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(from the French of Charles Baudelaire)

Sheltered by the sombre yews
the owls are perched abreast in rows,
just like outlandish deities.
They dart their orange eyes, and muse.

Without a movement they remain
until that tristful time arrives
when fading sunset at last fails,
and all about them darkness reigns.

From ‘Nature’

(From the text of a 2nd century BC letter from
Wen-ti, Emperor of the Han Dynasty, to the ruler
of the nomadic Hsiung-nu, ‘Huns’. The poem
echoes the official style of the Court).

To the great Hun Captain, greetings;
may the seasons long be with him.
Respectfully, the gift he sent US,
two fine horses, is accepted.

But WE must divulge unto him
grievances of late arising.
In the time of Han’s first Emperor
policies became established
and were firmly set in motion
where the northern-roaming peoples
– peoples northward of the Long Wall,
nations of the bow and arrow –
were the great Hun Captain’s wardens,
ordered by and subject to him.
All within the Long Wall – namely,
kindred of the hat and girdle –
to be ordered by and subject
to the House of Han’s dominion.
Thereby would both peoples prosper,
pursuing each their avocations –
OURS engaged in cultivation
and the art of cloth production,
yours in archery and hunting,
that you might find food and clothing.
Families would not be severed,
suzerain and vassal, peaceful;
neither side would suffer violence.

But WE hear that certain persons,
by the hope of gain incited,
by the chance of booty guided,
threw aside their sworn allegiance;
breached their treaty obligations.
Though, WE put such things behind US
since your letter to US saying
how the two states had been friendly,
and their rulers friendly likewise;
tramping armies had been quieted –
peaceful occupations followed
through successive generations.
These are words to bring rejoicing.
Let us then proceed together,
tread, abreast, the path of wisdom,
start afresh with due compassion
for the peoples charged unto us –
sanction quiet for the aged,
for the young provide occasion
for a life untouched by danger.

Han and Hun are border nations,
cheek by jowl each to the other.
In your north the cold comes early,
locking you in hardship yearly.
Wherefore yearly have we sent you
bounteous gifts of food and clothing.
Now is peace about the Empire,
and its people thrive and prosper.
Of both folk we are as parents,
standing close as father, mother.
Let us not for trivial causes
lightly sever bonds of friendship.
Heaven covers many people,
earth a resting-place for all men;
let us cast aside all trifles –
on the broader path now venture.
Let us mind not bygone troubles,
but with firm desire endeavour
to cement a lasting friendship,
that our peoples live as brothers.
Let us then dismiss past quarrels,
count as nothing old contentions.
For in old days did our rulers
never break their faith in treaties.
Think on this then, O Great Captain.
And when peace prevails among us,
when it holds again between us,
never will it first be severed
through the House of Han’s endeavours.

From ‘Poems from the Chinese’


Note: This is not a translation of a piece of poetry, but my verse adaptaton of an official document already translated into English prose (by the renowned Sinologist H.A. Giles in 1883). The letter was penned in 162 BC by Wen-ti, 180-157 BC, Emperor of the Former Han Dynasty, to Chi-chu, ruler of the nomadic steppe-based empire of the Hsiung-nu ‘Huns‘ 174-160 BC. I have followed closely Giles’ translation of the letter. Except for a small number of curious or minor details, the complete text of the letter has been included in the poem.

The use of the term ‘Hun’ to allude to the Hsiung-nu is something of a literary convenience – whether the names are in any way cognate, and whether those steppe peoples who entered the Eastern Roman Empire during the closing years of the 4th century AD and called ‘Huns’ by the Romans may be identified with descendants of the Hsiung-nu, are questions still under discussion.

‘The Great Hun Captain’: The title of the rulers of the Hsiung-nu, indeed all terms relating to the steppe-nomads at that period, are known only by their Chinese transcription ‘shan-yu’, which Giles has translated as ‘Captain’. In a letter to Wen-ti, Mao-tun, father of Chi-chu, is known to have styled himself ‘great shan-yu of the Hsiung-nu established by heaven’.

