The Full Text of “The River-Merchant's Wife”
After Li Po
1While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
2I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
3You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
4You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
5And we went on living in the village of Chōkan:
6Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
7At fourteen I married My Lord you.
8I never laughed, being bashful.
9Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
10Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.
11At fifteen I stopped scowling,
12I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
13Forever and forever, and forever.
14Why should I climb the look out?
15At sixteen you departed
16You went into far Ku-tō-en, by the river of swirling eddies,
17And you have been gone five months.
18The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
19You dragged your feet when you went out.
20By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
21Too deep to clear them away!
22The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
23The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
24Over the grass in the West garden;
25They hurt me.
26I grow older.
27If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
28Please let me know beforehand,
29And I will come out to meet you
30As far as Chō-fū-Sa.
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“The River-Merchant's Wife” Introduction
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"The River-Merchant's Wife" is Ezra Pound's reinterpretation of an 8th-century poem by the Classical Chinese writer Li Bai. The poem's speaker is a young wife pining for her husband, a merchant off on a long journey. Her frank, sweet retelling of their lives together evokes both the joys of love and the pains of separation. Pound first published this poem in his 1915 collection Cathay.
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“The River-Merchant's Wife” Summary
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When I still had a little kid's haircut, I used to play around by my garden gate, picking flowers. You walked past on stilts pretending to be a horse; you circled me, toying with plums. We both grew up in the little village of Chōkan: we were innocent children, without any feelings of hate or mistrust. When I turned fourteen, I married you, my honored husband. I felt shy, so I didn't laugh at our wedding. I ducked my head and looked at the wall; no matter how many times you called my name, I didn't respond.
By the time I was fifteen, I stopped being so standoffish. I fell so deeply in love with you that I wanted our ashes to be mixed together after we were dead, so we could spend eternity together. Why would I bother to look at anything but you?
When I was sixteen, you left for Ku-tō-en, the faraway city by the wild river. You've been gone for five months now. In the trees above my head, the monkeys seem to be mourning your absence.
You were reluctant to go, dragging your feet. Now, by our gate, all kinds of different mosses have grown, so deep that I can't even begin to get rid of them. This autumn, the leaves are getting blown off the trees sooner than usual. The sight of yellow, summery butterflies flitting over the lawn in the western part of our garden makes my heart ache. I'm getting older. If you're returning through the narrow passages of the Kiang river, let me know when you're coming, and I'll travel out to meet you, all the way to Chō-fū-Sa.
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“The River-Merchant's Wife” Themes
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Love and Longing
"The River Merchant's Wife" is Ezra Pound's translation and reimagination of a poem by the 8th-century Chinese writer Li Bai (whom Pound knew and credited as "Li Po"). The poem's speaker—the young "Wife" of the title—writes a letter to her husband, who's been away from home for five months. Retelling the couple’s story, from their shared childhood to their wedding to their present separation, the speaker's letter shows that deep love can creep up on people before they know it. Perhaps, the poem suggests, it's difficult to know just how much you love someone until you're separated from them.
The speaker and her husband have known each other for nearly their whole lives, but they didn't love each other right from the start. When she and her husband first met, the speaker recalls, they were nothing more than children; she still had her hair "cut straight across [her] forehead" like a little girl's, and she and her husband used to play together near her "front gate." That innocence persisted right up until the speaker was 14, when the couple were married: she was so young that she felt too "bashful" even to look her new husband in the eye.
However, the poem suggests, love can creep up before one knows it. Only a year after their wedding, the speaker recalls, she was so head-over-heels for her new husband that she "desired [her] dust to be mingled with [his] / Forever and forever." By the time he left for a long journey a year later, she found that she was so much in love with him that the whole world seemed miserable at his absence: even the "monkeys," to her ears, "make sorrowful noise overhead" now that he's away. Still very young, the speaker feels as she's grown far "older" over the "five months" of her husband’s journey. Every day they spend apart strikes her as an age.
Through this portrait of a speaker's longing for her young husband, the poem suggests that love might sometimes feel clearest and strongest when people can't be near their beloveds. Absence, as the saying goes, makes the heart grow fonder.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The River-Merchant's Wife”
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Lines 1-6
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."The River-Merchant's Wife" begins with a picture of a childhood friendship. The speaker remembers a time when her "hair was still cut straight across [her] forehead"—that is, when she still had ruler-straight little-kid bangs. Back then, she recalls:
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.The "you" in the speaker's apostrophe, readers can sense, must be an older child, a kid allowed to ramble around on stilts while the speaker is still confined to her family's front garden.
