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Home  »  Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  »  Arthur Waley, trans.

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

What Should a Man Want?

Arthur Waley, trans.

From “Chinese Poems”

Wang Chi—Seventh Century

TELL me now, what should a man want

But to sit alone sipping his cup of wine?

I should like to have visitors come to discuss philosophy

And not to have tax-collectors coming to collect taxes;

My three sons married into good families,

My five daughters provided with steady husbands;

Then I could jog through a happy five-score years,

Craving no Cloud-ascent, no Resurrection.