Category Archives: Sorrow and Adversity
Leave Me Not - 古别离
You wish to go -and yet your robe I hold.
Where are you going -tell me, dear, -to-day?
Your late returning does not anger me,
But that another steal your heart away.
An Elegy I - 遣悲怀・其一
O youngest, best-loved daughter of Xie,
Who unluckily married this penniless scholar,
You patched my clothes from your own wicker basket,
And I coaxed off your hairpins of gold, to buy wine with;
For dinner we had to pick wild herbs –
And to use dry locust-leaves for our kindling.
…Today they are paying me a hundred thousand –
And all that [...]
An Elegy II - 遣悲怀・其二
We joked, long ago, about one of us dying,
But suddenly, before my eyes, you are gone.
Almost all your clothes have been given away;
Your needlework is sealed, I dare not look at it….
I continue your bounty to our men and our maids –
Sometimes, in a dream, I bring you gifts.
…This is a sorrow that all mankind [...]
An Elegy III - 遣悲怀・其三
I sit here alone, mourning for us both.
How many years do I lack now of my threescore and ten?
There have been better men than I to whom heaven denied a son,
There was a poet better than I whose dead wife could not hear him.
What have I to hope for in the darkness of our tomb?
You [...]
The Spinster - 春怨
Dim twilight throws a deeper shade
across the window-screen;
Alone within a gilded hall
her tear-drops flow unseen.
No sound the lonely court-yard stirs;
the spring is all but through;
Around the pear-blooms fade and fall
and no one comes to woo.
Jade Steps Lament - 玉阶怨