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Night
The speaker urges Night, personified as a star-inwrought spirit who weaves dreams by day, to cross the western wave and blind the eyes of Day, recalls sighing for her from dawn to dusk and refusing the offers of her brother Death and her child Sleep, and asks only that she come soon.
Hearing a Flute by Night on the Shouxiang Wall
Before Huile Peak the sand is like snow; beyond the Shouxiang wall the moon is like frost. No one knows where a reed pipe is being blown— all night the campaigning men gaze toward home.
夜上受降城闻笛
Written on a Rainy Night to the North
You ask when I will return; no date is set. Night rain in the Ba Mountains swells the autumn pools. When shall we trim a candle together by the western window and speak again of this night of rain in the Ba Mountains?
夜雨寄北
Reeds of Innocence
A piper in the valleys meets a child on a cloud who has him pipe, then sing, then write his songs down, after which the piper makes a reed pen and writes the songs for every child to read.
On His Blindness
Fear that blindness has buried a biblical “talent” is answered by Patience: God needs neither human work nor gifts, and waiting can also be service.
Her Reply
A reply tests the shepherd’s promises against decay and false speech, yet leaves a wistful conditional opening if youth and love could last.
She walks in Beauty
Light and darkness balance in a woman’s appearance before the poem turns inward to serenity, goodness, and an innocent heart.
Upon Westminster Bridge
Dawn makes London appear bare, bright, and still from Westminster Bridge, joining city, river, buildings, and sky in one composed scene.
Chang'e
On the mica screen the candle's shadow deepens; the River of Heaven sinks lower, the dawn star goes down. Chang'e must regret having stolen the elixir— green sea, blue sky, and night after night that heart.
嫦娥
The Solitary Reaper
A passer-by stops to listen to a Highland girl reaping and singing alone, compares her voice to nightingale and cuckoo, wonders whether the song is about old battles or ordinary present sorrow, and carries the music with him long after it is out of hearing.
Perfect Woman
Over three stages of acquaintance the speaker moves from seeing a woman as a dazzling apparition, to noticing her human household life, to recognizing a capable, enduring person who still keeps something of angelic light.
Mooring for the Night on the Jiande River
I move the boat and moor by a misted sandbar; the sun sets, and a traveler's sorrow is new again. The plain is wide, the sky hangs below the trees; the river is clear, and the moon comes close to a person.
宿建德江
Looking for the Recluse and Not Finding Him
Beneath the pines I question the boy; he says his master has gone to gather herbs. He is only somewhere in this mountain, but the clouds are deep—who knows where?
寻隐者不遇
The World
The sonnet complains that getting and spending have laid waste our powers and left us out of tune with sea and wind, and the speaker declares he would rather be a pagan of an outworn creed if that let him glimpse Proteus and hear Triton's horn.
WHEN icicles hang by the wall
Winter cold, frozen milk, foul roads, wind and coughing are set against the owl's nightly cry, which the refrain calls a merry note while Joan keels the pot.
When we Two parted
Recalling a parting marked by silence, tears and a cold kiss, the speaker links that chill to present shame at the other's broken vows and gossiped name, and imagines that any future meeting would repeat the same silence and tears.
When I have Fears that I may cease to be
The speaker sets out three fears—of dying before his pen empties his teeming brain, before he can trace the cloudy symbols of high romance, and before he can look again on a beloved creature of an hour—and ends standing alone on the shore of the world while love and fame sink to nothing.
WHEN daisies pied and violets blue
Spring flowers, shepherds' pipes, mating birds and bleaching maidens fill the fields while the cuckoo's repeated call is heard as mockery of married men.
The Rainbow
The sight of a rainbow makes the speaker's heart leap as it did in childhood and does in manhood, and he asks that it still do so in old age, wishing his days bound each to each by natural piety.
The Shadow
Taking a shadow that flees pursuit and pursues flight as its figure for courtship, the poem twice concludes in a refrain that women are styled the shadows of men.
Ode on Melancholy
The poem forbids the poisons and death-emblems usually sought in grief, redirects the sudden melancholy fit toward a morning rose, a rainbow on the wave, peonies and a mistress's anger, and locates melancholy's shrine inside the temple of delight itself.
Remorse
At nightfall a voice commands departure: duty and dereliction guide the addressee back to solitude, then to a sad, silent home of bitter tears and ghostlike shades. The poem says the soul or the world must fade before the addressee can meet peace. Cloud shadows, winds, ocean and whatever moves, toils or grieves all have their appointed sleep, and the addressee shall rest in the grave; yet until the phantoms that house, heath and garden once made dear have fled, remembrance, repentance and deep musings remain bound to the music of two voices and the light of one sweet smile.
On His Deceased Wife
The speaker recounts dreaming that his dead wife came back to him veiled and clothed in white, with love and goodness shining in her, and that as she leaned to embrace him he woke and daylight restored his darkness.
On Elizabeth L. H.
An epitaph stops the passing reader, states that the stone covers as much beauty and virtue as could die, asks that any fault stay buried, and withholds the second name so that only "Elizabeth" is spoken.