There is no wall left to this village.
Bones white with a thousand frosts,
High heaps, covered with trees and grass;
Who brought this to pass?
Who has brought the flaming imperial anger?
Who has brought the army with drums and with kettle-drums?
Barbarous kings.
A gracious spring, turned to blood-ravenous autumn,
A turmoil of wars - men, spread over the middle kingdom,
Three hundred and sixty thousand,
And sorrow, sorrow like rain.
Sorrow to go, and sorrow, sorrow returning,
Desolate, desolate fields,
And no children of warfare upon them,
No longer the men for offence and defence.
Ah, how shall you know the dreary sorrow at the North Gate,
With Rihoku's name forgotten,
And we guardsmen fed to the tigers.
Cathay  appeared while WWI is raging, critic Hugh Kenner suggests it to be read as a book of war poetry that represents war as a transhistorical, universal phenomenon. It differs from the gory portrayal of  Siegried Sassoon  and  Wilfred Owen  that emphasized upon its brutality and instead focuses upon the more euphemistic emotions of nostalgia, bareness and lost.