Ah, make nature your home; Be true and be unchained. Enrichment by control Can never be sustained. Build your hut in the pines: Toss your hat and read verse. Know the dawn from the dusk, But not time -- cradle to hearse. If your life suits you well Why must you strive and strain? If you're unbound as sky, This style you have attained.
NOTE: The late Tang Dynasty poet, Sikong Tu (a.k.a. Ssŭ-k‘ung T‘u,) wrote an ars poetica entitled Twenty-Four Styles of Poetry. It presents twenty-four poems that are each in a different tone, reflecting varied concepts from Taoist philosophy and aesthetics. Above is a crude translation of the fifteenth of the twenty-four poems. This poem’s Chinese title is 疏野 and it has been translated as “Seclusion” [Giles,] “The Carefree and Wild Style” [Barnstone / Ping,] as well as, “Unrestricted,” “Seclusion,” and “Sparse Wilderness.”
In placid hours well-pleased we dream Of many a brave unbodied scheme. But form to lend, pulsed life create, What unlike things must meet and mate: A flame to melt -- a wind to freeze; Sad patience -- joyous energies; Humility -- yet pride and scorn; Instinct and study; love and hate; Audacity -- reverence. These must mate, And fuse with Jacob's mystic heart, To wrestle with the angel -- Art.
Dawn rain has washed the city of its dust; The refreshed hotel willows tremble in a gust. My friendly advice, you dry up another glass, You have no acquaintance beyond The Jade Gate Pass.
Men say they know many things; But lo! they have taken wings, -- The arts and sciences, And a thousand appliances; The wind that blows Is all that any body knows.
A cold rain blurs the edges of the river. Night enters Wu. In the level brightness of dawn I saw my friend start alone for the Ch'u mountain. I gave him this message for my friends and relations: My heart is a piece of ice in a jade cup.
This is the Amy Lowell translation of a poem by Tang Dynasty Poet, Wang Changling (王昌齡) --a.k.a. Shaobo (少伯)
I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing, All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches, Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark green, And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself, But I wonder'd how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there without its friend near, for I knew I could not, And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it, and twined around it a little moss, And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room, It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends, (For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,) Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love; For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana solitary in a wide flat space, Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near, I know very well I could not.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 