When the two empires came into serious confrontation during the early Han period, neither side was capable of gaining real control over the other, but the advantage lay, by and large, with the steppe-nomads. To prevent incursions into their territory and to stem defections by their border population, the Chinese adopted a policy of appeasement, aimed at drawing the nomads into the Chinese cultural sphere, and, in the long term, absorbing them. The first treaty was initiated in 198 BC by Kao-ti, the ‘Han’s first emperor’ of the poem. Three of the four terms of agreement of these treaties are outlined in the poem:

1) That the Long Wall (the ‘Great Wall’) should serve as the frontier between the two peoples;

2) That ‘gifts’ including rice and garments should be sent by the Han several times a year;

3. That the Han and Hsiung-nu should be ‘brotherly states’ of equal status.

The fourth, which gave name to the treaties – the ho-ch’in (harmonious kinship) treaties – stipulated a marriage arrangement between the two peoples, calling for a Han ‘princess’ to be given in marriage to the shan-yu at each ruler’s succession. Such ‘princesses’ were invariably selected from cadet or discredited lines of the extended Imperial family.

It is interesting to note that the pluralis majesatis, the imperial ‘we‘ – as in Victoria’s ‘We are not amused‘ – is used by the Han Emperor. I have followed Giles’ capitalization here, taking it that he accurately followed an indication in the original document.

Look into my heart,
stranger, and tell me
what you see there.
Our lives have crossed
briefly. You have seen
these hands move,
this mouth mumble
dumbly, and I have not
been blind to the
quadratic equation
of your mind. But
the man in the mouth
and the man in the heart
are not the same –
and you cannot see
into my heart.

From ‘Memories, Moods, Reflections’

(A Chinese poem of c.600 BC which resonates extraordinarily with events in 2020 AD)

O wide and mighty Heaven,
how was it that your mercy was witheld
and death and famine dealt
to devastate the realm?
Foreknowing Heaven, fearsome,
why neither your forewisdom, nor your care?
While the guilty go discounted,
in answer to their deeds,
must the innocent
be deep-drowned in despair?

Why is it, mighty Heaven,
that our ruler gives no heed to just advice,
like a stray along the pathway,
not knowing what’s in sight?
Let all you of authority
act, then, with due decorum!
How do you not fear other men,
nor stand in fear of Heaven?

From ‘Translations of Classical Chinese Poetry’


Note: The poem is from the Shih Ching, ‘ The Book of Songs’, an anthology of 305 poems relating to the Chou period (11th century BC – 3rd century BC) – the time when the ancient kingdoms of what was later to become a unified China emerged into historical perspective. These are the very earliest known Chinese poems, the oldest of which may date from c.1000 BC, although it is likely that the anthology was arranged in the form we know it c.600 BC. The majority of poems in the Hsiao ya, ‘The Minor Odes’, the section from which the above poem was taken, deal with the courtly level of society.

Shown here are stanzas 1 and 3 of 7 in all – and the two which set the tone of the entire poem. The idea of a ‘Heaven’ which overlooked worldly activity and to which humankind and especially its rulers were responsible was firmly established by the the Chou period. The Emperor was the ‘Son of Heaven’, and is mentioned as such in Stanza 6. It is not Heaven alone as representative of universal justice, though, which is being remonstrated with here, but its aristocratic earthly ministers. The final two lines, ‘How do you not fear other men, / nor stand in fear of Heaven?’ are directed at those in the highest authority who are guilty of the ills previously enumerated, and are to be understood as ‘How do you not take into proper account the well-being and feelings of those you are supposed to rule over, nor stand in fear of just retribution for your misgovernment of them?’ The thrust and tenor of the poem reminds me not a little of William Blake’s resounding lines, ‘O for a voice like thunder, and a tongue / to drown the throat of war!‘ which concludes with ‘The Kings and Nobles of the Land have done it! / Hear it not, Heaven, thy Ministers have done it!’. The picture, in the Chou context, is of a wavering ruler, an irresponsible court, a stricken populace, a tottering realm – a scene which might be translated into contemporary terms and said for a good many of us, depending on where we are the world, to represent a real and present experience.

