| The following poem was written by Li He in the ninth
century CE. |
"Song
of the Bronze Statue "
Gone
that emperor of Maoling,
Rider
through the autumn wind,
Whose
horse neighs at night
And
has passed without trace by dawn.
The
fragrance of autum lingers still
On
those cassia trees by painted galleries,
But
on every palace hall the green moss grows.
As
Wei's envoy sets out to drive a thousand li 1
The
keen wind at the East Gate stings the statue's eyes. . . .
From
the ruined palace he brings nothing forth
But
the moonshaped disk of Han, 2
True
to his lord, he sheds leaden tears, 3
And
withered orchids by the Xianyang Road
See
the traveler on his way.
Ah,
if Heaven had a feeling heart, it, too, must grow old!
4
He
bears the disk off alone
By
the light of the desolate moon,
The
town far behind him, muted its lapping waves.
1. The word li
refers to a unit of measurement. At the time this poem was
written, a li was roughly equivalent to about a kilometer,
but different Emperors in different centuries lengthened or
shortened the measurement as they saw fit.
2. The Han ruled
from 206 BCE to 26 BCE. They lost power for a few decades,
then reclaimed reclaimed their authority and continued to
rule until 220 CE. The symbol of the Han family was the crescent
moon. At the time the poet writes about Maoling palace, the
building has been in ruins for nearly 700 years.
3. The statue,
made of bronzework molded together with lead, has been melted
by the fire that destroyed the palace, and the lead (which
melts at a lower temperature than bronze) has run out from
its eyes, giving it the appearance of crying.
4. The word translated
here as "Heaven" is tian in Mandarin Chinese.
The written symbol for tian literally means "The
highest," and can refer to both "the sky" and
"the gods." The written ideograph shows an inverted
V shape with two horizontal lines crossing the top, the highest
of which holds blank space, indicating that there is nothing
above this highest point.
