Rebecca's Reading RoomThe River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter By Li Bai (Li Po), translated by Ezra Pound (1915)
Some poems arrive like a sudden tide — they rise in your heart before you even understand why. The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter, written by Li Bai in the 8th century and translated by Ezra Pound in 1915, came to me that way.
When I read it for the first time, something inside me stilled. I felt an ache that was both personal and universal — the kind of longing that crosses centuries and continents, binding us to someone who lived long ago and yet seems to be speaking directly to us. By the time I reached the final lines, I wanted to cry.
The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter
By Li Bai (Li Po), translated by Ezra Pound (1915)
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 Chōkan:
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 look out?
At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-tō-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 Chō-fū-Sa.
In just a few stanzas, we witness an entire life unfold. The young wife begins in childhood, pulling flowers by the gate while her future husband plays nearby. She remembers the shy awkwardness of marriage, eyes lowered, uncertain. Then love deepens until it becomes a vow of permanence — “I desired my dust to be mingled with yours… forever.” And then comes absence: the months apart, the quiet changes in her surroundings, the way even yellow butterflies wound her because they remind her of what she is missing.
Ezra Pound’s translation preserves not only Li Bai’s imagery but also the emotional heartbeat of the original. His free verse is plain, unadorned, yet every detail feels weighted with meaning: the moss grown too deep to clear away, the sound of monkeys overhead, the paired butterflies drifting through August air.
What moves me most is the steadfastness of the wife’s love. She doesn’t simply miss her husband — she carries him with her, shaping her days and her memories around his absence. In the end, she reaches outward: “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 Chō-fū-Sa.” It is not only a plea; it is an offering, a willingness to bridge the distance between them.
This is why the poem still feels alive today. It is not about an 8th-century river merchant and his wife alone. It is about how love endures across absence, how memory keeps someone present even when they are far away, and how longing itself becomes a form of devotion.
My Takeaway
Reading this poem reminded me that connection is not always about proximity. Sometimes the truest form of love is the willingness to hold another person in your heart, trusting that the bond will endure until you meet again. And in that waiting, there is beauty as well as ache.
Until the next page turns,
Rebecca
Genre Note
This poem belongs to the tradition of “classical Chinese lyric poetry”, written by Li Bai (701–762), one of the great voices of the Tang Dynasty. It is also an ”epistolary poem”, written in the form of a letter from a wife to her absent husband. When Ezra Pound translated it in 1915, he shaped it into “modernist free verse”, blending the intimacy of Li Bai’s original with the clarity and immediacy of early modernist style. Thus, the poem lives at the crossroads of traditions: classical, lyrical, epistolary, and modernist.
#EzraPound #LiBai #LiPo #ModernestPoetry #Poetry #PoetryInTheAfternoon #PoetryInTheEvening #PoetrySalon #TheRiverMerchantSWifeALetter
