which I Englished for a friend in the following manner. She did not say where she got it, and I have hunted in every likely place and asked my friends to hunt in Paris. I apologize if I have broached a copyright.
WOMAN
How sad it is to be a woman!
Nothing on earth is held so cheap;
When boys stand leaning at the sill,
Like Gods tumbled out of Heaven.
Their hearts compass the Four Oceans,
The dust and the wind of a thousand thousand miles.
But no one is glad when a girl is born â
By her the family sets no store.
When she grows up she hides in her room
Scared to look a man in the face.
Nobody cries when she leaves her home, save she.
As suddenly as clouds when rain pauses,
She bows her head, composes her face, her teeth
Are pressed into her red lips, she bows and kneels
O! countless times. She must humble herself even to servants.
His love is as distant as a star,
Yet always the sunflower turns towards the sun.
Her heart is more sundered than water from fire,
A hundred ills are heaped on her; her face will follow
The changes of the years, will wear its age.
Her Lord will find new treasures.
They that were once like substance and shadow
Are now as distant as Hu from châin [two places]
Or as Tsâan is from Châen [two stars].
3rd Century Chinese
How odd that these apparently disparate incidents were all held together in my mind by a slender chain of echoes, a predisposition which stretched back to my twenty-third year in the remote (then) island of Corfu where I had taken up residence with the intention of trying my hand at being a poet â or at least a writer of some sort. It seemed clear now, as I thought back to that prehistoric time, that the main inhibition against giving Changâs book a conventional review (what I had promised) was the echoes it had set off in my memory. I could not bring a coolly critical intelligence to bear on his text. This sense of indecision had been helped by the fact that I had also been trying to compile some sketchy autobiographical notes for an American friend who was anxious to trace what he called âthe inner autobiographyâ of my poetry. It dawned on me in answering his letters that the central preoccupation of the then unfledged young poet of Corfu has been always somehow linked with childhood dreams of Tibet which had at last concretized themselves about the Tao â the great poem of Lao Tsu. In the Black Book written around 1936, I find a Tibetan epigraph. The novel was published in 1938, the year before the war; already my poems were gathered into a bouquet to present to this amor fati from Lhasa, the tantric dakini who had guided and inspired me. It was a life sentence and it helped me to put a calm face upon the despair of the war years with their wanton murders of time and talent and truth. When the war came I had just turned twenty-seven. Among my papers, long after it had ended, I found a forgotten article I had contributed to the Aryan Path, called âTao and Its Glozesâ. The old Aryan Path, published from 51 Mahatma Gandhi Road, Bombay, was even then the most distinguished journal of the day devoted to theosophy, and my amateur article was published as a sort of little preface to the issue of December 1939, by which time my island life had ended and I was adrift in Athens waiting upon fate, waiting upon the Axis.
I reprint it here for old timesâ sake, and also as evidence of my constant attachment to the principle of non-attachment as outlined in the poem! It was not a bad way to greet a world war. I note also the use of the adjective âheraldicâ for which I have often had to answer the critics. It means simply the âmandalaâ of the poet or of the poem. It is the alchemical sigil or signature of the individual; whatâs left with the ego extracted. It is the pure nonentity of the entity for which the poem stands like an ideogram! It sounds rather enigmatic put like that, though in fact
WOMAN
How sad it is to be a woman!
Nothing on earth is held so cheap;
When boys stand leaning at the sill,
Like Gods tumbled out of Heaven.
Their hearts compass the Four Oceans,
The dust and the wind of a thousand thousand miles.
But no one is glad when a girl is born â
By her the family sets no store.
When she grows up she hides in her room
Scared to look a man in the face.
Nobody cries when she leaves her home, save she.
As suddenly as clouds when rain pauses,
She bows her head, composes her face, her teeth
Are pressed into her red lips, she bows and kneels
O! countless times. She must humble herself even to servants.
His love is as distant as a star,
Yet always the sunflower turns towards the sun.
Her heart is more sundered than water from fire,
A hundred ills are heaped on her; her face will follow
The changes of the years, will wear its age.
Her Lord will find new treasures.
They that were once like substance and shadow
Are now as distant as Hu from châin [two places]
Or as Tsâan is from Châen [two stars].
3rd Century Chinese
How odd that these apparently disparate incidents were all held together in my mind by a slender chain of echoes, a predisposition which stretched back to my twenty-third year in the remote (then) island of Corfu where I had taken up residence with the intention of trying my hand at being a poet â or at least a writer of some sort. It seemed clear now, as I thought back to that prehistoric time, that the main inhibition against giving Changâs book a conventional review (what I had promised) was the echoes it had set off in my memory. I could not bring a coolly critical intelligence to bear on his text. This sense of indecision had been helped by the fact that I had also been trying to compile some sketchy autobiographical notes for an American friend who was anxious to trace what he called âthe inner autobiographyâ of my poetry. It dawned on me in answering his letters that the central preoccupation of the then unfledged young poet of Corfu has been always somehow linked with childhood dreams of Tibet which had at last concretized themselves about the Tao â the great poem of Lao Tsu. In the Black Book written around 1936, I find a Tibetan epigraph. The novel was published in 1938, the year before the war; already my poems were gathered into a bouquet to present to this amor fati from Lhasa, the tantric dakini who had guided and inspired me. It was a life sentence and it helped me to put a calm face upon the despair of the war years with their wanton murders of time and talent and truth. When the war came I had just turned twenty-seven. Among my papers, long after it had ended, I found a forgotten article I had contributed to the Aryan Path, called âTao and Its Glozesâ. The old Aryan Path, published from 51 Mahatma Gandhi Road, Bombay, was even then the most distinguished journal of the day devoted to theosophy, and my amateur article was published as a sort of little preface to the issue of December 1939, by which time my island life had ended and I was adrift in Athens waiting upon fate, waiting upon the Axis.
I reprint it here for old timesâ sake, and also as evidence of my constant attachment to the principle of non-attachment as outlined in the poem! It was not a bad way to greet a world war. I note also the use of the adjective âheraldicâ for which I have often had to answer the critics. It means simply the âmandalaâ of the poet or of the poem. It is the alchemical sigil or signature of the individual; whatâs left with the ego extracted. It is the pure nonentity of the entity for which the poem stands like an ideogram! It sounds rather enigmatic put like that, though in fact
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