All beauty passes

Does that enhance or detract from its value?

AI could not handle the true darkness of the chasm of the years. Who can blame it? These thoughts can only be approached through art.

Jade Spring Brook
Girl at the River Xiang Way Station

Red leaves
    drunk on the sights of autumn
Emerald stream
    plucking the chords of night
Perfect moments
   can never return
The chasm of years
    is full of rain and storms

湘驿女子  题玉泉溪
红叶醉秋色，碧溪弹夜弦。
佳期不可再，风雨杳如年。

---

There are plenty more Hard Road to Walk poems still to come, but I felt like we all needed a little palate cleanser!

This lovely rhyme comes from an anonymous poet, presumed female. It’s a classic piece of High Tang writing (mid-8th century), and reminds us of the unique qualities of that era. Most striking, to my eyes, is the complexity. In the modern world, we often value simplicity in writing, but that was not an effect that interested these Tang poets. Bittersweet is the basenote, and every effect should produce mixed emotions.

So, in the very first line, we have the beauty of red leaves, but sadness for the passing of seasons that they represent. In the next, the stream is beautiful in colour, but perhaps its greatest beauty comes at night, when we sing on its banks - or are we listening to the sweet babble of the water itself? Everything is ambiguous.

The chasm of the years put me in mind of Gilgamesh:

...to lead me captive to the house of darkness, seat of Irkalla:
to the house which none who enters ever leaves, 
on the path that allows no journey back,
'to the house whose residents are deprived of light,
where soil is their sustenance and clay their food,
where they are clad like birds in coats of feathers,
and see no light, but dwell in darkness. 
'On door [and bolt the dust lay thick,]
on the House [of Dust was poured a deathly quiet.]
In the House of Dust that I entered...
(translated by Andrew George)

But the effect in this poem is not so dark. Though the years stretch away like an abyss, they are living years. And there is always the memory of these perfect moments, even if they will not return.