K'UNG JUNG — WANG TS'AN
"They whisper he is gone. The glooms
Of evening fall; beyond the gate
A lonely grave in outline looms
To greet the sire who came too late.
"Forth to the little mound he flings.
Where wild-flowers bloom on every side. . . .
His bones are in the Yellow Springs,
His flesh like dust is scattered wide.
"'O child, who never knew thy sire.
For ever now to be unknown,
Ere long thy wandering ghost shall tire
Of flitting friendless and alone.
"'O son, man's greatest earthly boon,
With thee I bury hopes and fears'
He bowed his head in grief, and soon
His breast was wet with rolling tears.
"Life's dread uncertainty he knows,
But oh for this untimely close!"
There was Wang Ts'an (A.D. 177-217), a learned man who wrote an Ars Poetica, not, however, in verse. A youth of great promise, he excelled as a poet, although the times were most unfavourable to success. It has been alleged, with more or less truth, that all Chinese poetry is pitched in the key of melancholy; that the favourite themes of Chinese poets are the transitory character of life with its partings and other ills, and the inevitable approach of death, with substitution of the unknown for the known. Wang Ts'an had good cause for his lamentations. He was forced by political disturbances to leave his home at the capital and seek safety in flight. There, as he tells us,
"Wolves and tigers work their own sweet will"
On the way he finds
"Naught but bleached bones covering the plain ahead,"
