Autumn Love
“A Weary Song to a Slow Sad Tune”

by Li Ch’ing-chao

trans. Kenneth Rexroth (renowned American poet)

Search. Search. Seek. Seek.
Cold. Cold. Clear. Clear.
Sorrow. Sorrow. Pain. Pain.
Hot flashes. Sudden chills.
Stabbing pains. Slow agonies.
I can find no peace.
I drink two cups, then three bowls,
Of clear wine until I can’t
Stand up against a gust of wind.
Wild geese fly over head.
They wrench my heart.
They were our friends in the old days.
Gold chrysanthemums litter
The ground, pile up, faded, dead.
This season I could not bear
To pick them. All alone,
Motionless at my window,
I watch the gathering shadows.
Fine rain sifts through the wu-t’ung trees,
And drips, drop by drop, through the dusk.
What can I ever do now?
How can I drive off this word —
Hopelessness?

I  read today this poem in the small collection of "Complete Poems" by Ching-Chao Li. How beautifully the poet captures with evocative images the loneliness and hopelessness after a possible break up from her lover!

Li Ch’ing-chao (1084–c.1151) is universally considered to be China’s greatest woman poet. Her life was colorful and versatile: other than a great poet, she was a scholar of history and classics, a literary critic, an art collector, a specialist in bronze and stone inscriptions, a painter, a calligrapher, and a political commentator. Li is reputed to be the greatest writer of tz’u poetry, a lyric verse form written to the popular tunes of the Sung Dynasty (960-1279). Her tz’u poems are fill of lucid imagery, refined and highly suggestive.

Source: Complete Poems by Ching-Chao Li (Author), Kenneth Rexroth (Translator), Ling Chung (Translator)

Married Love

By Kuan Tao-Sheng
Translated by Kenneth Rexroth

You and I
Have so much love
That it
Burns like a fire,
In which we bake a lump of clay
Molded into a figure of you
And a figure of me.
Then we take both of them,
And break them into pieces,
And mix the pieces with water,
And mold again a figure of you,
And a figure of me.
I am in your clay.
You are in my clay.
In life we share a single quilt.
In death we will share one bed.

Kuan Tao-Sheng ( 1262–1319) was a Chinese poet and painter who was active during the Yuan Dynasty.She was born in Huzhou and was the wife of Zhao Mengfu. She was talented in calligraphy and painting ink bamboo and plum with delicate and elegant strokes. The calligraphy of herself, her husband and her son Zhao Yong were collected in a scroll by Emperor Ren, who commented that it was a rare thing for a husband, wife and son to all be talented in calligraphy.

She inscribed poems on her paintings and used a style of poetry that was used rarely by women. In her poems she shows concern for her husband and children.

 One of the deepest human yearnings is connectedness, true connectedness. We have this deep longing to be irrevocably linked to another body, another soul. The deep desire for love, to be one with another on all levels, crosses all times and boundaries and how lovely to see that the narrator fulfilled that desire. Her beautiful words give wings and hope to all who have entered into this bond of everlasting love with another being. From ancient times, clay has been associated with human body.

(Translated from the Chinese by Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung. Kenneth Rexroth’s, “One hundred Chinese Poems”, is a good book to start with for Chinese Poetry. Kenneth Rexroth was a fine American  poet)

SIX POEMS OF YOSANO AKIKO

Yosano Akiko (1878-1942) was a Japanese poet, essayist, autobiographer, and novelist. One of the most prominent figures in modern Japanese literature, she was a representative “new woman”  at the turn of the 20th century, whose first collection of Tanka poetry, Midaregami (Tangled Hair, 1901) caused a sensation among her contemporaries for its newness of theme and style, characterized by direct expressions of passion in an uninhibited, sensual language. Yosano Akiko wrote both tanka and free verse, but it is in her tanka that we see the most striking expressions of the “new woman” asserting her self, her sexuality and her body. One of the most characteristic aspects of Yosano’s poetry is the presence of a self gazing at her own body, admiring it and cherishing it (See Poem 5). A narcissistic vision, indeed, yet how much courage it took for a woman to openly declare that she was a woman whose “beautiful body” was not only an object of the male gaze but a body to be gazed at by her own self, a desirous body that is waiting to be “kicked” open (Poem 6). Kenneth Rexroth states that Akiko Yosano "is one of the world's greatest women poets, comparable to Christina Rossetti, Gapara Stampa, Louise Labe and Li Ch'ing Chao.

Poem 1


Translated by Kenneth Rexroth


Black hair 
Tangled in a thousand strands.
Tangled my hair and
Tangled my tangled memories
Of our long nights of love making.


Poem 2


Translated by Kenneth Rexroth


Not speaking of the way, 
Not thinking of what comes after,
Not questioning name or fame,
Here, loving love,
You and I look at each other.

Poem 3

Translated by Kenneth Rexroth


This autumn will end.
Nothing can last forever.
Fate controls our lives.
Fondle my breasts
With your strong hands.

Poem 4

Translated by Sanford Goldstein and S. Shinoda

Fragrant the lilies

In this room of love;

Hair unbound,

I fear

The pink of night’s passing

Poem 5

Translated by Sanford Goldstein and S. Shinoda

In my bath--

Submerged like some graceful lily

At the bottom of a spring,

How beautiful

This body of twenty summers.


Poem 6


Translated by Leith Morton


 Clasping my hands to my breasts
 The curtain of mystery
 I kicked gently aside
 How crimson is my flower
 And how dark!