薛涛诗
Poems of Xue Tao
Index
酬郭简州寄柑子
Thanking Guo Jianzhou for Sending Oranges
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霜规不让黄金色 圆质仍含御史香 何处同声情最异 临川太守谢家郎 |
Hoarfrost has no power over this golden color whose round form retains a fragrance imperial. How was it we were just thinking especially of you? Lin River's commander thanks your master. |
-- 薛涛
废话
It seems more and more that Xue Tao writes plainly for those she entertains and literately otherwise. Her poetry is more incidental than regulated. But that is a specialized pursuit which may not interest her especially. She, at some point, learns to write regulated verse and writes them on occasion. But we will see that almost all her surviving poems are only four lines long. It would be simplest to think that the proportion of short poems to long ones was roughly the same in her complete four hundred and fifty poems as it is in the surviving seventy-six. Brief poetic expression came naturally to her.