Golden Bells

Long, long ago when I was optimistic and full of love I lounged on a battered old sofa with my feet in the lap of the man I loved. In the evenings while children slept, we turned up the fire and read poetry to one another and dreamed of long lives entwined and shores we would walk together. One peaceful night in my daughter's first year I found this poem and reading it to my fifty year old love, welled up. The following year he was gone. Years had passed when walking by the Thames a pot of these beautiful little daffodils caught my eye - Narcissus Golden Bells - and I remembered the poem. Now they flower in early May in an old salt glaze pot by my gate.

Golden Bells

When I was almost forty

I had a daughter whose name was Golden Bells.

Now it is just a year since she was born;

She is learning to sit and cannot yet talk.

Ashamed—to find that I have not a sage’s heart:

I cannot resist vulgar thoughts and feelings.

Henceforward I am tied to things outside myself:

My only reward—the pleasure I am getting now.

If I am spared the grief of her dying young,
Then I shall have the trouble of getting her married.
My plan for retiring and going back to the hills

Must now be postponed for fifteen years!



The poem is as moving twelve hundred years after it was written. A few weeks later I found a second poem and the tears streamed down my face.

Remembering Golden Bells


Ruined and ill—a man of two score;

Pretty and guileless—a girl of three.

Not a boy—but still better than nothing:

To soothe one’s feeling—from time to time a kiss!

There came a day—they suddenly took her from me;

Her soul’s shadow wandered I know not where.

And when I remember how just at the time she died

She lisped strange sounds, beginning to learn to talk,

Then I know that the ties of flesh and blood

Only bind us to a load of grief and sorrow.
 At last, by thinking of the time before she was born,

By thought and reason I drove the pain away.

Since my heart forgot her, many days have passed

And three times winter has changed to spring.

This morning, for a little, the old grief came back,
Because, in the road, I met her foster-nurse.

 Po Chu i,  translated by Arthur Waley