Old Father Clancy’s hair is thin, and white as snow.
He trembles when he kneels, and palm meets palm,
and eyelids close – this, unrelated to his eighty years;
no more, he knows, can he put his trust in prayer.
The wooden man, there on the cross, stares blankly from
              the whitewashed wall;
the painted plaster woman’s head is fixedly inclined
              to lilies placed about her feet.
The humid air has stuck the shirt close to his back.
He parts his hands to wipe his brow. Mosquitoes whine.
Outside, the sun, ablaze – tall palms, hibiscus flowers;
the music of the native tongue, like the cadenced lilt of psalms.
His mind flits back to far-off times… those long-gone seminary days.
Dark Dublin skies, and darker rooms, the dull, obedient hours – 
              and yet he’d had such youthful dreams.
Zeal for the priesthood; service – he had not questioned that.
Nor the reverence of humble folk, for to them the man of God was all –
till traitorous time revealed to him and he had seen,
              one bloody day upon this foreign soil,
the absurdity of duty and the long, lost years of toil – the long, the doubtful,
all too rapid changing years – and heard – dear God! – the wailing of his innocents
             amid that havoc of machetes and Kalashnikovs.     
Still the pesos trickle in from the simple, superstitious souls outside;
though Sundays witness, even when they try to wear
their best, a crowd of ill-clad, barefoot girls and boys.
Gaunt Clancy trusts no more in prayer, despite pressed palms.
And his nights are plagued by snakes among the lilies,
             and blood among the psalms.

From ‘Of Gods and Men’

Note: When, in 1949, the Communist forces of Mao Tse-tung took over mainland China and forced Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist armies – a million and a quarter soldiers and camp-followers – to withdraw en masse to the island of Taiwan, life became hard for the Christian communities in China. Some had no choice but to remain to face persecution; others fled or were expelled. The Jesuit order, which had been influential in China since the 17th century, were forced to reorganize, and made its future bases of operation in two East Asian island locations – Taiwan, and the Philippines. One of the main focuses of Jesuit activity in Taiwan was the north-west coastal town of Hsinchu, where I now live, and where they established new congregations and bought much property. My wife and I rented a campus facility from them (complete with the church of St.John the Evangelist) for almost two decades, and have had constant dealings with a succession of Jesuit Fathers Superior and priests, including a dwindling number of the original ‘49ers. With Jesuit priests high up in the mountains, too, serving the aboriginal Atayal tribal communities. So we know them well.

Father Clancy, the imaginary priest in the poem, is one of their number who found himself in the Philippines. I have located him in the large southern island of Mindanao, in its northern Christian part (the extreme south is Muslim). The inspiration for that violent catalyst for Father Clancy’s loss of belief in prayer comes from an ongoing situation across much of the Philippine archipelago – the contention between the rebel New People’s Army (NPA) who have strong, well-organised bases in the mountain jungles, and the regular Philippine Armed Forces, whose commission it is to root them out. Much of my information on the reality of this, and on the devout nature of Catholicism among the poor of remote villages, comes first-hand from the childhood and youthful memories of my thrice-weekly domestic help, a Filipina who grew up in such a remote community in Mindanao. Then, the NPA was a very serious threat to the government; its numbers and support have over the years decreased, but they are still there, and still well-organised. The scene is her, or any of a number of villages on the plain. The NPA visited these villages to exact ‘tribute’ in the form of supplies of all sorts; they were welcomed by some (the majority, I believe) but not by others. The villages were also swept through periodically by units of the Philippine Army, suspicious and fearful of where the sympathies of the inhabitants might lie and, uncertain of who and what they were dealing with, were inclined to be heavy-handed. In these circumstances, violent, sometimes very violent situations, inevitably arose.

The Promontory: Summer Dusk

Evening here
is the clear sweep of bay,
the quiet arc of water
caught by dusk’s edge,
softened there,
still.
Evening here
is heather and cromlech,
virgin turf,
              a sudden breeze
upon the cheek;  the distant
bleat of a wayward sheep come home.
              Evening here
is the silence of great stones.


