You who practise the four elegant occupations tea music calligraphy and checkers follow me over the snow in search of plum blossom. Leave kingdom breakers to juggle nations, and care's broad cloud to the white hare that with mortar and pestle sits in the moon by the cassia tree, leave your lacquer trestle of puppets, your aviary of pets in petrified wood, your malachite lion with its ball of brocade, your clique to scribble the past on dust, and with no inlaid saddle, no jewelled bridle, follow me over the snow in search of plum blossom. The leaping salmon rainbows the cataracts, the dragon in chase of a pearl skips space and the phoenix, alighting, first selects a place to arrange its tail. Emulate in a degree these agreeable acts. Silent though peach and plum a path is trod to them. Every rustic talent till seen is silent. Even the hollow bamboo has leaves that droop. Come back over the snow, set up wrist-rests, paint in ink mountains trees creepers clouds gorges rivers cascades the brink of wind, monasteries in mist, beauties that have no best, that through your purpose a longing be learned, earned, the seal of your mind borrowed and not returned. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...INFERENTIAL by EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON L.E.L.'S LAST QUESTION by ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING EPISTLE TO MRS. BLOUNT, WITH THE WORKS OF VOITURE by ALEXANDER POPE SONGS OF LABOR: DEDICATION by JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER TO ATHENA by ALCAEUS OF MYTILENE SONNETS OF MANHOOD: 21. THE WORLD'S MARRIAGE MORN by GEORGE BARLOW (1847-1913) |