Xie Lingyun

At 37, Xie Lingyun (Hsieh Ling-yün) was demoted at court and exiled to the coast. It was there he began writing his landscape poetry, something he continued when he retreated to his family’s estate one year later, where he commanded servants to hack trails through thick forests spread across mountaintops. Eventually, the government ordered him to serve once more. Rather than work, Xie gathered some soldiers and staged a small, failed rebellion. Exiled again, he was executed some time later in a public square.

If anything can ease the grief of exile travels
it’s these morning winds and seascape vistas,

vast swells stretching away beyond knowing
to the east, that unfathomable Great Valley.

I’ll follow the way of water-chestnut foragers,
traces of drifting song thinning sorrow away,

roam along beaches of jade-green sand at ease,
wander these cinnabar-red peaks of eternity.

Feeding small lakes strung
together by coves and bays,

streams gather: the return
ten thousand springs follow.

None alike, they seep or swell,
first surging, then a sheen.

And far-off mountain rivers
trace distances back home.

Searching out other realms all quiet mystery,
I sail in morning clarity out beyond farmlands,

swept along past shallows crowded with orchids,
moss-covered peaks towering vast and majestic.

Here, Stone-House floats above outland forests,
a waterfall tumbling down the rocky dome,

its empty cascade drifting through millennia
below summits outlasting the shift of dynasties.

Nowhere near village sights and sounds, distant
wind and mist keep even woodland foragers away,

but after longing to climb peaks since childhood,
I’ll keep these close through the dusk of old age.

A sacred land long since wrapped in solitude:
it seems to share this mind adoration conjures,

and come to this accord that’s empty of all words,
I gather its blossoms, savor thickets in cold bloom.

Cold cutting through thin openwork robes
and not yet time for gifts of winter clothes:

this season always pitches me into depths
all grief-clotted thoughts of ancient times.

I’ll never sail on thousand-mile oars again
or think through the hundred generations,

but Master Shang’s distant mind my own
now, and old Master Hsü’s recluse ways,

I wander these winds boundless and clear,
and the headlong rush of autumn streams.

Rivers and mountains open away through
that alluring luster cloud and sun share,

and when twilight’s clarity infuses it all,
I savor a joy things themselves know here.