Scott Wang 12 U07S

KING GEORGE V SCHOOL

IB A1 ENGLISH

PART 4

W ORLD P OETRY A NTHOLOGY

Scott Wang 12 U07S

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Not
es
fro
m
Notes from the City of the Sun the
City
of
the
Sun

The
The Answer Ans
wer

Dus
k:
Bei Dao
Dusk: Dingjiatan Din
gjia
tan

An
End
or a
An End or a Beginning
Beg
inni
ng

Hea
d
Head for Winter for
Win
ter

Pablo Neruda We
ak
wit
Weak with the Dawn h
the
Da
wn

Walking Around Wal

kin
g

2
 Aro
und

I’m
Exp
laini
ng
I’m Explaining a Few Things
a
Few
Thi
ngs

The
Wa
y
The Way Spain Was Spa
in
Wa
s

Fab
le
of
the
Mer
Fable of the Mermaid and the Drunks mai
d
and
the
Dru
nks

Rabindrinath Tagore Afri

Africa
ca

Flyi
ng
Flying Man
Ma
n

Rail
way
Railway Station
Stat
ion

Freedom-bound Fre
edo
m-
bou
nd

3
Scott Wang 12 U07S

Inju
Injury
ry

4
 NOTES FROM THE CITY OF THE
SUN

Bei Dao

Life
The sun has risen too

Love
Tranquillity. The wild geese have flown
over the virgin wasteland
the old tree has toppled with a crash
acrid salty rain drifts through the air

Freedom
Torn scraps of paper
fluttering

Child
A picture enclosing the whole ocean
folds into a white crane

Girl
A shimmering rainbow
gathers brightly coloured feathers

Youth
Red waves
drown a solitary oar

Art
A million scintillating suns
appear in the shattered mirror

People

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Scott Wang 12 U07S

The moon is torn into gleaming grains of wheat

and sown in the honest sky and earth

Labour
Hands, encircling the earth

Fate
The child strikes the railing at random
at random the railing strikes the night

Faith
A flock of sheep spills out of the green ditch
the shepherd boy plays his monotonous pipe

Peace
In the land where the king is dead
the old rifle sprouting branches and buds
has become a cripple’s cane

Motherland
Cast on a shield of bronze
she leans against a blackened museum wall

Living
A net

6
 THE ANSWER

Bei Dao
Debasement is the password of the base,
Nobility the epitaph of the noble.
See how the gilded sky is covered
With the drifting twisted shadows of the dead.

The Ice Age is over now,

Why is there ice everywhere?
The Cape of Good Hope has been discovered,
Why do a thousand sails contest the Dead Sea?

I came into this world

Bringing only paper, rope, a shadow,
To proclaim before the judgement
The voice that has been judged:

Let me tell you, world,

I–do–not–believe!
If a thousand challengers lie beneath your feet,
Count me as number one thousand and one.

I don’t believe the sky is blue;

I don’t believe in thunder’s echoes;
I don’t believe that dreams are false;
I don’t believe that death has no revenge.

If the sea is destined to breach the dikes

Let all the brackish water pour into my heart;
If the land is destined to rise
Let humanity choose a peak for existence again.

A new conjunction and glimmering stars

Adorn the unobstructed sky now:
They are the pictographs from five thousand years.
They are the watchful eyes of future generations.

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Scott Wang 12 U07S

DUSK: DINGJIATAN

Bei Dao
Dusk, dusk
Dingjiatan is your blue shadow
dusk, dusk
Your sweetheart’s hair floats on your shoulder

she holds a bunch of white roses

and brushes the dust away with her lashes
it is the martyr’s holy name
that freedom writes on the land

he pierces the moon with his finger

like a circle of smoke from the horizon
it is a gold engagement ring
the golden sealed lips of the girl

lips are lips

without a single word
their breath can still find in the valley
a shared echo

dusk is dusk
even if there are heavy shadows
the sunlight can still simultaneously
fall into both hearts

night closes in
night faces two pairs of eyes
here is a small patch of clear sky
here is dawn waiting to rise

8
 AN END OR A BEGINNING

Bei Dao
for Yu Luoke

Here I stand
Replacing another, who has been murdered
So that each time the sun rises
A heavy shadow, like a road
Shall run across the land

A sorrowing mist
Covers the uneven patchwork of roofs
Between one house and another
Chimneys spout ashy crowds
Warmth effuses from gleaming trees
Lingering on the wretched cigarette stubs
Low black clouds arise
From every tired hand

In the name of the sun

Darkness plunders openly
Silence is still the story of the East
People on age-old frescoes
Silently live forever
Silently die and are gone

