This is another poem you ought to read before my commentary. I don’t want to color your initial experience of it with my discussion.

The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter by Ezra Pound (1915)

Another love poem, what? Don’t worry, it’s also about isolation and how your childhood rots away and stuff.

I read it first in college and adored it. It was the romantic part of me that fell for that beautiful repetitive moment halfway through when the speaker falls in love. That comma-pause! And then an extra ‘forever’! Ugh, so good! So I read it again and again to experience the moment of true love between this…fifteen year old girl? To her—wait, she got married at fourteen? Hold up, let’s go through this again. Oh, okay. So it was an arranged marriage between two kids (8th graders, basically), and about a year or so into it, she fell in love. At fifteen. When we all make our best decisions and completely understand ourselves and know what marriage entails.

Time passes in the poem as the moss grows too deep to clear away and butterflies age to yellow. The ending reads as though an old woman is looking back nostalgically and yearning for her husband who has been gone for—wait, I guess just five months. She laments that she grows older, but the oldest she could possibly be at this point is 17 and a half, minus a day.

But the lengths she would go to be with him! How far she would travel! …Wait, how far away exactly is Chō-fū-Sa? What if it’s only like two miles out, and she’s saying “I guess I’ll come visit you if you can get to Chō-fū-Sa. But I’m kind of busy, and honestly getting through all that moss would take a lot of effort.”

Obviously there is sincerity in the speaker here, but I think this poem is saying, or at least questioning, much more than I initially thought. Yes, we see a woman (girl?) who is looking back with nostalgia at a gone childhood and an absent husband, whom she loves deeply. Is this pain of hers any less valid simply because she is still so young? Is regret inherent in the passage of time? If so, is it only permissible by those of us in the middle of our journeys, or even further along? Am I an asshole for now, as a very very old person (41), wanting to scoff? (Twenty years from now, you’ll wish he had to go back to Ku-tō-en, amirite?)

Maybe this is simply an earnest and sincere account of one girl’s experience of absence. But I prefer to think that it’s not.

Short Stuff:

• Remember that whole discussion about separating the art from the artist? Yeah, Ezra Pound was a fascist. 😦
• You know what? Seriously, his Wikipedia page is wild. Grab a cup of coffee and settle in. There’s more than one instance of giving a baby away.

Topics

love; aging; regret

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The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter

After Li Po

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-en, 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.

–Ezra Pound