The Promontory:  A Pledge

I will return there in the winter,
when clouds pile ragged
in the sky and the wind shifts
high over the waves
biting endlessly at Wales.
I will return there when
the gale roars strife,
when cliff-birds cling
to their kingdom of rock,
when brine-shocked boulders
grumble in blind caves;
when deep in the worried sea
the shellfish nations
rave in silent chaos.
When the sun has died,
when the last white gull
is crucified,
when winter comes I will return.

From ‘Welsh Past and Present’

I am saying this just once.
Please listen well.
If you wish to hear my words
I ask, in turn:


The First Listener

Try, if you can, not to merely understand
their signal properties.
For you to whom this proves to be a hardship
I offer honest, heartfelt sympathy.


The Second Listener

To you, my words are these:
Do not agree with everything I say,
not for love, nor out of deference,
nor from obsequiousness,
nor out of false propriety.
You must agree to question me.


The Third Listener

And you – why do you question
each and every sentence that I form?
From some untamed recalcitrance,
or from inborn adversity,
from downright animosity, or scorn?
You, too, might criticize –
but with reason, please, and rationality.


The Fourth Listener

To you I will say this:
Do not, I urge you, apply the biases which live
within your mind
unconsciously to what you hear,
usurping what is said
according to the standards of your own prehension.
Listen with impartiality, discrimination.


The Fifth Listener

To you, do not, I say,
listen with malign intent, preparing
to distort and amplify,
and work your spiteful calumnies
upon the minds of others.
For you I hold the uttermost contempt.


From ‘Memories, Moods, Reflections’

(Andalusia, Moorish Spain,1829)

Young widow – Yes! – mine hostess,
oh, eyes so dark and sultry,
silken black basquina
setting off her figure.
Leisurely her step, her bangles
jangling gently,
a coquetry about her
inviting admiration.

And then I saw her bravo –
eyes so dark with meaning,
leaning through the window,
fingering a dagger.

I made a swift decision
– it took a mere moment –
to keep the crimson current
running round inside me.

From ‘Journeys in Time’

Note: On a May evening in the spring of 1829, Washington Irving, on the last leg of a long and dangerous journey to Granada, made his final stop before reaching that city at an inn in the small frontier town of Loxa, high in the wild mountains overlooking the plain. Irving was straightaway struck by the beauty and free, inviting sociability of the young hostess,; in Irving’s words, her clothing ‘set off the play of a graceful form and round pliant limbs. Her step was firm and elastic; her dark eye was full of fire, and the coquetry of her air… showed that she was accustomed to be admired’. Irving’s thoughts (whatever he might have been thinking) were suddenly dashed by the appearance in the doorway of a sturdy young contrabandista dressed in excessive finery profusely decorated with silver buttons, and with a free, bold, and daring air, who straightaway entered into low and earnest conversation with the lady’s brother. Irving glimpsed, just outside, his powerful black horse ‘decorated with tassels and fanciful trappings, and a couple of wide-mouthed blunderbusses hung behind the saddle’. It was evident to Irving that this rather fearsome personage ‘had a good understanding with the brother of mine hostess; nay, if I mistake not, he was [her] favored admirer… ‘ Irving, it would seem, lay somewhat low thereafter. He need not have been overly concerned, though, for the man passed his evening at ease with them all, ‘and sang several bold mountain romances with great spirit’ to the guitar, which had, before he took it up, stood in the corner accompanied by another blunderbuss.

The leaning through the window and the fingering of the dagger are my own invention; in that imaginary circumstance (but considering too the actual dubiousness of the company and surroundings which he himself describes in greater detail) I have tried to catch – and, yes, dramatize a little – something of the apprehension which might have governed Irving’s feelings.

Wall

The wall is old, who knows how old,
and lichen has spread its circles wide
upon each grey stone slab,
and moss has laid its soft green mat
along each upper edge.
Small flowers thrust from cave and crack.

