Poetic China: Cambridge Forever My Fond Dream

Farewell Again, Cambridge

Author: Xu Zhimo (1897—1931)

Quietly, I will leave,

As once I quietly came.

I quietly wave my hand

To the colorful clouds in the sunset’s flame.

That golden willow by the river,

A bride glowing with the setting sun she is.

Her radiant reflection flickers on the water,

But it’s my heart she teases.

The plants named floating heart growing in the mud,

They are vivaciously waving at me from underwater.

For the soft currents of the River Cam,

I wish to be a reed in the water.

The elm-tree-shaded pool is not a spring,

But a fallen rainbow,

Shattered among duckweed.

The sediments keep a rainbow-like dream below.

Pursue a dream?

Let me take a long pole for boating

Upstream through grass to greener grass.

Let me load my boat with starlight

And sing in the twinkles as loud as brass.

But I cannot sing a high note;

Low key is music for farewell.

Even summer insects are silent for me;

Silent is tonight’s Cambridge as well.

Silently, I will leave,

As once I silently came near.

I wave good-bye with an empty sleeve

Without taking a cloud from here.

Xu Zhimo is remembered as an exceptionally creative and popular Chinese poet. He was friends with Hu Shi, and supported Hu’s New Literature Movement by using sentence structures of the spoken language to write poems, as Hu himself did. While most of Hu’s works tend to be too colloquial to appear like poetry, Xu’s lines are often even more poetic than many of those in classical Chinese poetry. The appeal of Xu’s poems helped the so-called “new poetry” win its place in Chinese literature.

A natural born poet, Xu led his life in the same free-spirited way he composed poetry. He took classes at Cambridge University in England but never earned a degree from there. And he wrote this famous poem according to the memories of Cambridge. Also, this poem is believed to be a classic one about farewell.

Copyright: A POETIC PORTAL TO CHINESE CULTURE, China Pictorial Press