Lu Yu (1125–1210)
The wide wide Yangtze, dragons in deep pools;
wave blossoms, purest white, leap to the sky.
The great ship, tall-towered, far off no bigger than a bean;
4 my wondering eyes have not come to rest when it’s here before me.
Matted sails: clouds that hang beyond the embankment;
lines and hawsers: their thunder echoes from high town walls.
Rumble rumble of oxcarts to haul the priceless cargo;
8 heaps, hordes to dazzle the market—men race with the news.
In singing-girl towers to play at dice, a million on one throw;
by flag-flown pavilions calling for wine, ten thousand a cask;
the Mayor? the Governor? we don’t even know their names;
12 what’s it to us who wields power in the palace?
Confucian scholar, hard up, dreaming of one square meal;
a limp, a stumble, prayers for pity at His Excellency’s gate;
teeth rot, hair falls out—no one looks your way;
16 belly crammed with classical texts, body lean with care—
See what Heaven gives me—luck thin as paper!
Now I know that merchants are the happiest of men.
Translated by Burton Watson
Lu Yu
Old man pushing seventy,
in truth he acts like a little boy,
whooping with delight when he spies some mountain fruits,
laughing with joy, tagging after village mummers;1
with the others having fun stacking tiles to make a pagoda,
standing alone staring at his image in the jardiniere pool.
Tucked under his arm, a battered book to read,
just like the time he first set off for school.
Translated by Burton Watson
Lu Yu
In death I know well enough all things end in emptiness;
still I grieve that I never saw the Nine Provinces1 made one.
On the day the king’s armies march north to take the heartland,
at the family sacrifice don’t forget to let your father know.
Translated by Burton Watson
As Su Shih (see selection 56) was the most important poet of the Northern Sung period, so was Lu Yu the most important poet of the Southern Sung period. Lu, noted for his passionate patriotism, made repeated calls for mounting military strikes against the Tungusic Jürchen who had occupied the northern Chinese heartland in the middle of the 1120s. Many of his poems were written explicitly in this very public vein, but a wholly different mood prevails in his other poems, which describe the quiet joys and experiences of quotidian existence.
Lu Yu was extraordinarily prolific, having left behind close to ten thousand poems in his collection. There is also good evidence that he had destroyed thousands of others. This stupendous figure owed partly to his longevity but mostly to his huge reservoir of determination and energy. Arranged chronologically, Lu Yu’s poems constitute a virtual poetic biography.
This poem was written in 1187.
Written in 1192 in Shao-hsing (Chekiang), this is the first of two poems with the same title.
1. Villagers dressed up in costume who go from house to house at the beginning of spring to drive out evil spirits.
This is Lu Yu’s deathbed poem, written in 1209, when he was eighty-four years old.
1. The divisions of China in ancient times.