AT Pei-mang how they rise to Heaven, Those high mounds, four or five in the fields! What men lie buried under these tombs? All of them were Lords of the Han world. "Kung" and "Wen" gaze across at each other: The Yuan mound is all grown over with weeds. When the dynasty was falling, tumult and disorder arose, Thieves and robbers roamed like wild beasts. Of earth they have carried away more than one handful, They have gone into vaults and opened the secret doors. Jewelled scabbards lie twisted and defaced: The stones that were set in them, thieves have carried away, The ancestral temples are hummocks in the ground: The walls that went round them are all levelled flat. Over everything the tangled thorns are growing: A herd-boy pushes through them up the path. Down in the thorns rabbits have made their burrows: The weeds and thistles will never be cleared away. Over the tombs the ploughshare will be driven And peasants will have their fields and orchards there. They that were once lords of a thousand hosts Are now become the dust of the hills and ridges. I think of What Yun-men said And am sorely grieved at the thought of "then" and "now." | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...TO THE RETURNED GIRLS by FRANKLIN PIERCE ADAMS LINES TO GRIEF by ANN ELIZA BLEECKER A COUNTRY GOD by EDMUND CHARLES BLUNDEN WRITTEN WITH A PENCIL AT KENMORE, TAYMOUTH by ROBERT BURNS OUR OLD VERMONT APPLE POLE by DANIEL LEAVENS CADY FAREWELL TO LOVE by THOMAS CAMPBELL TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 4. IN A SCOTCH-FIR WOOD by EDWARD CARPENTER |