has put an end to our king. It is (now) sending down those devourers of the grain, So that the husbandry is all in evil case. Alas for our middle states[1]! All is in peril and going to ruin. I have no strength (to do anything), And think of (the Power in) the azure vault.
Ode 4. The Yun Han.
King Hsüan, on occasion of a great drought, expostulates with God and all the spirits, who might be expected to help him and his people; asks them wherefore they were contending with him; and details the measures he had taken, and was still taking, for the removal of the calamity.
King Hsüan does not occur by name in the ode, though the remarkable prayer which it relates is ascribed to a king in stanza 1. All critics have admitted the statement of the Preface that the piece was made, in admiration of king Hsüan, by Zăng Shû, a great officer, we may presume, of the court. The standard chronology places the commencement of the drought in B.C. 822, the sixth year of Hsüan's reign. How long it continued we cannot tell.
Bright was the milky way, Shining and revolving in the sky. The king said, 'Oh! What crime is chargeable on us now, That Heaven (thus) sends down death and disorder? Famine comes again and again. There is no spirit I have not sacrificed to[2]; There is no victim I have grudged; Our
- ↑ We must translate here in the plural, 'the middle states' meaning all the states subject to the sovereign of Kâu.
- ↑ In the Official Book of Kâu, among the duties of the Minister of Instruction, or, as Biot translates the title, 'the Director of the Multitudes,' it is stated that one of the things he has to do, on occurrences of famine, is 'to seek out the spirits,' that is, as explained by the commentators, to see that sacrifices are offered to all the spirits, even such as may have been discontinued. This rule had, no doubt, been acted on during the drought which this ode describes.
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