The speaker uses simple, direct language here, merely describing what she and this older kid used to do. The specific things she chooses to describe, though, paint a vivid emotional picture. The image of the older child "walk[ing] about" the speaker as she sits "pulling flowers," for instance, suggests that the older child is a bit of a show-off, in a sweet childish way, trying to impress the speaker with his stilt-walking and a tasty armful of "blue plums." That showing-off seems to have worked, too: the speaker remembers it well even now that she's older.
And take another look at the parallel structure in these lines:
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.These circling repetitions mirror the way the older child circles the younger one—and suggest that these games happened more than once, that the speaker is describing not just one afternoon but a whole childhood of play. And so, the speaker says, "we went on living in the village of Chōkan": / Two small people, without dislike or suspicion."
That image of "small people, without dislike or suspicion" evokes a kind of innocence the speaker has grown beyond but remembers fondly. As "small people," she and her friend are getting ready to grow into big people who will know dislike and suspicion, whose hair is no longer cut in straight-across bangs.
In its first lines, then, the poem paints a picture of gentle, fond memories. The "you" the speaker addresses must be a person she still cares about—and perhaps a person for whom she still feels a flicker of the awe a younger kid feels for an older one.
These lines also give readers a peek at the speaker's world. Ezra Pound adapted this poem from an 8th-century work by the Chinese poet Li Bai (whom he credits here as "Li Po"), and the scene here—bamboo stilts, blue plums—suggests a picturesque, rural, long-ago China.
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Lines 7-10
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.
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Lines 11-14
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? -
Lines 15-18
At sixteen you departed
You went into far Ku-tō-en, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead. -
Lines 19-21
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! -
Lines 22-26
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. -
Lines 27-30
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.
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“The River-Merchant's Wife” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Apostrophe
The speaker's apostrophe to her faraway husband gives the poem its intimate, loving tone. In much of this poem, which is presented as a letter, the speaker reminisces about her life with her husband, her affectionate voice suggesting that she knows he remembers everything she describes as well as she does.
In one sense, the speaker and her husband have known each other forever: the two of them used to play "about the front gate" when they were children, the speaker "pulling flowers" and the husband-to-be "playing horse" on his "bamboo stilts." In another sense, though, their marriage is still fresh and young. The two, the speaker reports, were married when she was just "fourteen"; she's "sixteen" now, and her initial "bashful[ness]" around her husband has only recently evolved into a passionate love.
Directing her memories of their time together to her husband, the speaker comes across as vulnerable, sincere, and sweet. She's absolutely not hiding anything from him, from her initial shyness and resistance to her current overwhelming longing for him to return.
Apostrophe thus helps to characterize both the speaker and her husband. It's not just the speaker's picture of her husband "dragg[ing his] feet" when he left, but her willingness to write so directly and openly to him, that makes it clear this marriage is a truly loving one.
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Repetition
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Pathetic Fallacy
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Imagery
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“The River-Merchant's Wife” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
- Bashful
- Scowling
- Swirling eddies
While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead-
The implication in this line is that hair cut "straight across [one's] forehead" is a hairdo that marks out a little kid—like pigtails or a bowl cut.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The River-Merchant's Wife”
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Form
"The River-Merchant's Wife" is written in four irregular stanzas of free verse, with no meter or rhyme. Each stanza depicts a phase in the speaker's life with her husband: the first stanza traces their childhood together, the two shorter middle stanzas the first years of their marriage and the husband's departure, and the last and longest stanza her longing for her husband to return from his journey (which, "five months" in, strikes her as far too long already). The changing stanza lengths here suggest that the five months the speaker's husband has been away feel like an eternity: the stanza describing these months stretches out longer even than the stanza describing their whole childhoods!
This poem is a translation of a work by the 8th-century Chinese poet Li Bai—or rather, it builds on an earlier translation of the poem by Ernest Fenollosa. Pound himself couldn't read much Chinese. Li Bai's original poem (and Fenollosa's notes) aren't so much a model for Pound as a springboard for his own vivid visions and formal experiments.
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Meter
This free verse poem doesn't use any meter. That's partly a pragmatic choice: this is a translation from the Chinese, Pound's take on an 8th-century work by the poet Li Bai. Rather than trying to mimic the rhythms of the original poem, Pound uses flexible free verse to evoke its images and its sentiments. (In fact, Pound couldn't even read much Chinese: this poem is based on the work of another translator.)
Perhaps free verse is an especially fitting choice here for emotional reasons, too. Written in the form of a love letter, this poem feels gentle and intimate; flexible, sensitive, informal free verse suggests the closeness between the speaker and her beloved, faraway husband.
