Looking at the Moon After Rain

- 701-762

Translated by Florence Ayscough and Amy Lowell

The heavy clouds are broken and blowing,
And once more I can see the wide common stretching beyond the four sides of the city.
Open the door. Half of the moon-toad is already up,
The glimmer of it is like smooth hoar-frost spreading over ten thousand li.
The river is a flat, shining chain. 
The moon, rising, is a white eye to the hills;
After it has risen, it is the bright heart of the sea.
Because I love it—so—round as a fan,
I hum songs until the dawn.

In the Mountains on a Summer Day

Gently I stir a white feather fan,
With open shirt sitting in a green wood.
I take off my cap and hang it on a jutting stone;
A wind from the pine-trees trickles on my bare head.

A Dream of T'ien-mu Mountain

Speak of the Blessed Islands men from the Ocean’s brim.
Truth is hid in their endless billows and mist-wreaths dim.
Tell of the T’ien-mu Mountain men in the land of Yore,
Seen there, when rainbows scatter, and clouds conceal no more!
Reaching up to the zenith, the skyline it seems to fill,
Huge like the Sacred Mountains piled over Ch’ihch’eng Hill.
T’ien-t’ai Mountain is fifty myriads of feet in height,
Crushing, about to fall, soaring in awful might!
Seeing, I longed to dream of Wu and the land of Yore:
Flew one night on a moonbeam over the Mirror’s shore.
Moon, that reflected my shadow dark on the lake below,
Carried me thence to Yen-ch’i, land that the spirits know.
Place where the ancient Hsieh dwelt is yet to be seen.
Gibbons howl by the water dimpling so purely green.
Bound on my feet the clogs were used by Hsieh of old,
Mounting the dun clouds ladder, halfway up I behold
Sea and Sun; and I hear mystic carols in Space.
Crags and hollows commingled, hard is the road to trace.
Flower-drugged, I lean on a rock. Lo! Night her shadow flings!
Bears’ roars and dragons’ bellowings boom over rocks and springs!
Startled, how forests quake on ridge over ridge of crags!
Black are the sombre clouds, waiting the rain to pour.
Placid the water still; above it the mist wraith lags.
Flash! and the hollow hills blasting the lightning tore.
Crash! and the stone gates burst of the vaulted sky in twain.
Boundless those azure spaces; end is there none in view.
Sunlight and moonbeams commingle golden and silver hue.
Clad in rainbows, and mounted on coursers of rapid wind,
Lords of the clouds come trooping; and trooping more behind.
Tiger roar of the drums, psalteries’ oriole note.
Orderly mixing disorder, crowding the genii float.
Suddenly feared my soul; twanging my spirit leapt.
Startled and trembling sprang I. Sorely I sighed and wept,
Feeling that I was awake; that it was but a dream now past.
Gone all those roseate hues the mist-wreaths had mingled last!
Thus are the joys of life! for all things pass away.
Streamlike flowing a-down, old Time will never stay.
Now, as I bid you farewell, when will you turn again,
Over the verdant mountains loosing the White Deer’s rein?
Wishing to go, we ride it seeking the famous hills….
Eyes must I bow, and body bending, submit to serve
Rich and powerful below, where never I may deserve
Happy a thought to think, or carelessly laugh at ills?

Related Poems

A London Thoroughfare. 2 A.M.

They have watered the street,
It shines in the glare of lamps,
Cold, white lamps,
And lies
Like a slow-moving river,
Barred with silver and black.
Cabs go down it,
One,
And then another,
Between them I hear the shuffling of feet.
Tramps doze on the window-ledges,
Night-walkers pass along the sidewalks.
The city is squalid and sinister,
With the silver-barred street in the midst,
Slow-moving,
A river leading nowhere.

Opposite my window,
The moon cuts,
Clear and round,
Through the plum-coloured night.
She cannot light the city:
It is too bright.
It has white lamps,
And glitters coldly.

I stand in the window and watch the
moon.
She is thin and lustreless,
But I love her.
I know the moon,
And this is an alien city.

Where is the Poet

The inky-garmented, truth-dead Cloud—woven by dumb ghost alone in the darkness of
         phantasmal mountain-mouth—kidnapped the maiden Moon, silence-faced,
         love-mannered, mirroring her golden breast in silvery rivulets:
The Wind, her lover, grey-haired in one moment, crazes around the Universe, hunting
         her dewy love-letters, strewn secretly upon the oat-carpets of the open field.
O, drama! never performed, never gossiped, never rhymed!
         Behold—to the blind beast, ever tearless, iron-hearted, the Heaven has no mouth to interpret these tidings!
Ah, where is the man who lives out of himself?—the poet inspired often to chronicle these
         things?

[‘Twas the new moon!]

‘Twas the new moon! 
Since then I waited—
And lo! to-night!
[I have my reward!]

 

 

 

                                              —Translation by William George Aston