Having caressed the dancers in the vernal breeze,
You're ravished amid the merry-making trees.
How can you wail until clear autumn days are done
To shrill like poor cicadas in the setting sun?
Original Poem
「柳」
李商隐
曾逐东风拂舞筵，乐游春苑断肠天。
如何肯到清秋日，已带斜阳又带蝉。
Interpretation
Composed in the poet's twilight years, this work employs the willow's seasonal metamorphosis as a mirror for his own journey from youthful vigor to aged melancholy. Once brimming with ambition yet repeatedly thwarted in official career, the poet now finds himself adrift—much like the autumn willow whose凄凉 (qīliáng, desolate) silhouette against the setting sun and dying cicada songs amplifies life's cruel ironies.
First Couplet: "曾逐东风拂舞筵，乐游春苑断肠天。"
Céng zhú dōngfēng fú wǔyán, lè yóu chūn yuàn duàncháng tiān.
Once you chased spring breezes across banquet floors, In Wandering Joy Garden's heartrending spring hours.
The verb "chased" animates the willow with agency, its dancing twigs embodying bygone springtime splendor. Yet "heartrending" (断肠) foreshadows impending loss, transforming what begins as nostalgic recollection into an elegy for vanished glory.
Second Couplet: "如何肯到清秋日，已带斜阳又带蝉。"
Rúhé kěn dào qīngqiū rì, yǐ dài xiéyáng yòu dài chán.
How could you bear this clear autumn's plight, Burdened with slanting light and cicada's blight?
Autumn's ravages manifest in the willow's stooped posture beneath the dying sun, while the cicada's dirge—a traditional symbol of life's brevity—completes this vanitas tableau. The rhetorical "how could you bear" imbues the tree with human reluctance, mirroring the poet's own resistance to acknowledging decline.
Holistic Appreciation
The willow serves as an extended metaphor for the poet's life journey, its seasonal transformation from vibrant spring to desolate autumn mirroring his own transition from youthful ambition to aged resignation. Through this botanical allegory, the poem constructs a poignant meditation on temporality, where the juxtaposition of past splendor and present decline reveals the inexorable passage of time. The work's profundity lies in its dual perspective - the persistent afterimage of spring's vitality superimposed upon autumn's stark reality, creating a layered contemplation of human transience.
Artistic Merits
- Anthropomorphic Precision: The willow's personification through active verbs ("chased," "bear") transforms it from passive scenery to sentient biographical subject
- Seasonal Dialectics: The spring-autumn dichotomy evolves beyond simple contrast to demonstrate time's continuous erosion
- Sensory Layering: Visual (slanting light) and auditory (cicada's song) elements combine to create immersive pathos
Insights
This lyrical vanitas reminds us that life's most profound realizations often come too late - when the vitality we took for granted has already faded. Its true revelation lies not in lamenting lost opportunities, but in recognizing how our perception of value changes with time's passage. The poem ultimately suggests that wisdom consists not in resisting autumn's arrival, but in understanding how its melancholy beauty contains spring's remembered glory.
Poem translator
Xu Yuan-chong (许渊冲)
About the poet
Li Shangyin (李商隐), 813 - 858 AD, was a great poet of the late Tang Dynasty. His poems were on a par with those of Du Mu, and he was known as "Little Li Du". Li Shangyin was a native of Qinyang, Jiaozuo City, Henan Province. When he was a teenager, he lost his father at the age of nine, and was called "Zheshui East and West, half a century of wandering".
