His stark simplicity was so alien to contemporaneous expression that his poetry was largely honored for moral purity rather than for styling until the times of Meng Hao-jan. Unlike Hsieh Ling-yun, he was a poet of farms and villages, not the wilderness. I built my hut near people yet never hear carriage or horse. Since my heart is a wilderness the world fades. Gathering chrysanthemum by the east hedge, my lazy eyes meet South Mountain.
Mountain air is clean at twilight as birds soar homeward wing to wing.
Translated by Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping Return to My Country Home 1. Yet I fell into the world's net and wasted thirteen years. Elm and willow shade the back eaves, rows of peach and plum trees by the front hall. A distant village lost in haze, smoke twining from neighbors' houses. Dogs bark in far alleys, a cock chuckles atop a mulberry tree.