Classic Poem

This boat is of sato-wood, and its gunwhales are cut magnolia,
Musicians with jewelled flutes and with pipes of gold
Fill full the sides in rows, and our wine
Is rich for a thousand cups.
We carry singing girls, drift with the drifting water,
Yet Sennin needs
A yellow stork for a charger, and all our seamen
Would follow the white gulls or ride them.
Kutsu's prose song
Hangs with the sun and moon.

King So's terraced palace
is now but barren hill,
But I draw pen on this barge
Causing the five peaks to tremble,
And I have joy in these words
like the joy of blue islands.
(If glory could last forever
Then the waters of Han would flow northward.)

****** * * *

And I have moped in the Emperor's garden, awaiting an order-to-write!
I looked at the dragon-pond, with its willow-coloured water
Just reflecting the sky's tinge,
And heard the five-score nightingales aimlessly singing.

The eastern wind brings the green colour into the island grasses at Ei-shū,
The purple house and the crimson are full of Spring softness.
South of the pond the willow-tips are half-blue and bluer,
Their cords tangle in mist, against the brocade-like palace.
Vine-strings a hundred feet long hang down from carved railings,
And high over the willows, the fine birds sing to each other, and listen,
Crying — " Ken-Kwan, " for the early wind, and the feel of it.
The wind bundles itself into a bluish cloud and wanders off
Over a thousand gates, over a thousand doors are the sounds of spring singing,
And the Emperor is at Ko.
Five clouds hang aloft, bright on the purple sky,
The imperial guards come forth from the golden house with
their armour a-gleaming.
The Emperor in his jewelled car goes out to inspect his flowers,
He goes out to Horai, to look at the wing-flapping storks,
He returns by way of Shi rock, to hear the new nightingales,
For the gardens at Jo-rin are full of new nightingales,
Their sound is mixed in this flute,
Their voice is in the twelve pipes here.
By Rihaku (Li T " ai Po), 8th century A.D.