Ah, my beloved land

Why don’t you sing any more
Can it be true that even the ropes of the Yellow River towmen
Like sundered lute-strings
Reverberate no more
True that time, this dark mirror
Has also turned its back on your forever
Leaving only stars and drifting clouds behind

I look for you

In every dream
Every foggy night or morning
I look for spring and apple trees
Every wisp of breeze stirred up by honey bees
I look for the seashore’s ebb and flow

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Scott Wang 12 U07S

The seagulls formed from sunlight on the waves

I look for the stories built into the wall
Your forgotten name and mine

If fresh blood could make you fertile

The ripened fruit
On tomorrow’s branches
Would bear my colour

I must admit
That I trembled
In the death-white chilly light
Who wants to be a meteorite
Or a martyr’s ice-cold statue
Watching the unextinguished fire of youth
Pass into another’s hand
Even if doves alight on its shoulder
It can’t feel their bodies’ warmth and breath
They preen their wings
And quickly fly away

I am a man
I need love
I long to pass each tranquil dusk
Under my love’s eyes
Waiting in the cradle’s rocking
For the child’s first cry
On the grass and fallen leaves
On every sincere gaze
I write poems of life
This universal longing
Has now become the whole cost of being a man

I have lied many times

In my life
But I have always honestly kept to
The promise I made as a child
So that the world which cannot tolerate
A child’s heart
Has still not forgiven me

Here I stand
Replacing another, who has been murdered
I have no other choice
And where I fall
Another will stand

10
A wind rests on my shoulders
Stars glimmer in the wind

Perhaps one day

The sun will become a withered wreath
To hang before
The growing forest of gravestones
Of each unsubmitting fighter
Black crows the night’s tatters
Flock thick around

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The first draft of this poem was written in 1975.
Some good friends of mine fought side by side with Yu Luoke, and two
of them were thrown into prison where they languished for three
years. This poem records our tragic and indignant protest in that tragic
and indignant period.

11
Scott Wang 12 U07S

HEAD FOR WINTER

Bei Dao
The wind has blown away towards the setting sun
the sparrow’s last remaining warmth

Head for winter

we weren’t born for the sake of
a sacred prophecy, let’s go
past the arched doorway formed by humpbacked old men
leaving the key behind
past the main hall where ghost shadows flicker
leaving the nightmare behind
leaving all our superfluous things behind
we lack for nothing
sell off even clothes and shoes
and our last rations
leaving our jingling change behind

Head for winter

singing a song
no blessings, no prayers
we will never go back
to decorate the painted green leaves
in a season that has lost its enchantment
fruit that cannot make wine
won’t turn into vinegar either
roll a cigarette out of newspaper
and let the black cloud faithful as a dog
close at our heels as a dog
wipe away all the lies under the sun

Head for winter

and don’t sink into green
dissipation, at ease everywhere
don’t repeat the incantation of thunder and lightning
letting ellipses in thinking become streams of raindrops
or walk down the street like a prisoner
under noon’s supervision
ruthlessly stepping on our shadows
or hide behind a curtain
to recite with a stammer the words of the dead
performing the wild joy of the tyrannized

12
Head for winter
in a land where rivers are frozen
roads begin to flow
on the cobblestones along the river shore
crows hatch out a series of moons
whoever awakens will know
a dream shall befall the earth
precipitating as cold morning frost
replacing the exhausted stars
the time of evil shall come to an end
and icebergs in uninterrupted succession
become a generation’s statues

13
Scott Wang 12 U07S

WEAK WITH THE DAWN

Pablo Neruda
The day of the luckless, the pale day appears
with a cold heart-breaking smell, with its forces in grey,
with no bells on, dripping dawn from everywhere:
it is a shipwreck in a void, surrounded by weeping.

For the moist shadow went from so many places,

from so many vain objections, from so many earthly halts
where it should have occupied even the design of the roots,
from so much sharp form that defended itself.

I weep in the midst of what is invaded, amid the uncertain,

amid the growing savour, lending the ear
to the pure circulation, to the increase,
without direction giving way to what is approaching,
to what issues forth dressed in chains and carnations,
I dream, burdened with my moral remains.

There is nothing sudden, nor light-hearted, nor with a proud form,

everything seems to be making itself with obvious poverty,
the light of the earth comes out of its eyelids
not like a bell’s ringing, but more like tears:
the fabric of the day, its frail linen,
is good for a gauze for the sick, is good for waving
goodbye, in the wake of an absence:
it is the colour what wants only to replace,
to cover, to engulf, to subdue, to make distances.

I am alone with rickety materials,

the rain falls on me, and it is like me,
it is like me in its raving, alone in the dead world,
repulsed as it falls, and with no persistent form.

