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Home  »  Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  »  Arthur Waley, trans.

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

On Finding a Hairpin in a Disused Well

Arthur Waley, trans.

From “Chinese Poems”

T’ang Seng-ch’i—Sixth Century

ONCE a girl was gathering flowers,

Gathering flowers at the well-side.

The flowers she plucked she put in her hair

And she looked at herself in the well-water.

Long she looked and couldn’t stop,

Laughing and laughing at her own beauty,

Till one of her golden pins fell out

And there in the well it has lain ever since.

Its peacock-feathers are turned to mud,

But the golden shaft is as bright as new.

The person who wore it is dead and gone;

What was the use of the thing lasting?