The poem describes the relationship between a river merchant's wife and her husband over time. In the first stanza, they are young children playing together. In the second, they marry when she is 14 but she is shy. At 15, she no longer scowls and wants to be with him forever. At 16, he departs on a trip and has been gone for 5 months, leaving her lonely and missing him. She asks that he let her know when he is returning so she can meet him.

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

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.
S
Each of the first four
T

stanzas is image-centered,
Y focusing an emotional point
L in the history of the
relationship between the
E river-merchant's wife and
her husband.