14
 WALKING AROUND

Pablo Neruda
It happens that I am tired of being a man.
It happens that I go into the tailor’s shops and the movies
all shrivelled up, impenetrable, like a felt swan
navigating on a water of origin and ash.

The smell of barber shops makes me sob out loud.

I want nothing but the repose either of stones or of wool,
I want to see no more establishments, no more gardens,
nor merchandise, nor glasses, nor elevators.

It happens that I am tired of my feet and my nails

and my hair and my shadow.
It happens that I am tired of being a man.

Just the same it would be delicious

to scare a notary with a cut lily
or knock a nun stone dead with one blow of an ear.
It would be beautiful
to go through the streets with a green knife
shouting until I died of cold.

I do not want to go on being a root in the dark,

hesitating, stretched out, shivering with dreams,
downwards, in the wet tripe of the earth,
soaking it up and thinking, eating every day.

I do not want to be the inheritor of so many misfortunes.

I don not want to continue as a root and as a tomb,
as a solitary tunnel, as a cellar full of corpses,
stiff with cold, dying with pain.

For this reason Monday burns like oil

at the sight of me arriving with my jail-face,
and it howls in passing like a wounded wheel,
and its footsteps towards nightfall are filled with hot blood.

And it shoves me along to certain corners, to certain damp houses,

to hospitals where the bones come out of the windows,
to certain cobblers’ shops smelling of vinegar,
to streets horrendous as crevices.

15
Scott Wang 12 U07S

There are birds the colour of sulphur, and horrible intestines

hanging from the doors of the houses which I hate,
there are forgotten sets of teeth in a coffee-pot,
there are mirrors
which should have wept with shame and horror,
there are umbrellas all over the place, and poisons, and navels.

I stride along with calm, with eyes, with shoes,

with fury, with forgetfulness,
I pass, I cross offices and stores full of orthopaedic appliances,
and courtyards hung with clothes on wires,
underpants, towels and shirts which weep
slow dirty tears.

16
 I’M EXPLAINING A FEW THINGS

Pablo Neruda
You are going to ask: and where are the lilacs?
and the poppy-petalled metaphysics?
and the rain repeatedly spattering
its words and drilling them full
of apertures and birds?

I’ll tell you all the news.

I lived in a suburb,
a suburb of Madrid, with bells,
and clocks, and trees.

From there you could look out

over Castille’s dry face:
a leather ocean.
My house was called
the house of flowers, because in every cranny
geraniums burst: it was
a good-looking house
with its dogs and children.
Remember, Raúl?
Eh, Rafael?
Federico, do you remember
from under the ground
my balconies on which
the light of June drowned flowers in your mouth?
Brother, my brother!

Everything
loud with big voices, the salt of merchandises,
pile-ups of palpitating bread,
the stalls of my suburb of Argüelles with its statue
like a drained inkwell in a swirl of hake:
oil flowed into spoons,
a deep baying
of feet and hands swelled in the streets,
metres, litres, the sharp
measure of life,
stacked-up fish,
the texture of roofs with a cold sun in which

17
Scott Wang 12 U07S

the weather vane falters,

the fine, frenzied ivory of potatoes,
wave on wave of tomatoes rolling down to the sea.

And one morning all that was burning,

one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings –
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children’s blood.

Jackals that the jackals would despise,

stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate!

Face to face with you I have seen the blood

of Spain tower like a tide
to drown you in one wave
of pride and knives!

Treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain:
from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers,
from every socket of Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes,
and from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull’s eye of your hearts.

And you will ask: why doesn’t his poetry

speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land?

Come and see the blood in the streets.

Come and see
the blood in the streets.

18
Come and see the blood
in the streets!

19
Scott Wang 12 U07S

THE WAY SPAIN WAS

Pablo Neruda
Taut and dry Spain was,
a day’s drum of dull sound,
a plain, an eagle’s eyrie, a silence
below the lashing weather.

How unto crying out, unto the very soul

I love your barren soil and your rough bread,
your stricken people!
How in the depths of me
grows the lost flower of your villages,
timeless, impossible to budge,
your tracts of minerals
bulging like oldsters under the moon,
devoured by an imbecile god.

All your extensions, your bestial solitude,

joined with your sovereign intelligence,
haunted by the abstracted stones of silence,
your harsh wine and your sweet wine,
your violent and delicate vineyards.

Stone of the sun, pure among territories,

Spain veined with bloods and metals, blue and victorious,
proletariat of petals and bullets,
alone alive, somnolent, resounding.

