" A Second Farewell To Cambridge "

In the grounds of King's College, a group of Chinese students were gathered around this stone, so I went to have a look. It is in memory of the Chinese poet Xu Zhimo (1897 - 1931)  who studied at King's 1921-22. He was a free-thinking poet who strove to loosen Chinese poetry from it's traditional forms and to reshape it under the influence of western poetry and the vernacular Chinese language. This stone is inscribed with the first and last lines  of his poem, "A Second Farewell To Cambridge."
   Quietly now I leave the Cam as
   Quietly as I came.....
....Waving sleeve so gently, lest sky
    Of cloudspeck be deprived.

I looked up the poem and it is quite lovely. The division on the stone shows the separate parts of the poem Sadly he died quite young in a plane crash, never knowing his work would become so popular.