try to define - ("Drinking Wine, No. 5")

Zeb Raft's handout
"The Pageant of the Thundering Prince - Poetry at a Medieval Chinese Ceremony"

contained this five-syllable poem


Tao Yanming (365-427), "Drinking Wine, No. 5"



I built my hut in a place where people live,
and yet there's no clatter of carriage or horse.
You ask me how that could be?
With a mind remote, the region too grows distant.
I pick chrysanthemums by the eastern hedge,
see the southern mountain, calm and still.
The mountain air is beautiful at close of day,
birds on the wing coming home together.
In all this there's some principle of truth,
but try to define it and you forget the words.

(trans. Burton Watson, The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry, p. 135).