[A long time ago]
translated from the Chinese by Arthur Waley
A long time ago
I went on a journey,
Right to the corner
Of the Eastern Ocean.
The road there
Was long and winding,
And stormy waves
Barred my path.
What made me
Go this way?
Hunger drove me
Into the World.
I tried hard
To fill my belly:
And even a little
Seemed a lot.
But this was clearly
A bad bargain,
So I went home
And lived in idleness.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on June 6, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
Tao Yuanming’s “[A long time ago]” was translated by Arthur Waley and published in A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 1918). About Yuanming’s work, Xiaofei Tian, the Ford Foundation Professor of East Asian studies at Harvard University, writes in her book, Tao Yuanming and Manuscript Culture (University of Washington Press, 2005), “Tao Yuanming is regarded as the fountainhead of a kind of poetry called ‘farmstead poetry’ (tianyuan shi), whose main theme is a reclusive life (as opposed to active service in the government) lived out ‘in the fields and gardens’—a pastoral setting.”
Tao Yuanming
