ABSTRACT
Bing Xin was one of the youngest contributors to the new literary movement of the May Fourth era and later became the best-known Chinese woman poet of the twentieth century. Her early literary reputation rests on two collections of poems, Fanxing (A Maze of Stars) and Chunshui (Spring Water), first published in the Chenbao fukan (Morning Post Supplement) in 1922. Both collections are comprised of the new genre of short poems, inspired by the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore and his Stray Birds. The biblical themes of the two poems reprinted can be ascribed to Bing Xin's Christian education, first at the Bridgman Academy for Girls, an American missionary school in Beijing, and subsequently at Peking Union College for Women, later amalgamated with the Protestant Yanjing University. The poem “Keximani huayuan” (The Garden of Gethsemane) was first published in the journal Shengming (Life), the poem “Duloudi” (Golgatha) was published in the same issue of this journal.
