On the Mountain Holiday Thinking of my Brothers in Shandong
Mount Zhongnan
Seeing Off a Friend
Lodge Among the Bamboos
Deer-park Hermitage
Bird Stream
AT PARTING
TO QIWU QIAN BOUND HOME AFTER FAILING IN AN EXAMINATION
A GREEN STREAM
A FARM-HOUSE ON THE WEI RIVER
THE BEAUTIFUL XI SHI
A Song of a Girl from Loyang
Song of an Old General
A Song of Peach-blossom River
A Message from my Lodge at Wangchuan to Pei Di
An Autumn Evening in the Mountains
Bound Home to Mount Song
Answering Vice-prefect Zhang
Toward the Temple of Heaped Fragrance
A Message to Commissioner Li at Zizhou
A View of the Han River
My Retreat at Mount Zhongnan
An Early Audience at the Palace of Light Harmonizing Secretary Jia Zhi Poem
Looking Down in a Spring-rain on the Course from Fairy-mountain Palace to the Pavilion of Increase Harmonizing the Emperor's Poem
| Multiple poems at a time |
老将行Song of an Old General
老将行
Wang Wei
When he was a youth of fifteen or twenty,
He chased a wild horse, he caught him and rode him,
He shot the white-browed mountain tiger,
He defied the yellow-bristled Horseman of Ye.
Fighting single- handed for a thousand miles,
With his naked dagger he could hold a multitude.
...Granted that the troops of China were as swift as heaven's thunder
And that Tartar soldiers perished in pitfalls fanged with iron,
General Wei Qing's victory was only a thing of chance.
And General Li Guang's thwarted effort was his fate, not his fault.
Since this man's retirement he is looking old and worn:
Experience of the world has hastened his white hairs.
Though once his quick dart never missed the right eye of a bird,
Now knotted veins and tendons make his left arm like an osier.
He is sometimes at the road-side selling melons from his garden,
He is sometimes planting willows round his hermitage.
His lonely lane is shut away by a dense grove,
His vacant window looks upon the far cold mountains
But, if he prayed, the waters would come gushing for his men
And never would he wanton his cause away with wine.
...War-clouds are spreading, under the Helan Range;
Back and forth, day and night, go feathered messages;
In the three River Provinces, the governors call young men –
And five imperial edicts have summoned the old general.
So he dusts his iron coat and shines it like snow-
Waves his dagger from its jade hilt in a dance of starry steel.
He is ready with his strong northern bow to smite the Tartar chieftain –
That never a foreign war-dress may affront the Emperor.
...There once was an aged Prefect, forgotten and far away,
Who still could manage triumph with a single stroke.
Translator: Witter Bynner
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