Good poetry captures the essence of human experience. Unlike prose, it distills it through an economy of language and a particular attention to word choice and structure, allowing the moment, or the experience, to resonate within the reader. Because our life experiences are often different, two separate readers might have divergent views on the impact of the same poem. Others will bring with them a knowledge of decoding the poem, skills that are taught at school and soon forgotten. I suspect that this is one reason why poets are no longer esteemed as once they were and that the general public is rarely bothered to read verse of any sort.

I confess that poets themselves must take some of the blame, for the shrinking of their profession and its confinement to academic circles has meant that a particularly abstruse form of poem has become common. I remember reading a few poems by an acclaimed young Australian poet and being bamboozled. The obscurity of the language made the poems dry and largely inaccessible to anyone except, presumably, a closed circle of fellow poets. Sure, poems should be challenging sometimes but they need to be readable. They need to communicate.

I have mentioned the Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu before. An official in the Chinese bureaucracy at a time of considerable upheaval in the land, Tu Fu became a chronicler of the times. He reacted with genuine emotion to the threats of war and rebellion that he encountered. The following one, translated by Ken Rexroth, strikes a far more Daoist note. The hermitage may be real, or perhaps serves as a metaphor for the poet's desire to escape the folly of the world.

WRITTEN ON THE WALL AT CHANG’S HERMITAGE

It is spring in the Mountains.
I come along seeking you.
The sound of chopping wood echoes
Between the silent peaks.
The streams are still icy.
There is snow on the trail.
At sunset I reach your grove
In the stony mountain pass.
You want nothing, although at night
You can see the aura of gold
And silver ore all around you.
You have learned to be gentle
As the mountain deer you have tamed.
The way back forgotten, hidden
Away, I become like you
An empty boat, floating, adrift.