孟郊诗
Poems of Meng Jiao
Index
春日有感
How Spring Makes Me Feel
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雨滴草芽出 一日长一日 风吹柳线垂 一枝连一枝 |
It's been raining on the new grass all day, all day long. Wind's been blowing the willow catkins one branch after another. |
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独有愁人颜 经春如等闲 且持酒满杯 狂歌狂笑来 |
I'm the only one with a sad face, passing through spring without a thought. So I grasp a full cup of wine and sing like crazy, until I laugh like crazy, too. |
-- 孟郊
废话
The collators of these poems, Ming dynasty officials, I believe, try to put a poet's poems in chronological order. They're not too great at their job, as far as I can tell. It's a government job, sorting poems, and it gets the same kind of attention government jobs always get -- not too much. This poem is collated into Meng Jiao's late wandering years. But I bet it comes elsewhen. As for the content, he could have written it in the cart on the way to his death that last moving-day of his. But it's not that late, I don't think. It's late enough that he is playing with lines 2 and 4 in an unusual way. Not a kosher way. You can see without reading Chinese what he's doing. In most poetic forms of his time, repeating characters is a no-no. Everyone does it from time to time. But doing so flaunts the rules. These two lines almost mock the rules. But I don't think they satisfied him because he gives it up and goes on to the end in another way. So maybe it's not a later poem but an earlier one. If you haven't noticed, these Useless Words of mine are more or less my way of deciding what I might think about a poem. No decisions are final. So, I place this poem well before he returns to the north, along with other earlier experimental poems from his mid- to late-twenties.