Undying Love: 20th day of the first month, 1075, As a Record of My Dream

COOL POEMS: Introduction > THE POEMS

Topics: Undying Love

Author: Su Shi (1037-1101)

20th day of the first month, 1075, As a Record of My Dream

1. Ten measureless years between the living and the dead;
2. Though I haven’t pondered it,
3. How can one forget?
4. A thousand miles away your lonely grave;
5. With whom can I now pour out my grief?
6. Should we meet again would you even know me?
7. With dust upon my face?
8. My beard all grown gray?

9. Last night in a dream I found myself back home.
10. By the small latticed window
11. You had just raised your comb.
12. Facing each other, not a word did we speak,
13. Only the thousand tears that streamed across our cheeks.
14. I imagined you year after year all alone in that heart-breaking place;
15. With the full moon above,
16. And the pines upon your grave.

Comments: Su Shi, at one stage a major statesman, at another an exiled poet and social critic, is one of China’s most famous poets, and this is one of China’s most famous poems. It is familiar to most educated Chinese people even today and is therefore definitely appropriate for the study of contemporary China.  Su Shi wrote this poem ten years after his wife’s passing. With the aid of detailed commentary below, see if you can understand why this poem has moved millions of readers for almost a thousand years.
 
Comments and Explanations for Each Line
1. For a grieving husband, how can you measure 10 years of pain in units of time?
2. Su hasn’t made a point of dwelling on his loss
3. But there’s no way he can forget.
4. His wife is separated not only in time but also in space, and he is grieved by the fact that she rests alone.
5. Su also feels alone because he can no longer share his deepest thoughts and feelings with her.  This acknowledges an ideal of marital love which evolved between the 9th and 11th centuries, namely, a romantic concept of marriage in which “wife” is construed as “soul mate.”
6. Su reflects on how he has changed over the past ten years,
7. how he has made mistakes which might have disappointed his wife (“dust” is a common metaphor for failures of integrity). Su thereby confesses his humanity, his human frailty, and his regret that he hasn’t always lived up to those principles he and she cherished.
8. He confesses to physical deterioration; now he is older and less attractive than when his wife last saw him.
9. All this grief gives birth to a fantasy.  Longing for his wife, in his dream he finds himself back home.
10. She is at her cosmetics table, the most intimate part of the house, where a woman’s only companion would be a loving husband.
11. Facing each other, each wants to put sorrow into words, but words are incapable of expressing such grief.
12. All each can do is face the other and weep.
13. Su pans out from the dream, moving from his position by her side to outside the grave, where he now sees her as irrevocably separated from him, several feet below the earth.
14. He still worries protectively, wishing he could be with her but he can’t.
15. The poem ends with this lonely scene: we view her grave from afar, brightly lit by the full moon above, and the silhouette of the pines he once planted on her grave.

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