I TRY GOING OUT TO THE LANTERN FESTIVAL & QUICKLY RETURN

I TRY GOING OUT TO THE LANTERN FESTIVAL & QUICKLY RETURN

by Mei Yao-ch'en

translated by David Hinton

If I stay home, the gloom only gets worse,
so I go out and wander the festival for fun,

but rich and poor alike stroll beside wives,
driving any joy further and further away.

Once you’re old, anything’s overwhelming
I want to keep on, but it’s wearing me out,

so I go back home to the children, and no one
says a word. You can smell the acrid grief.

Last year they went out with their mother,
smeared on paint and rouge just like her:

now she roams the Yellow Springs below,
and they’re dressed in tatters, faces dirty.

Remembering how young they both are,
I hide my tears, not wanting them to see,

push the lamp away and lie facing the Wall
a hundred sorrows clotting heart and lung.

Mei Yao-ch'en (1002–1060) was a poet of the Sung dynasty. He was one of the pioneers of the "new subjective" style of poetry named 'P'ing-tan' which became the touchstone of Sung poetry. 'P''ng-tan' literally means even 'even and bland' and 'ordinary and tranquil' for a P'ing-tan poem enacts the spiritual posture of idleness in the movement of the poem. Like this poem, it takes experience as it is, without straining to extract from it profound emotional insights. As a result, the poem tends to be realistic, plainspoken, free of exaggerated poetic sentiment, calm and subdued whatever the topic, descriptive and socially engaged.

Mei Yao-ch'en wrote many poems which are celebrations of ordinary life and also touching verses mourning the deaths of his first wife and several of his children. This poem mourns the death of his wife. He visualizes his wife wandering in the Yellow Springs (The Chinese term for Hades or the Underworld), while his children, in the absence of their caring mother, wander bedraggled and unkempt. The poem poignantly paints the plight of a soul saturated with sadness and also the lugubrious ambience that prevails in a home where the mother has passed away, leaving everything in disarray.

From : Calssical Chinese Poetry . Translated by David Hinton