Ezra Pound
The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter
Li T’ai Po
While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
Played I about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.
At fifteen I stopped scowling.
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the lookout?
At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-yen, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand.
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.
April 9th, 2007 at 8:16 pm
hmm i’m not sure if i like this poem too much. i guess i’m not in one of those moods to fully understand poetry, but it seems kind of weird. hopefully i’ll like it more when we go over it in class.
i do like the first sentence though. it reminds me of when i was little :]
April 9th, 2007 at 8:40 pm
Hmmmm…after pondering a great deal of time over this poem, i have come to the conclusion that i think that i would like to write this kind of poetry. I think it would be easy and fun to write about situations that you know no one will ever understand what you mean.
But, this poem left me a little sad because his girl left and he really liked her…i think…
w/e
PPPeace!
April 12th, 2007 at 2:58 pm
So the narrator of this poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” obviously knows about the meaning of time and how in only a few instances, an infinate ammount of choices can be made. He seems to have been exposed to all this stuff because he says so. He then looks back on what’s happened to him in the past. He wonders the validity of his actions of a time before this. This is a story poem with an entire life within it’s lines… very unique.
The butterfly partner rules
April 23rd, 2007 at 5:46 pm
Cho-fu-Sa is probably only out to her mailbox.