孟郊诗

Poems of Meng Jiao


Index

塘下行

A Walk Down the Bank


塘边日欲斜
年少早还家
徒将白羽扇
调妾木兰花
不是城头树
那栖来去鸦

Along the river, sunlight slanting barely overhead,
This year's new grass is just now coming home.
Students come, waving white feathered fans,
Where singing girls move among magnolias.
It isn't the trees along the fortress walls
That are filling and emptying with bustling crows.

-- 孟郊


废话

This, too, appears to be an early poem of Meng Jiao. He's no longer sitting on Wizard Mountain. But he is working at his craft. The three couplets move from personal, direct observation to the world of men to social (political?), if oblique, criticism. But none of it is really about anything, as it were. It's like a postcard of a graffitied bench along a river sidewalk. Good likeness. But nothing to linger for.


Index