English

Hard is it for a man to please all men:
I therefore speak in doubt,
And as one may that looketh to be chid.
But who can hold his peace in these days? — when
Guilt cunningly slips out,
And Innocence atones for what he did;
When worth is crushed, even if it be not hid;
When on crushed worth, guile sets his foot to rise;
And when the things wise men have counted wise
Make fools to smile and stare and lift the lid.

Let none who have not wisdom govern you:
For he that was a fool

There is a time to mount; to humble thee
A time; a time to talk, and hold thy peace;
A time to labour, and a time to cease;
A time to take thy measures patiently;
A time to watch what Time's next step may be;
A time to make light count of menaces,
And to think over them a time there is;
There is a time when to seem not to see.
Wherefore I hold him well-advised and sage
Who evermore keeps prudence facing him,
And lets his life slide with occasion;
And so comports himself, through youth to age,

The emperor's city, a place of fame and profit:
from cockcrow on, no one relaxes.
I alone play the idler,
the sun high, hair as yet uncombed.
The clever and the clumsy differ in nature;
advancers and laggards go separate ways.
Luckily I've hit on a time of great peace
when the Son of Heaven loves scholars and learning.
With small talent, hard to perform great service:
I collate texts in the palace archives,
out of thirty days spend twenty at the office,
and so get to nurture my perversity and sloth.

Stepping through the sleet
that falls and collects in puddles,
shivering, shivering,
he follows

Drip drip, rain on paulownia leaves;
softly sighing, wind in the mallow flowers.
Sad sad the early autumn thoughts
that come to me in my dark solitude.
How much more so when I part from an old friend —
no delight then in my musings.
Don't say I didn't see you off —
in heart I went as far as the Green Gate and beyond.
With friends, it's not how many you have
but only whether they share your heart.
One who shares my heart has gone away
and I learn how empty Ch'ang-an can be.

Dousing clean a thousand old cares,
sticking it out through a hundred pots of wine,
a good night needing the best of conversation,
a brilliant moon that will not let us sleep —
drunk we lie down in empty hills,
heaven and earth our quilt and pillow.

" Don't worry! " he says,
and then tells you something
that really gets you worried

Even on a spring morning
my Sicilian pipe makes a sound of autumn
retracing thoughts past thousands of years

Though tangled and twisted the course of true love,
 This ditty explains,
No tangle's so tangled it cannot improve
 If the Lover has brains.

Ere the steamer bore him Eastward, Sleary was engaged to marry
An attractive girl at Tunbridge, whom he called “my little Carrie.”
Sleary's pay was very modest; Sleary was the other way.
Who can cook a two-plate dinner on eight poor rupees a day?

Long he pondered o'er the question in his scantly furnished quarters—
Then proposed to Minnie Boffkin, eldest of Judge Boffkin's daughters.

The eldest son bestrides him,
And the pretty daughter rides him,
And I meet him oft o' mornings on the Course;
And there kindles in my bosom
An emotion chill and gruesome
As I canter past the Undertaker's Horse.

Neither shies he nor is restive,
But a hideously suggestive
Trot, professional and placid, he affects;
And the cadence of his hoof-beats
To my mind this grim reproof beats: —
" Mend your pace, my friend. I'm coming. Who's the next? "

Ah! stud-bred of ill-omen,