20
 FABLE OF THE MERMAID AND
THE DRUNKS

Pablo Neruda
All these men were there inside
when she entered, utterly naked.
They had been drinking, and began to spit at her.
Recently come from the river, she understood nothing.
She was a mermaid who had lost her way.
The taunts flowed over her glistening flesh.
Obscenities drenched her golden breasts.
A stranger to tears, she did not weep.
A stranger to clothes, she did not dress.
They pocked her with cigarette ends and with burnt corks,
and rolled on the tavern floor with laughter.
She did not speak, since speech was unknown to her.
Her eyes were the colour of faraway love,
her arms were matching topazes.
Her lips moved soundlessly in coral light,
and ultimately she left by that door.
Scarcely had she entered the river than she was cleansed,
gleaming once more like a white stone in the rain;
and without a backward look, she swam once more,
swam toward nothingness, swam to her dying.

21
Scott Wang 12 U07S

AFRICA

Rabindrinath Tagore
When, in that turbid first age,
The Creator, displeased with himself,
Destroyed his new creations again and again;
In those days of his shaking and shaking his head in irritation
The angry sea
Snatched you from the breast of Mother Asia,
Africa
Consigned you to the guard of immense trees,
To a fastness dimly lit.
There in your hidden leisure
You collected impenetrable secrets,
Learnt the arcane languages of water and earth and sky;
Nature’s invisible magic
Worked spells in your unconscious mind.
You ridiculed Horror
By making your own appearance hideous;
You cowed Fear
By heightening your menacing grandeur,
By dancing to the drumbeats of chaos.

Alas, shadowy Africa,

Under your black veil
Your human aspect remained unknown,
Blurred by the murk of contempt.
Others came with iron manacles,
With clutches sharper than the claws of your own wild wolves:
Slavers came,
With an arrogance more benighted than your own dark jungles.
Civilization’s barbarous greed
Flaunted its naked inhumanity.
You wailed wordlessly, muddied the soil of your steamy jungles
With blood and tears;
The hobnailed boots of your violators
Stuck gouts of that stinking mud
Forever on your stained history.

Meanwhile across the sea in their native parishes

Temple-bells summoned your conquerors to prayer,
Morning and evening, in the name of a loving god.
Mothers dandled babies in their laps;

22
 Poets raised hymns to beauty.
Today as the air of the west thickens,
Constricted by imminent evening storm;
As animals emerge from secret lairs
And proclaim by their ominous howls the closing of the day;
Come, poet of the end of the age,
Stand in the dying light of advancing nightfall
At the door of despoiled Africa
And say, ‘Forgive, forgive –’
In the midst of murderous insanity,
May these be your civilization’s last, virtuous words.

23
Scott Wang 12 U07S

FLYING MAN

Rabindrinath Tagore
Satanic machine, you enable man to fly.
Land and sea had fallen to his power:
All that was left was the sky.

God has given as a gift a bird’s two wings.

From the flash of feathery line and colour
Spiritual joy springs.

Birds are companions to the clouds: blue space

And great winds and brightly-coloured birds
Are all of the same race.

The rhythms in the life and play of birds belong

To the wind; from the sky’s music comes
Their energy and song.

Thus each dawn throughout the forests of the earth

Light, when it wakes, unites with birdsong
In one harmonious birth.

In the great peace beneath the immense sky,

The dancing wings of birds quiver
Like wavelets rippling by.

Age after age through birds the life-spirit speaks:

It is carried by birds along tracks of air
To far-flung forests and peaks.

Today what do we see? And what is its meaning?

The banner of arrogance has taken wing,
Proud and overweening.

This thing has not been blessed by the life-divinity.

The sun disowns it, neither does the moon
Feel any affinity.

In the brutal roaring of an aeroplane we hear

Incompatibility with sky,
Destruction of atmosphere.

24
High among the clouds, in the heavens, its din
Adds new blasphemous grating laughter
To man’s catalogue of sin.

I feel the age we live in is drawing to a close –

Upheavals threaten, gather the pace
Of a storm that nothing slows.

Hatred and envy swell to violent conflagration:

Panic spreads down from the skies,
From their growing devastation.

If nowhere in the sky is there left a space

For gods to be seated, then, Indra,
Thunderer, may you place

At the end of this history your direst instruction:

A last full stop written in the fire
Of furious total destruction.

Hear the prayer of an earth that is stricken with pain:

In the green woods, O may the birds
Sing supreme again.

25
Scott Wang 12 U07S

RAILWAY STATION

Rabindrinath Tagore
I come to the station morning and evening,
I love to watch the coming and going –
Hubbub of passengers pressing for tickets,
Down-trains boarded, up-trains boarded,
Ebb and flow like an estuarine river.
Some people sitting there ever since morning,
Other people missing their train by a minute.

