Classic Poem

‘C HOP suey,’ I say to Chung Li,
Quaint, quiet, and twenty-three,
Who smiles as I wearily enter the door
Through a curtain of beads and teak.

‘Chop suey. Soon,’ he answers me,
And slips away like wind in the tree
On the lacquered screen in the corner.
But I feel in his eye, still as a stone
In an idol's head on a temple's throne,
A myriad years
Of the Whang-Ho,
As it tawnily runs
Under the suns
Of Honan.

For Chung's eye holds, as a jade its hue,
His gods and the long ancestral line
Of the sires he prays to.
And it holds the pines by a tea-house door
At the foot of a mountain age-divine;
And the tea-girl's lute, for the traveller strung,
And the misty moon she plays to;
And even, I think, the memory
Of a sire who one day bowed and poured
Wine for Confucius, and adored
The Sage, foot-sore and weary.
So when I am sick of the noise and heat,
Of the Now, which never is complete,
Of the rude strife in the rude street,
I go to Chung.