Poem
There is an often-quoted poem about the holiday:
九月九日憶山東兄弟
獨在異鄉為異客,
每逢佳節倍思親.
遙知兄弟登高處,
遍插茱萸少一人.
- "Double Ninth, Missing My Shandong Brothers" — Wang Wei (王維), Tang Dynasty
English:
- On the ninth day of the ninth month, I remember my brothers from Shan Dong.
- As a lonely stranger in a foreign land,
- At every holiday my homesickness increases.
- Far away, I know my brothers have reached the peak;
- They are planting flowers, but one is not present.
Read more about this topic: Double Ninth Festival
Famous quotes containing the word poem:
“No other human being, no woman, no poem or music, book or painting can replace alcohol in its power to give man the illusion of real creation.”
—Marguerite Duras (b. 1914)
“Every poem of value must have a residue [of language].... It cannot be exhausted because our lives are not long enough to do so. Indeed, in the greatest poetry, the residue may seem to increase as our experience increases—that is, as we become more sensitive to the particular ignitions in its language. We return to a poem not because of its symbolic [or sociological] value, but because of the waste, or subversion, or difficulty, or consolation of its provision.”
—William Logan, U.S. educator. “Condition of the Individual Talent,” The Sewanee Review, p. 93, Winter 1994.
“The award of a pure gold medal for poetry would flatter the recipient unduly: no poem ever attains such carat purity.”
—Robert Graves (1895–1985)