The previous Penguin Little Black Classic – Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal left me shocked. It is one of those books that leaves you admiring the writer while hoping the next book on your shelf inhabits a gentler world. Swift’s satire is so sharp and so relentless that even after the final page, the world seems just a little harsher than before.

The world he writes about at that time is much closer to the world that I see around me. The little essay gave me new eyes to see the children on traffic signals of Gurgaon while commuting to work. Is this a problem that can ever be solved?

The next one though, Three Tang Dynasty Poets, is much gentler. The transition could not have been more refreshing.

Instead of Swift’s carefully constructed outrage, I found rivers, mountains, moonlight, solitary boats and peach blossoms. There are travelers meeting old friends, poets sharing wine, people thinking about home while watching the moon, and hidden valleys that seem to exist just beyond the reach of ordinary life. It felt less like changing books and more like stepping out of a crowded courtroom and finding oneself beside a quiet river.

I have mentioned this earlier in my posts, I am not much for poetry. Give me a novel, a memoir or an essay, and I am perfectly comfortable. Dense philosophical expositions where a sentence might be the entire page, I’m fine. But poetry has always felt like a language that I admire more than I naturally speak. I often find myself looking for a story, a character or a conversation to hold on to.

Perhaps that is why the poems that stayed with me all suggested worlds larger than themselves.

The first was Wang Wei‘s The Peach Blossom Spring. The collection opens with that one.

A traveller chances upon a hidden valley where people have lived peacefully for generations, untouched by the turmoil of the outside world. He spends some time there, leaves with every intention of returning, and then discovers that he can never find the place again.

The story occupies only a few pages, but it feels much larger than that. It has the shape of so many legends that came afterwards. A hidden paradise, an accidental discovery and the sadness of knowing that some places can only be found once. We had a similar story in Pu Songling’s Wailing Ghosts as well.

As I read, I found myself wondering about the people who lived in that valley long before the traveller arrived and long after he had gone. The poem keeps its mystery intact. It never explains more than it needs to.

Then there are the peaches. Only two books earlier, in Songling’s Wailing Ghosts, peaches kept appearing amidst fox spirits, ghosts and strange encounters. Here they appeared again, this time leading towards a hidden paradise rather than a haunted one.

Clearly peaches occupy an important place in the Chinese tradition. And now for me, they are part of a literary landscape. Maybe next time I encounter a book from China, I’ll look for the peaches.

It has been one of the unexpected pleasures of reading through the Penguin Little Black Classics in order. The books begin talking to one another. An image encountered in one book returns in another. At the same time, all the books so far have introduced something new. A new genre, a new style, a new culture.

The next poet is Li Bai. And his poems appealed to the part of me that enjoys movement and romance. There is the Ballad of Cha’ng-Kan (The Sailor’s Wife). It is a complete love story narrated by the sailor’s wife. She starts at the age when the boy rode a bamboo as a steed, and then her wedding. And then the wait for his return. It’s a lament about marrying a travelling man. Her pain in two lines –

And finally, we encounter Du Fu. His poem about Lady Kung-sun’s disciple performing the sword dance conjures an entire vanished age through a single performance. Even in a few lines, you feel the weight of history, memory and admiration.

As someone who naturally gravitates towards prose, these were the poems that drew me in first. They carried stories within them, or at least hinted at stories beyond the page.

But then I read Du Fu’s Night Thoughts Afloat.

The poem begins simply. Bent grasses moving in the wind. A solitary boat beneath the stars. The moon floating on the great river. Then almost imperceptibly, the landscape gives way to the poet’s thoughts. He wonders about his place among poets, reflects on his failed official career, and then leaves the reader with an image that has stayed with me ever since.

Drifting, drifting,
what am I more than
A single gull
between sky and earth?

There is very little to explain. Just one image suspended between an immense sky and an equally immense river.

When I began this collection, I assumed the poems that would stay with me would be the ones that behaved most like prose. The hidden paradise of The Peach Blossom Spring certainly did. The sailor’s wife and the sword dance did too.

Yet, after closing the book, it wasn’t the stories that kept returning. It was a lone gull drifting between sky and earth.

The next one is a selection from a book that I’ve been recommended countless times. Had I been a poetry reader, I would probably have read it years ago. But it seems we were destined to meet like this. A slim volume of Penguin Little Black Classics number 10.