'Chop 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. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...LONELY BURIAL by STEPHEN VINCENT BENET ON GOING UNNOTICED by ROBERT FROST SOUVENIR by GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON WOMAN by GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON DOMESDAY BOOK: HENRY BAKER, AT NEW YORK by EDGAR LEE MASTERS |