Who laid the stones here, one by one,
a hundred years and more gone by?
They toiled, they chose each single slab;
they held each one, and weighed it
for its handiness; tested it for steadiness of place,
and laid it cradled in the wall;
they sought the next stone from the pile.
And, doubtless, paused to look upon the land
and touched upon the way things were,
while the hawk wheeled high above the hill
and the whitewashed farm looked down,
and spread out their kerchiefs when noontide came
and ate good bread and drank Adam’s ale
from the freshet here, still dashing by;
and knocked their pipes out on the wall;
and thought what thoughts we cannot know
while the sun shone down or the dark wind whined,
and near and far the world worked out
its kind or cruel ways.

The hawk wheels yet above the hill,
and the whitewashed farm looks down.
But they are one with the vanished years,
and the stones that were held
and weighed in their hands
and steadied and laid in their place in the wall
stand mute.

The Field of Stones

Siencyn Blaengarw built this wall
two hundred years ago, from stones
that lay upon his field, and some that lay
within the soil, a foot or more below
in virgin, untouched, unploughed ground.
He cleared them all away.
Small and middle-sized, the most,
but twice or thrice a day a biggish one
that Sioni Gryf, the plough-horse, would pull away
with chains. All these were heaped at the field’s far edge
in a long and ragged pile. And once in a while,
from deep within the soil a monstrous one would raise its head,
a stone so large that Sioni Gryf would toil to drag along.
And one of these had queer marks
in groups along the edge, like scratches
from some giant claws upon its angled sides;
and one, a great flat seven-foot stone
had a long-stemmed cross, it seemed,
with uneven letters of some sort in a  
downward roaming line. At this now, Siencyn wondered;
and with Sioni’s strength that flat slab with the carven cross
was lifted out and hauled along, and piled up with the rest.
And when he came to stack the stones when the ploughing
was all done – an hour perhaps of every day
and his sons to help as well – the stones were
tidied up a bit in a rough and ready line.
But after three-score stones, or four, were laid out
in this way, a thought took hold of
Siencyn’s mind; he would ponder much
about each stone, about its shape and size, and how
it would fit in snug and firm with its neighbour
on each side, and with those below
and those above. He sorted by size,
he studied them, weighed and turned them
in his hands, and smiled. He turned then to his boys. From these
stones thrown in a line, they heard, would be built a wall
that was firm and strong, for Blaengarw kin in all the days to come;
a long wall and a fine one that would stand the test of time.
So Siencyn was espoused.

Well the scouting creatures round about
took interest in this thing, and they came
to explore the nooks in the wall, the field-mouse
and the beetle. The lizard too, and the sparrows in droves
and the ants en masse, and the spider.
The grass took root about its foot;
and soon, in the cracks, tiny flowers emerged.
Siencyn, his sons, and Sioni Gryf worked on.

So the stones were laid, the wall, complete. Seasons passed;
the field was ploughed, and ploughed and ploughed again,
and sown, and reaped. Those two great slabs were stood upright
and firmly fixed in place – stout gateposts,
central to the wall, and it made old Siencyn proud
to see them standing there in the world,
after how they had slept in the ground.
He whitewashed their surface. Those parallel lines
stood out starkly in the sun. The cross
looked so fine, with its tapering tail, reaching and reaching down,
its letters crawling along its length in some strange
unworldly rhyme. The vicar, passing by one day,
announced it the Latin tongue, and stuttered upon it
bit by bit, running his fingers over the script, frowning
and pacing around. And time wore on.

And when Siencyn Blaengarw was old and grey
and toiled no more upon the field
and his grandsons worked the place in his stead
and he sat indoors with his long clay pipe
there came two men to the farmhouse door,
well-spoken, learned men. With them the Reverend
Marcus Black, and the end of it was
that the gateposts were sold, and sold for a goodly sum,
with new ones promised to take their place. The scholars smiled
and Siencyn too, though he knew he would miss
that slab scratched with the slanting strokes
and the one with the long-tailed cross incised,
that Sioni Gryf, long gone now, had hauled out from the soil.
And the ceaseless years passed by.

