The river merchant's wife 001

1. The River Merchant ’s Wife: A Letter Translated by Ezra Pound Originally written by Li Po

2. An Introduction Poem Text Poem Summary Themes Style

3. born in Hailey, Idaho, in 1885 completed two years of college at the University of Pennsylvania earned a degree from Hamilton College in 1905. EZRA POUND

4. After teaching at Wabash College for two years, he travelled abroad to Spain, Italy and London, where, as the literary executor of the scholar Ernest Fenellosa , he became interested in Japanese and Chinese poetry. He married Dorothy Shakespear in 1914 and became London editor of the  Little Review  in 1917. published in 1915 in Ezra Pound's third collection of poetry,  Cathay: Translations

5. LI PO Li Bai  (lived 701 – 762), also known in the West by various other transliterations, especially  Li Po , was a major  Chinese poet of the Tang dynasty poetry period. He has been regarded as one of the greatest poets in China's Tang period, which is often called China's "golden age" of poetry.

6. THE RIVER MERCHANT’S WIFE: A LETTER

7. Scowling – to express with a frowning facial expression. Eddie - water that flows opposite from the normal flow of a river Lookout - act of observing or keeping watch

8. While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead I played 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.

9. 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.

10. 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?

11. At sixteen you departed, You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river of swirling eddies, And you have been gone five months. The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

12. 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- fo -Sa.

13. So what does it say?

14. LOVE PASSION

15. 5 stanzas: the first of 6 lines, and the second, third, and fourth of 4 lines each. Each of the first four stanzas is image- centered , focusing an emotional point in the history of the relationship between the river-merchant's wife and her husband. S T Y L E