There is a singer everyone has heard, Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird, Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again. He says that leaves are old and that for flowers Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten. He says the early petal-fall is past When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers On sunny days a moment overcast; And comes that other fall we name the fall. He says the highway dust is over all. The bird would cease and be as other birds But that he knows in singing not to sing. The question that he frames in all but words Is what to make of a diminished thing.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun; And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. The work of hunters is another thing: I have come after them and made repair Where they have left not one stone on a stone, But they would have the rabbit out of hiding, To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean, No one has seen them made or heard them made, But at spring mending-time we find them there. I let my neighbor know beyond the hill; And on a day we meet to walk the line And set the wall between us once again. We keep the wall between us as we go. To each the boulders that have fallen to each. And some are loaves and some so nearly balls We have to use a spell to make them balance: 'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!' We wear our fingers rough with handling them. Oh, just another kind of out-door game, One on a side. It comes to little more: There where it is we do not need the wall: He is all pine and I am apple orchard. My apple trees will never get across And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors.' Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder If I could put a notion in his head: 'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offense. Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him, But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather He said it for himself. I see him there Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. He moves in darkness as it seems to me, Not of woods only and the shade of trees. He will not go behind his father's saying, And he likes having thought of it so well He says again, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'
Smoke slowly rises from sodden woods; Millet 's steamed to feed the fieldhands; Egrets fly over foggy paddies; Hidden birds sing from lush tree stand. Mountain hikers study hibiscus, Under dewy pines chew sunflower seeds, Give mat space to any old traveler. Gull and I: wary of each other's deeds.
Among ten thousand writing styles, There's no one standard or measure. The styles: many, muddled, and free -- Form, the unattainable treasure. Talent in word-wrangling shows skill. Idea conveyance shows craft. Writers strive 'twixt have and have not -- Unyielding in shallow or deep draught. An escape artist of fine lines -- Yet time and space consume in kind. Intricacy excites the eye, But frugality soothes the mind. One of few words is not confined. Verbose writers drift the Undefined.
An old man in a lodge within a park; The chamber walls depicted all around With portraitures of huntsman, hawk, and hound, And the hurt deer. He listeneth to the lark, Whose song comes with the sunshine through the dark Of painted glass in leaden lattice bound; He listeneth and he laugheth at the sound, Then writeth in a book like any clerk. He is the poet of the dawn, who wrote The Canterbury Tales, and his old age Made beautiful with song; and as I read I heard the crowing cock, I hear the note Of lark and linnet, and from every page Rise odors of ploughed field or flowery mead.
When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy, And the dimpling stream runs laughing by; When the air does laugh with our merry wit, And the green hill laughs with the noise of it;
When the meadows laugh with lively green, And the grasshopper laughs in the merry scene, When Mary and Susan and Emily With their sweet round mouths sing 'Ha, Ha, He!'
When the painted birds laugh in the shade, Where our table with cherries and nuts is spread, Come live & be merry, and join with me, To sing the sweet chorus of 'Ha, Ha, He!'
I left Baidi amid ochre clouds -- Crossed a thousand li by day's end. Monkeys howled and chased along each bank; My skiff slipped past ten thousand mountains.
The original in Simplified Chinese:
朝辞白帝彩云间 千里江陵一日还 两岸猿声啼不住 轻舟已过万重山
Note: this is poem #269 of the 300 Tang Poems [唐詩三百首.]
Tiger Riding for Beginners 