Blaengarw lies in ruins now. The grass and the ferns
thrust strong and tall within its foursquare walls,
its roof collapsed, its timbers home to the woodlouse and the snail.
And its sons gone away to the smoke-stack towns
where the steel was spun and the shafts were sunk
and other sons and daughters would be raised.
A black tarred road now winds close by.
A tractor will rumble along. The smell of petrol
hangs in the air, cigarette-ends lie in the ditch
at the side. And once in a while
a car will stop if the day is fine, and a family
pile out. A blanket is spread in the field close by,
a picnic begins, the kids run about, and stop to look
at the old ruined house, and pass through the gap in the wall,
past the old leaning gateposts covered in moss.
The wall still stands, though tumbled in parts
and choked with brambles and weeds. Little creatures
still live, and insects creep through its tunnels and its caves,
and wild flowers sprout from its cracks to the sun,
and saucers of pale green lichen spread, and moss
caps the silent stones. But nobody knows who Siencyn was,
how he toiled to clear that field, the stones of the field,
in those years now lost – Siencyn and Sioni Gryf.

Note: I’ve always been fascinated by old stone walls, and every time I’ve ever looked at one I’ve not been able to help but think ‘Who were the people who laid these stones, each one in its special, chosen place? How long ago had they lived? Were they young, or old? What were their thoughts as they toiled here? And I have touched their stones with reverence, each individual one laid there in its special place by a hand long gone, while the stone itself ‘lives’ on. Yes, there is something about a wall, and those are words which occurred to me quite unconsciously, I’m sure, from the first line of Robert Frost’s very discerning poem Mending Wall – ‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall’… this in reference to those natural forces which accompany time – as well as the destructive meddling of humankind – which will cause a wall not to be what it once was. Well that, I suppose, is the inescapable, old, old story.

In ‘The Field of Stones’, the name of the plough-horse, ‘Sioni Gryf’, is in English ‘Strong Johnny’. The ‘queer scratchings’ on the one stone were, of course, in the Ogham script, and would date to the fifth / seventh centuries AD, along with the stone bearing the incised cross and Latin inscription. The two ‘learned men’ would have been early / late 19th century antiquarians, scholars (men like Romilly Allen, who at Whitsuntide, 1889, made the pilgrimage to the remote church near the farmhouse of Llandre, west Carmarthenshire, and found and deciphered the now well-known ‘Carantacus‘ stone, complaining, on the way, of the hotel accommodation at Hendy-gwyn  being of a ‘very homely kind’). These made it their business, at that time, to investigate stones of that kind which were found in the Welsh countryside. The punning in the name of the Reverend Marcus Black makes it obvious that he thought he knew his congregation very well indeed.

Loneliness
(From the Chinese of Liu Fang-ping, 742-779 AD)

The day is past, and twilight steals across the darkened window screen.
Within the lady’s gilded home she dabs her teardrops all alone.
The empty courtyard lies all still. Attendant to the passing spring
the pale pear-blossoms fail and fall. She knows that no-one, now, will call.


Tears
(From the Chinese of Li Bai, 701-762 AD)

The beauty at the window lifts high the beaded blinds.
Her brows are drawn and troubled. She cannot turn aside
the tears that well and tumble, and glisten on her cheeks.
Nor can we know the person who causes her such grief.

Note: This poem is said to stem from an incident which Li Bai witnessed personally.


Waiting
(From the Chinese of Yao Yue-hua, 600 x 900AD)

I set out silver candlesticks
and cups of clear wine,
and I stood there and waited
for a long, long time.

I passed out the gate
and in the gate
till the sky was growing light.

The moon had set;
the stars grew few.
In the end, he didn’t arrive.

From the misty willows
came wingbeats.
And a magpie took to flight.

Note: The magpie is, in Chinese symbolism, considered a bird of good omen; in popular parlance its name, hsi-ch’iao, means ‘joy-bringing bird’. Two magpies symbolize male-female harmony, and the wish ‘May you meet each other in joy’ of a marriage or other love relationship. In the poem, the flight of a single magpie emphasizes the sad reality of the situation; a possible corollary might be seen in the western jingle ‘One for sorrow’… etc.

From ‘Translations of Classical Chinese Poetry’