Classic Poem

A CHINESE Queen on a lacquered throne
With a dragon as big as the side of a house,
All golden, and silent and sitting alone
In an empty house.

With the shadows above and the shadows behind,
And the Queen with a paper white, rice white face,
As still as a partridge, as still as a mouse,
With slanting eyes you would say were blind—
In a dead white face.

And what does she think, and what does she see,
With her face as still as a frozen pool is,
And her air as old as the oldest sea,
Where the oldest ice of the frozen Pole is?

She should have been dead nine thousand year . . .
But there come in three score and sixty coolies
With a veil of lawn as large as a lake,
And the veil blows here and shimmers there
In the unseen winds of the shadowy house.
And dragons flew in the shadowy air,
And there were chrysanthemums everywhere,
And butterflies and a coral snake
All round the margin of the lake.

For the Prince has come to court the Queen
Still sitting on high on her lacquered throne
With the golden dragon: and all the sheen
And shimmer and shine of a thousand wantons
In silken stuffs, with ivory lutes
And slanting eyes and furred blue boots
That moved in the light of a thousand lanthorns . . .

It all dies down, and the Queen sits there,
She should have been dead nine thousand year.