war is not our war,

  Neither side is on our side:

  A vicious mediaevalism,

  A belly-fat commerce,

  Neither is on our side:

  Whores, apes, rhetoricians,

  Flagellants! in a year

  Black as the dies irae.4

  We have about us only the unseen country road,

  The unseen twigs, breaking their tips with blossom.

  COMMISSION

  Go, my songs, to the lonely and the unsatisfied,

  Go also to the nerve-wracked, go to the enslaved-by-

  convention,

  Bear to them my contempt for their oppressors.

  Go as a great wave of cool water,

  Bear my contempt of oppressors.

  Speak against unconscious oppression,

  Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,

  Speak against bonds.

  Go to the bourgeoise who is dying of her ennuis,

  Go to the women in suburbs.

  Go to the hideously wedded,

  Go to them whose failure is concealed,

  Go to the unluckily mated,

  Go to the bought wife,

  Go to the woman entailed.

  Go to those who have delicate lust,

  Go to those whose delicate desires are thwarted,

  Go like a blight upon the dulness of the world;

  Go with your edge against this,

  Strengthen the subtle cords,

  Bring confidence upon the algæ and the tentacles of the soul.

  Go in a friendly manner,

  Go with an open speech.

  Be eager to find new evils and new good,

  Be against all forms of oppression.

  Go to those who are thickened with middle age,

  To those who have lost their interest.

  Go to the adolescent who are smothered in family—

  Oh how hideous it is

  To see three generations of one house gathered together!

  It is like an old tree with shoots,

  And with some branches rotted and falling.

  Go out and defy opinion,

  Go against this vegetable bondage of the blood.

  Be against all sorts of mortmain.

  A PACT

  I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman—1

  I have detested you long enough.

  I come to you as a grown child

  Who has had a pig-headed father;

  I am old enough now to make friends.

  It was you that broke the new wood,

  Now is a time for carving.

  We have one sap and one root—

  Let there be commerce between us.

  FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS

  Come, my songs, let us express our baser passions,

  Let us express our envy of the man with a steady job and no

  worry about the future.

  You are very idle, my songs.

  I fear you will come to a bad end.

  You stand about in the streets,

  You loiter at the corners and bus-stops,

  You do next to nothing at all.

  You do not even express our inner nobilities,

  You will come to a very bad end.

  And I?

  I have gone half cracked,

  I have talked to you so much that

  I almost see you about me,

  Insolent little beasts, shameless, devoid of clothing!

  But you, newest song of the lot,

  You are not old enough to have done much mischief,

  I will get you a green coat out of China

  With dragons worked upon it,

  I will get you the scarlet silk trousers

  From the statue of the infant Christ in Santa Maria Novella,1

  Lest they say we are lacking in taste,

  Or that there is no caste in this family.

  A SONG OF THE DEGREES1

  I

  Rest me with Chinese colours,

  For I think the glass is evil.

  II

  The wind moves above the wheat—

  With a silver crashing,

  A thin war of metal.

  I have known the golden disc,

  I have seen it melting above me.

  I have known the stone-bright place,

  The hall of clear colours.

  III

  O glass subtly evil, O confusion of colours!

  O light bound and bent in, O soul of the captive,

  Why am I warned? Why am I sent away?

  Why is your glitter full of curious mistrust?

  O glass subtle and cunning, O powdery gold!

  O filaments of amber, two-faced iridescence!

  ITÉ1

  Go, my songs, seek your praise from the young and from the

  intolerant,

  Move among the lovers of perfection alone.

  Seek ever to stand in the hard Sophoclean light2


  And take your wounds from it gladly.

  LIU CH’E1

  The rustling of the silk is discontinued,

  Dust drifts over the court-yard,

  There is no sound of foot-fall, and the leaves

  Scurry into heaps and lie still,

  And she the rejoicer of the heart is beneath them:

  A wet leaf that clings to the threshold.

  THE COMING OF WAR: ACTÆON

  An image of Lethe,1

  and the fields

  Full of faint light

  but golden,

  Gray cliffs,

  and beneath them

  A sea

  Harsher than granite,

  unstill, never ceasing;

  High forms

  with the movement of gods,

  Perilous aspect;

  And one said:

  “This is Actæon.”

  Actæon of golden greaves!2

  Over fair meadows,

  Over the cool face of that field,

  Unstill, ever moving

  Hosts of an ancient people,

  The silent cortege.

  IN A STATION OF THE METRO

  The apparition of these faces in the crowd : Petals on a wet, black bough.

  [first version, Poetry, 1913]

  IN A STATION OF THE METRO

  The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.

  [Lustra, 1916]

  THE ENCOUNTER

  All the while they were talking the new morality

  Her eyes explored me.

  And when I arose to go

  Her fingers were like the tissue

  Of a Japanese paper napkin.