Day –Night – clanking and rumbling,

Trainloads of people thundering forth.
Changing direction at every moment,
Eastwards, westwards, rapid as storms.

The essence of all these moving pictures

Brings to my mind the image of language,
Forever forming, forever unforming,
Continuous coming, continuous going.
Crowds can fill the stage in an instant –
The guard’s flag waves the train’s departure
And suddenly everyone disappears somewhere.
The hurry disguises their joys and sorrows,
Masks the pressure of gains and losses.

Bho – Bho – blows the whistle,

Ruled by the clock’s division of time.
No one can bear to wait for a second,
Some get aboard, some stay behind.

Succeeding, failing, boarding or remaining,

Nothing but picture after picture.
Whatever catches the eye for a moment
Is erased the next moment after.
A whimsical game, a self-forgetting
Ever-dissolving sequence –
Each canvas ripped, its shreds discarded
To pile up along the roadside,
Detritus lifted hither and thither
By tired hot summer breezes.
‘Hold back, hold back’, rings out the clamour
Of passengers left stranded –

26
Next thing they have also vanished,
Chasing, running, wailing.

Clang – Clang – sounds the tocsin,

Time for good-bye, off goes the train.
Passengers leaning out of the windows,
Waving until they are whisked away.

The world is merely the work of a painter,

This is the truth I have accepted –
Not made by a craftsman, beaten and moulded,
Not a thing the hand can grip hold of,
But an insubstantial visual sequence.
Age follows age, never losing momentum,
A stream of forming and passing pictures.
Alone in the midst of the to-ing and fro-ing
I watch the constant flux of the station.

One – brush – the picture is painted,

Another brush blacks it out again.
Who are those coming from one direction?
Who are those floating the other way?

27
Scott Wang 12 U07S

FREEDOM-BOUND

Rabindrinath Tagore
Frown and bolt the door and glare
With disapproving eyes,
Behold my outcaste love, the scourge
Of all proprieties.
To sit where orthodoxy rules
Is not her wish at all –
Maybe I shall seat her on
A grubby patchwork shawl.
The upright villagers, who like
To buy and sell all day,
Do not notice one whose dress
Is drab and dusty-grey.
So keen on outward show, the form
Beneath can pass them by –
Come, my darling, let there be
None but you and I.
When suddenly you left your house
To love along the way,
You brought from somewhere lotus honey
In your pot of clay.
You came because you heard I like
Love simple, unadorned –
An earthen jar is not a thing
My hands have ever scorned.
No bells upon your ankles, so
No purpose in a dance –
Your blood has all the rhythms
That are needed to entrance.
You are ashamed to be ashamed
By lack of ornament –
No amount of dust can spoil
Your plain habiliment.
Herd-boys crowd around you, street-dogs
Follow by your side –
Gipsy-like upon your pony
Easily you ride.
You cross the stream with dripping sari
Tucked up to your knees –
My duty to the straight and narrow
Flies at sights like these.

28
You take your basket to the field
For herbs on a market-day –
You fill your hem with peas for donkeys
Loose beside the way.
Rainy days do not deter you –
Mud caked to your toes
And kacu-leaf upon your head,
On your journey goes.
I find you when and where I choose,
Whenever it pleases me –
No fuss or preparation: tell me,
Who will know but we?
Throwing caution to the winds,
Spurned by all around,
Come, my outcaste love, O let us
Travel, freedom-bound.

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Scott Wang 12 U07S

INJURY

Rabindrinath Tagore
The sinking sun extends its late afternoon glow.
The wind has dozed away.
An ox-cart laden with paddy-straw bound
For far-off Nadiyā market crawls across the empty open land,
Calf following, tied on behind.
Over towards the Rājbamśī quarter Banamāli Pandit’s
Eldest son sits
On the edge of a tank, fishing all day.
From overhead comes the cry
Of wild duck making their way
From the dried-up river’s
Sandbanks towards the Black Lake in search of snails.

Along the side of newly-cut sugar-cane

Fields, in the fresh air of trees washed by rain,
Through the wet grass,
Two friends pass
Slowly, serenely –
They came on a holiday,
Suddenly bumped into each other in the village.
One of them is newly married – the delight
Of their conversation seems to have no limit.
All around, in the maze
Of winding paths in the wood, bhāti-flowers
Have come into bloom,
Their scent dispensing the balm
Of Caitra. From the jārul-trees nearby
A koel-bird strains its voice in dull, demented melody.

A telegram comes:
‘Finland pounded by Soviet bombs.’

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