256 t He F i v e Dy na s t i e s anD t He s ong Dy na s t y
虞美人
(yú měi rén)
spring flower autumn moon what time end 春花秋月何時了 ▲
(chūn huā qiū yuè hé shí liăo)
past affair know much few 往事知多少^ ▲^
(wăng shì zhī duō shăo)
small pavilion yesterday night again east wind 小樓昨夜又東風^ △^
(xiăo lóu zuó yè yòu dōng fēng)
home land not dare turn head moon light in 故國不堪回首月明中^ △^
(gù guó bù kān huí shŏu yuè míng zhōng)
inlay balustrade jade step should still be there 雕闌玉砌應猶在 ▲
(diāo lán yù qì yīng yóu zài)
only is crimson face change 只是朱顏改 ▲
(zhĭ shì zhū yán găi)
ask you can be how much worry 問君能有幾多愁 △
(wèn jūn néng yŏu jĭ duō chóu)
just like a river spring water toward east flow 恰似一江春水向東流 △
(qià sì yì jiāng chūn shuĭ xiàng dōng liú)
Certain elements are familiar from the female-voiced abandonment complaints
we have already seen: the interrogatives, the use of the second-person pronoun
jun, the colloquial elements and empty words, like bukan (not dare) and qiasi (just
like). The east wind, like the rain in Wen Tingyun’s “On the Water Clock at Night,”
seems to conspire against the speaker by coming yet again. But the context is less
particular and more universal and philosophical. The opening parallelism, “spring
flowers, autumn moon,” evokes a sense of the entirety of time (by reference to op-
posing seasons) and nature (by its opposition of an earthly with a cosmic image).
When read in the light of the reference to the speaker’s “homeland” in line 4, the
“past affairs” transcend the personal to encompass national history. At the same
time, the particularity of the speaker’s emotion is retained. Line 3 situates the
speaker in a specific place at a specific time, and line 4 gestures toward the in-
tensity of his emotion by depicting him unable even to look toward the object of
his nostalgia (and here it is a place, not a person, for which the speaker longs).
The poem closes with a question and an answer that once again link emotion and
scene. Unlike the typical fusion of feeling and scene, however, in which the con-
nection between the two remains implicit, here the speaker seems to cast about
in his mind for an image that adequately captures the swelling and unstoppable
quality of his emotion, which he then offers in an explicitly apt comparison: qiasi
(just as much as) a flooded river overflowing with the melting snows of spring.
The gender of the speaker in this poem is ambiguous, but since critics tradition-
ally have interpreted Li Yu’s poems in the light of the details of his biography, the
speaker has usually been assumed to be the poet himself. Because this and others
of Li Yu’s best poems date from the period of his captivity at the Song court, refer-