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Rhyme Scheme
Written in free verse, this poem doesn't use a rhyme scheme. The lack of rhyme here suits this poem's gentle, thoughtful, intimate tone: this letter to the speaker's beloved husband doesn't need anything so formal as a rhyme scheme to communicate her heartfelt longing.
The lack of rhyme here also reflects the fact that this is a translation: Pound's version of a work by the 8th-century Chinese poet Li Bai. Rather than trying to imperfectly capture the sounds and rhythms of the original, Pound focuses on his model's imagery. (In fact, Pound couldn't read much Chinese! This poem, and others like it, instead draw on the notes of earlier translators; there's something like an elegant modernist game of telephone going on here.)
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“The River-Merchant's Wife” Speaker
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The poem's speaker is the "River-Merchant's Wife" of the title: a young bride longing for her beloved husband to come home from a long journey. Only about 16 years old at the time the poem takes place, she writes her husband a letter, describing how they used to play together as children, how "bashful" she felt on their wedding day, and how quickly she fell head-over-heels in love with him not long after.
The speaker's passionate sincerity and beautiful imagery mark her out as a sensitive, genuine soul, unafraid to tell her husband exactly how she feels (even when that means remembering the early days when she "never looked back" at him).
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“The River-Merchant's Wife” Setting
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This poem—Pound's creative "translation" (or reinterpretation) of the Chinese poet Li Bai's original—takes place in Li Bai's own 8th-century China. The speaker's vibrant descriptions of the natural world around her help to give this tale of longing its dreamy, gentle atmosphere. When the speaker's husband travels to "far Ku-tō-en, by the river of swirling eddies," she stays home in a house where thick "mosses" grow by the gate and "paired butterflies" flit "over the grass in the West garden." Without her beloved husband, though, these beauties only "hurt" the speaker; even the "monkeys" in the trees above her seem to "make sorrowful noise."
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Literary and Historical Context of “The River-Merchant's Wife”
Literary Context
Ezra Pound (1885-1972) was one of the most important figures in modernist poetry. Reacting against inherited traditions of poetic rhyme, meter, and form, the modernists strove to (in Pound's words) "make it new," embracing free verse and intense, sometimes surreal imagery.
Pound was a hub of the modernist movement; in his work as a literary editor, he championed the work of writers like T.S. Eliot, H.D. (Hilda Dolittle), and James Joyce. As this poem shows, his forward-looking modernism was also influenced by the far past. This reworking of an 8th-century Chinese poem by Li Bai is one of a collection, Cathay (1915), in which Pound presents new versions of Classical Chinese poems based on notes by the translator Ernest Fenollosa.
Pound took great liberties with these "translations," treating the original poems as jumping-off points for his own stylistic experiments. The spare language and bright imagery of the originals, however, clearly influenced Pound in his later work. His unfinished masterpiece, The Cantos, shows the marks of his interest not only in Chinese poetry, but Chinese history and philosophy, too.
Pound's legacy is complicated, tainted by his antisemitism (which he did, however, repent toward the end of his life) and his active support for fascist governments during World War II. Inarguably, though, his poetic vision and his support for his fellow modernists changed the course of literature.
Historical Context
When "The River-Merchant's Wife" was published in 1915, World War I was ripping Europe apart. This horrendously destructive conflict, fought mostly from muddy and perilous trenches, killed 16 million people over the course of four years.
The WWI period is known for its soldier poets like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, whose work recorded the horrors of the battlefield. While Pound never went to war himself, Cathay, too, responded to the trauma and sorrow of the war.
Many of the poems Pound chose to adapt for this collection dealt with wartime themes. The poem's speakers long for home, prepare for battle, or (as in "The River-Merchant's Wife") wish desperately that a faraway husband would come home: all feelings that soldiers and their loved ones knew well. The sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, a friend of Pound's who fought (and died) in the war, even told Pound that he read excerpts of Cathay to his fellow soldiers in the trenches and that it gave them comfort: "I use [the book] to put courage in my fellows," he wrote.
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More “The River-Merchant's Wife” Resources
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External Resources
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The Life of Li Bai — Learn more about Li Bai, the Chinese poet whose work Pound translates here.
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Pound's Biography — Learn about Pound's life and work at the Poetry Foundation.
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to the actor Jodie Foster performing the poem.
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Pound's "Translations" — Read about the complex history of Pound's translations of Chinese poetry (which many critics see more as new works inspired by the source material than attempts at faithful translation).
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Pound's Difficult Legacy — Read a short overview of Pound's life that discusses his fascist politics, his antisemitism, and his years in a mental hospital.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Ezra Pound
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