Returning To The Fields

When I was young, I was out of tune with the herd:

My only love was for the hills and mountains.

Unwittingly I fell into the Web of the World’s dust

And was not free until my thirtieth year.

The migrant bird longs for the old wood:

The fish in the tank thinks of its native pool.

I had rescued from wildness a patch of the Southern Moor

And, still rustic, I returned to field and garden.

My ground covers no more than ten acres:

My thatched cottage has eight or nine rooms.

Elms and willow cluster by the eaves:

Peach trees and plum trees grow before the Hall.

Hazy, hazy distant hamlets of men.

Steady the smoke of the half-deserted village,

A dog barks somewhere in the deep lanes,

A cock crows at the top of the mulberry tree.

At gate and courtyard – no murmur of the World’s dust:

In the empty rooms – leisure and deep stillness,

Long I lived checked by the bars of a cage:

Now I have turned again to Nature and Freedom.

Tao Yuanming (365–427)

Translated from the Chinese by Arthur Waley