I called on my friend, a man of parts in music,

To find him sat, leaning forward on his stool.

He was looking up to heaven and breathed gently,

Seeming to be in some kind of a trance and

To have lost all consciousness of my companion.

Standing before him, I asked myself,

"What's this? Can the body be made to become thus

Like a withered tree, and the mind

To become like slaked lime?" His appearance,

As he leans forward on the stool, is such

As I never saw him have before in this position.

All of a sudden, as though going on beauty sleep,

He said to me, "You do well to think in this way,

I had just now lost myself, but how should you

Understand this state of focusing prostration?. .

You may have heard the notes of a man,

But have not heard those of Mother Earth;

You may have heard the notes of Earth,

But have not heard those straight from Heaven."

I ventured to ask from him a description

Of such a tangled puzzle to me. In reply he said:

"When the breath of the great mass of airspace

Comes strongly, we call it "a gust" or "a gale."

Normally, it does not come so, but when it does,

Then from a myriad crevices, holes and cavities

There issues its excited roaring and buzz.

Have you not heard it in a prolonged windstorm?

Take the jaggy cliffs of a mountain forest--

In the great trees, a hundred spans round,

The caves and hollows are like the nostrils

Or the mouth or the man's ears; now square,

Now round, like a round mortar oppressed

With a square pestle; here like a wet footprint,

There like a large puddle if not to say a pond;

The notes issuing from them are like those

Of fretted water or those of arrowy whizz,

Of the stern command, of the inhaling of breath,

Of the shout, of the gruff sound, of the screech,

Of the deep wail, of the sad sign and, at last,

Of the piping boom. The first notes are slight,

And those that follow deeper, but somehow

In harmony with all the formerly performed.

Gentle breezes produce a small response

While violent winds are of the great return.

When the fierce gusts have passed away,

All the cavernous bluffs are empty and still--

Have you not seen this in the bending

And quivering of the twigs and leaves?"

I said, "The notes of Earth then are simply those

Which come out from its myriad wells and caves,

And the notes of man may just be compared

To those which are brought from the tubes

Of a goat's horn and flutes of bamboo. But may I

Ask you about the notes of Heaven?"

In no time he replied, "Blowing the myriad kinds

And their repeatedly multiplied differences,

It makes them cease proceed of themselves;

Sealing their instincts and self-selecting abilities,

Who is it if not Heaven that stirs them all up?!"