Poetry Codex

Chinese & Japanese

Anonymous (Classical Chinese)

various

The Classical Chinese poems gathered here are anonymous: folk songs and ballads from the Book of Odes, short epigrams and proverbs with no author named, and a few poems that Giles prints with a poet’s name or date that the scan does not preserve in full.

The poems here are Herbert A. Giles’s versions in Chinese Poetry in English Verse (1898).

Poems (42)

  1. To a Young Gentleman
  2. To a Man
  3. The Cricket
  4. The Husbandman's Song
  5. Yao's Advice
  6. Inscription on a Wash-Basin
  7. Carpe Diem
  8. The Elixir of Life
  9. True Pleasures
  10. Anticipation
  11. My Neighbour
  12. The Traveller
  13. View from an Old Tower
  14. Homeward
  15. An Agnostic
  16. Integer Vitæ
  17. Opportunity
  18. Chance
  19. A Lament
  20. Song of the Snapped Willow
  21. The Cloudy River
  22. One of the "Songs of the Ten Requests"
  23. Ai Ai Thinks of the Man She Loves
  24. Sent to Her Lover Yüan at Ho Nan (South of the River)
  25. Ch'in, the "Fire-Bird with Plumage White as Jade," Longs for Her Lover
  26. The Great Ho River
  27. Lines from the Tomb of an Unknown Woman
  28. A Word from the Wind
  29. Riding by Moonlight
  30. Plum Blossom
  31. Calycanthus Flower
  32. Only a Fragrant Spray
  33. A Maiden's Reverie
  34. The Old Soldier's Return
  35. The Brevity of Life
  36. Estimating the Value of a Wife
  37. The Lady Lo-Fu
  38. Muh-Lan
  39. Reflections on the Brevity of Life
  40. The Journey Back
  41. The Day of No Fire
  42. General Ke-shu

See Anonymous (Classical Chinese) in the full archive →