XXXII Ballades in Blue China [1885]

Andrew Lang’s XXXII Ballades in Blue China is a poetry collection shaped by French fixed verse, using intricate rhyme and recurring refrains to explore books, classical literature, love, the seasons, mortality, desire, and human folly. Lang ranges from Theocritus, Cleopatra’s Needle, roulette, sleep, forests, and the River Tweed to golf, university life, rare-book collecting, and blue china, moving easily between sincere nostalgia and playful satire. Poems about vanished cities, dead women, worldly wealth, true wisdom, aging, and burial reflect on lost beauty and the transience of life, while lighter pieces gently mock literary fashion and ordinary enthusiasms. The accompanying verses and translations summon Homer, Molière, Bion, Persephone, and other figures from the classical and literary past, revealing a poet who uses formal elegance and imaginative play to relieve care and preserve fleeting memories and pleasures.