SHAHBAZ ALI

American Literature
70044350
The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter

Originally Written by Li Po
Translated by Ezra Pound
Published in 1915
Contents

 An Overview
 Poem Text
 Poem Analyses
 Poetic form & Imagism
 Abstract and Concrete words
 Symbols
 Themes
An Overview

 Implication of the Title: the poem is about a lonely housewife has not seen
her husband for five months, so she decides to write a letter. The letter
portrays the loneliness and isolation of the river merchants wife while her
husband is working far.
 Tense: The first two stanzas are written in the past tense. The third and
fourth stanzas contain a mix of the past, present perfect, present, and future
tenses. The tense shifts as the river-merchant's wife remembers her husband's
departure, ruminates on her current environment, and offers to travel to
meet her husband on his safe return.
The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter

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.
Stanza 2-3

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.
Stanza 4

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.
What does every stanza convey?

Stanza 1
Lines 1-6
The opening 6 lines are centered around them as
children.
“Haircut” shows the childhood of the merchants wife.
The repetition of the verb “playing” in three separate
lines emphasizes the activity of children.
Cont…

Lines 7-8
These lines are centered around the woman and
man as adults. Lines 8-9 established the wife’s
shyness by painting a picture of her with her head
bent and looking down to the ground.
Stanza 2

Lines 11-15
These lines are centered around the growth of love
between the young couple. Lines 12-13 are similar
to wedding vows almost meaning “till death do us
part” emphasized by the triple repetition of the
word “forever”.
Line 14 shows her deep love for her husband.
Stanza 3

Lines 15-20
These lines give an image of separation when her
husband takes his job as a river merchant and has to
travel in dangerous water.(swirling eddies)
In line 20 the use of sorrowful sounds of the
monkeys are a reminder to the wife of her own
sorrows.
Stanza 4

Lines 20-21
These lines are centered on the river merchant’s
absence. In line 20 the phrase “by the gate”
implies she has returned to the gate and is a
memory of when/where her husband left.
Cont..

Lines 22-25
In line 22 the river merchant’s wife is again
reminded of her sorrow by falling leaves of autumn
and by the “paired” butterflies who are turning
yellow and changing with the season. She says the
butterflies hurt her because they make her realize
she is growing old too but not with her husband.
Cont…

Lines 26-30
In the final lines of the poem it emphasizes the
woman’s desire to be with her husband and to
shorten the distance between them. She is willing to
hundreds of miles upstream just to meet her
husband and to lessen their distance from one
another.
Poetic Form

 For his translation Pound uses free verse, a poetic form with no metrical
rules.
 His choice to avoid rhyme and meter reflects one of the three basic tenets of
imagism:
Poets should "compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of
the metronome." Pound uses plain, simple words arranged into clear, concise
sentences. This style makes the poem read less like a traditional poem and more
like a real letter from a real person.
 The majority of the lines are end-stopped, meaning they end on periods,
commas, or other punctuation marks.
Imagism

 Imagism, was founded in 1912 when Pound and a group of like-minded early 20th-century
poets rejected the elevated language and abstract thinking they found in traditional
western literature. 
 Pound and his contemporaries outlined three basic rules for writing poetry, which were
the central tenets of imagism:
 Poems should present a "direct treatment of the 'thing,'" or subject of the poem. The
"thing" can be a physical object, a feeling, or anything else—it does not have to be
concrete.
 Poets should avoid any word "that does not contribute to the presentation." In other
words, they should use no frills, no fancy language expounding on themes, no
interpretation at all.
 Poetry should resemble the musicality of speech "in sequence of the musical phrase, not
in sequence of the metronome." Thus, imagists rejected prescribed rhythms of the past,
such as 14-line sonnets in iambic pentameter.
Abstract words Concrete words

 Bashful Hair
 Forever Flowers
 Month Bamboo
 Wind Horse
 August Blue Pulms River
 Hurt People Garden
 Time Dust Butterflies
 Sorrow Monkey Wall
Figures of Speech

Hyperbole
“The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.”
“Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.”
Symbols

 Hair Cut In context, her childhood haircut is a physical aspect of her appearance
that separates her past self from her current self. She briefly describes her sweet
childhood games with the boy who would become her husband, whom she regarded
"without dislike or suspicion." Because of this, listeners may associate her cut hair
at the beginning of the poem with childhood, simplicity, and trust.
 Dust The word dust suggests death and decay, as if the speaker is imagining herself
and her husband buried side by side. The word indicates the speaker's tacit
understanding that her circumstances will change: someday she and her husband will
die. 
 Butterflies Near the end of the poem, the speaker's grief and loneliness are perhaps
most poignant when she describes seeing "paired butterflies." That they are "paired"
suggests they are mating, which must painfully remind the speaker of her aloneness.
The suggestion is that she cannot mate without the presence of her husband.
Themes

 Time and Transformation

 Grief and Regret
 An Expression of Evolving Love
References

 Bush, Ronald (1985): Pound and Li Po: What Becomes a Man. In: George
Bornstien, ed. Ezra Pound among the Poets. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 35-62.
 Eliot, Thomas Stearns (1928/1959): Introduction. In: Ezra P, ed.
Selected Poems by Ezra Pound. London: Faber & Faber.
 Froula, Christine (1983): A Guide to Ezra Pound’s Selected Poems. New York:
New Directions.
 Gale (1997): Explanation: “The River-Merchants’s Wife: A Letter.” In:
G, ed. Exploring Poetry. CD-ROM. Detroit: Gale.
 Thank You…!

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