Butterfly Poem: What is a Dream?

Question

Hi, this an English translation of a Chinese poem written in the early 1900s. the theme is very much older. It’s about the paradox of dreaming and reality.

Die - the Butterfly

And so once as a butterfly
I moved in robes more splendid than the silk of the Emperor's court; and when the return of ten thousand springs had passed,
I heard, from a vanishing mist in the green field beneath me, a meadow flower call out:
"If ever you go from this place,
do not die into a sickle-cold world that severs the sunflower mind from its roots in the heart."
This gentle command shook me to the rainbow tip of my wings and I woke as if from a dream into the kingdom of mankind.

Poet: Wu Meng Shan (Sr.)

Woodward · Accepted Answer

This is really nice!

Maj · Answer

Nice metamorphosis! How does it feel?

Thesaurus Rex · Answer

and this one... what is it about?

'The Thought Fox'

I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Besides the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

-- Ted Hughes

Maj · Answer

Inspiration?

Thesaurus Rex · Answer

Sometimes inspiration is irrepressible, like grass pushing up through the concrete pavement…

From: Gerard Manley Hopkins - The Academy of American Poets
http://www.poets.org/poems/poems.cfm?45442B7C000C070C0B71

In 1864, Hopkins first read John Henry Newman's Apologia pro via sua, which discussed the author's reasons for converting to Catholicism. Two years later,
Newman himself received Hopkins into the Roman Catholic Church. Hopkins soon decided to become a priest himself, and in 1867 he entered a Jesuit novitiate
near London. At that time, he vowed to "write no more...unless it were by the wish of my superiors." Hopkins burnt all of the poetry he had written to
date and would not write poems again until 1875.

Thesaurus Rex · Answer

Sometimes, the muse is frustrated. This poem is about the atrophy of the human spirit, something caused by the repression of the Cultural Revolution in China. Ironically, it is a rough approximation of a poem written during the Tang Dynasty; more than a thousand years ago.

Jiu Ju - Old House
Grime covers the cracked panes within the house,
deep silence and dust.
Smell the smoke from a kitchen fire, decades past.
A woman moves,
her wraith keens like a gong in waves of sigh;
and the great house shrinks from the girl sold off
at the blink of an eye,
Don't weep for the hanged wife or the flayed boy
who spilt the wine cup.
Passing stranger you who dreamed you lived here once
hold back your tears,
fool yourself with pleasant tales or cry for the world.

Wu Meng Shan (Sr.)

Thesaurus Rex · Answer

It is Golden Week in China and people are either traveling or going to bars for entertainment. In USA the live entertainment might involve a DJ mixing it up for the crowd; in Shenzun, it’s a graffiti artist ‘spraying shadows on the walls’.

This is a poem about political corruption in China. The reference to a slaughterhouse is metaphorical. This is a poem written very recently and is part of the new wave of ‘graffiti expression’ in Shenzun, a port city close to Hong Kong.

As the sun dawns across the North wall every morning, the wave of slaughter begins.
nine million chickens, turkeys, pigs, calves and cows meet their deaths at human hands
We do not usually see ourselves as members of a flesh-eating cult. But all the signs of a cult are there.
There is flesh under the saddle
The ordinary places have been scoured by a Mongol wind.

[From the whispering dock, Shenzun]

Guest · Answer

i am very interested in this poem... is there any website that i can look into it? i am doing research on butterfly n trying to get inspiration for my project. could u reply me through my email Email Removed......... thanks a lot

Butterfly Poem: What is a Dream?

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