孟郊诗
Poems of Meng Jiao
Index
别妻家
A Wife Leaves Home
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芙蓉湿晓露 秋别南浦中 鸳鸯卷新赠 遥恋东床空 |
Water lilies wet with morning dew. Leaving in autumn from the south bank. Love birds carrying off new gifts to an Empty eastern bed and a distant love. |
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碧水不息浪 清溪易生风 参差坐成阻 飘飖去无穷 |
Green river with its restless waves. Clear creek and a wind springs up. Hard to sit easy in a rolling boat. Shaking, swaying, on without end. |
|
孤云目虽断 明月心相通 私情讵销铄 积芳在春丛 |
Lonely cloud falls apart before your eyes. Full moon, hearts traveling together. This love affair, how could it ever end? Gathering fragrance like a massing of spring. |
-- 孟郊
废话
Meng Jiao has officially, poem-wise, remarried. I believe this is the same woman from poem 3, "A Frivolous Outing on Ba River." That poem is not a young man's poem and was probably miscollated by the scribes who were, no doubt, younger men.
Meng Jiao is taking his new wife from her parent's home to his home in the east. Where in other "escorting" poems Meng Jiao has told complaining travelers to man-up and stop whining, here he sympathizes with his new wife's discomforts in the boat. "Solitary cloud" can also mean "solitary wanderer" and so here "myself before I met you."
While Meng Jiao has always enjoyed the company of women, that company is, for him, based on love. In the poems, we only have his first wife, the older woman out on the borderlands, and now his second wife. As for his private life, outside the poems, Meng Jiao has kept that to himself.