At the time when blossoms

Fall from the cherry-tree:

On a day when yellow birds

Hovered in the branches -

You said you must stop,

Because your horse was tired:

I said I must go,

Because my silkworms were hungry.

All night I could not sleep

Because of the moonlight on my bed.

I kept on hearing a voice calling:

Out of Nowhere, Nothing answered “yes”.

I will carry my coat and not put on my belt;

With unpainted eyebrows I will stand at the front window.

My tiresome petticoat keeps on flapping about;

If it opens a little, I shall blame the spring wind.

I heard my love was going to Yang-chou

And went with him as far as Ch’u-shan.

For a moment when you held me fast in your outstretched arms

I thought the river stood still and did not flow.

I have brought my pillow and am lying at the northern window,

So come to me and play with me awhile.

With so much quarrelling and so few kisses

How long do you think our love can last?

This week’s poem is the first of a group that appears in Arthur Waley’s 170 Chinese Poems entitled Five “Tzŭ-Yeh” Songs. But we don’t know with any certainty that Tzŭ-Yeh was the author!

Lady Night, aka Lady Midnight, Tzŭ-Yeh was said to have been a Chin Dynasty poet from Jiangnan, who worked as a courtesan or a “sing-song” girl. But the many poems attributed to her may have been written by various hands, one or none of them hers. Whatever the authorship, a new genre, Midnight Songs Poetry, was established towards the end of the fourth century, and remained influential for many years to come.

The intimate tone and vivid natural imagery of the Songs recall Ezra Pound’s version of the poem by Rihaku/Li-Po, The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter, published in Cathay in 1915. Li-Po himself must have been influenced by the “Tzŭ-Yeh” songs. And it’s more than likely that Pound and Waley – who met from time to time at Pound’s poetry soirees – shared technical notes on their common task. The use of unrhymed free verse and everyday diction is an important common element in the success of these English translations. Waley, of course, translated far more extensively than Pound, and had the superior grasp of Chinese. But there seems little doubt that he learned from Pound’s poetics.

Li-Po’s “letter”, narrated almost entirely in the past tense, is autumnal and melancholy. The tone of the Song is far more playful. It’s late spring: the cherry blossom is falling to make way for the budding fruit, and those auspicious “yellow birds” are “hovering”, ready for a feast. The narrator seems to be flirting; she’s excited by the young man, but still wary. They part, having made their deliciously silly, operatic excuses: he says he must stop because the horse is tired, she says she must go, because the silkworms need to be fed. The images are sharp and alive, although they may well be from a common vernal-erotic stock. In general, there’s little about the poem’s rhythm to remind us that the roots of the genre are in folk-song: if so, it’s not folk-song as a western reader knows it. Only this short-lined opening “stanza” seems to have the lift and lightness of song.

Emotional intensity builds in the next stanza. The woman is kept awake by the brilliant moonlight. She hears a voice calling, and “Nothing out of Nowhere answered ‘Yes’.” It may simply be that she has decided to accept the young man’s advances the next time, and she has only imagined his voice. Or he might really be outside her window. Either way, she dissociates herself from her own consent by giving “Nothing” a ghostly voice to speak on her behalf. It’s an unsettling little moment of psychological insight and fatalism.

In the following stanza, the young woman plans ahead. She might even be preparing to run away with her lover. She is the potential seductress, with no plans to dress up. In fact, she is halfway to being undressed. At the end of the stanza, speaking in the present tense, she pretends to be annoyed with her petticoat for “flapping about”. If, as she intends, a little too much is revealed, she’ll blame the spring wind. It’s a knowingly comic touch, almost as if she had met with another young woman, and they were giggling together.

The narrative moves from scene to scene with unerring pace and economy, always focusing on the moment which will carry the story tacitly further. In the fourth stanza, the shift from third to second person mimics the shift in the couple’s relationship. They are intimate now, surely – perhaps married – and she remembers going part of the way with him on his long errand (as the river-merchant’s wife promises to do at the end of Pound’s translation). The last two lines describe what is probably their parting kiss, the moment when, as Louis MacNeice put it, “Time was away and somewhere else”. Waley stretches the lines as far as they’ll comfortably go and the result is rich and compelling:



For a moment when you held me fast in your outstretched arms

I thought the river stood still and did not flow.

A different tone of voice enters the last stanza. Again, the speaker is ready for love-making, but now she seems not quite certain that her husband will return. We understand the relationship hasn’t been idyllic – “With so much quarrelling and so few kisses”. Her question, “How long do you think our love may last?”, sounds a shade banal to modern ears: how many lyricists since have asked virtually the same thing? But it was a more serious question for a woman of Tzŭ-Yeh’s period. As Waley tells us in his introduction, there was no place in Chinese society for a woman abandoned by her husband. Marriage breakdown had tragic consequences for the wife.

For now, not all is lost. The speaker’s tone seems more provocative and teasing than angry or sad. There is none of the weary sense of longing that imbues the letter from the river-merchant’s wife. This Song may be the lesser poem as a result, but its younger, flightier, and more conventionally optimistic voice is beautifully rendered all the same, and the last stanza avoids a too-insistent closure. The charmingly candid plea of “Tzŭ-Yeh” to “come to me and play with me a while” suggests there could still be some springtime pleasures for the young couple to recapture.