Last night spring wind in inner room did blow;
My friend’s beyond the River Xiang’s long flow.
Upon my pillow, in a dream’s short lease,
I roamed the southern miles, and found no peace.
Original Poem
「春梦」
岑参
洞房昨夜春风起，故人尚隔湘江水。
枕上片时春梦中，行尽江南数千里。
Interpretation
This poem is a work of unique style within Cén Cān's collection, and its exact date of composition is difficult to ascertain. It is speculated to be an early work or one composed outside his typical frontier theme. Known as a frontier poet celebrated for majestic imagery like "The Flaming Mountains in the sixth moon must be hotter still" and "As though a vernal gale had come back overnight," Cén Cān reveals in this piece the other pole of his artistic style—one of ultimate tenderness, subtle depth, and dreamlike quality. This creative phenomenon illustrates the comprehensive artistic ability and emotional richness of High Tang poets, who could gallop across desert storms yet also linger wistfully over boudoir reveries.
The title "Spring Dream" points directly to the poem's core mechanism: using spring as the catalyst and the dream as the bridge. In the tradition of classical Chinese poetry, both "spring" and "dream" are classic vessels for longing. Spring, with all things stirring, most easily stirs tender feelings; while dreams can transcend physical limitations, allowing emotions to arrive instantaneously. Cén Cān's poem is precisely a refined and highly concentrated artistic realization of the lyrical mode 'spring breezes stir dreams, dreams traverse passes and hills.' Within just twenty characters, it constructs a complete and moving emotional circuit, making it an enduring miniature among Tang quatrains on dream-longing.
First Couplet: "洞房昨夜春风起，故人尚隔湘江水。"
Dòngfáng zuóyè chūnfēng qǐ, gùrén shàng gé Xiāngjiāng shuǐ.
Last night, a spring breeze arose, wafting into the inner chamber; / That old friend (of my heart) remains still beyond the River Xiang.
The poem begins at a specific spatiotemporal moment: "last night," when the spring breeze first stirred. "Dòngfáng" refers to a deep, inner chamber, hinting at the secluded, enclosed space inhabited by the protagonist (presumably female). The "arising" of the spring breeze is a signal of the changing seasons in the external world; it intrudes into the "inner chamber," breaking its quietude and awakening slumbering longing. "That old friend remains still beyond the River Xiang" directly names the object of longing and the insurmountable distance. The "River Xiang" is both a concrete geographical barrier and, due to its literary associations with plaintive sentiment (like the tears of the Xiang Consorts staining the bamboo), lends this longing a prolonged and beautifully melancholic hue. The spring breeze and the river water, one close and touching, the other distant and separating, together pluck the strings of emotion.
Second Couplet: "枕上片时春梦中，行尽江南数千里。"
Zhěn shàng piànshí chūn mèng zhōng, xíng jìn Jiāngnán shù qiān lǐ.
*On my pillow, for a fragment of time within a spring dream, / I journeyed all the miles—thousands of *li—of the region south of the Yangtze.
This couplet is the essence of the entire poem, pushing the intensity of emotion and the power of fantasy to their peak. "A fragment of time on my pillow" and "journeyed all the miles… thousands of li" form a startling contrast between time and space: real, physical time is intensely compressed (a fragment), while psychological, spatial distance is intensely stretched (thousands of li). This is not simple exaggeration but profoundly reveals how longing distorts normal perception of time and space—driven by intense emotion, consciousness can in an instant break through all barriers. The "spring dream" is the medium, the crystallization and release of longing in the subconscious; "journeyed all the miles" is the action, the relentless pursuit of emotion within the illusion. The dream's illusoriness combined with the palpable sense of "journeying" makes this pursuit seem both real and futile, its deep feeling lingering, its aftertaste endless.
Holistic Appreciation
This pentasyllabic quatrain is an exquisite lyrical miniature. It uses the dream to express longing, brevity to suggest vastness, revealing within extremely limited space the infinite depth and breadth of the emotional world.
The poem's emotional logic is clear and potent: spring breezes stir longing (first couplet), longing gives birth to a dream, and within the dream, pursuit is realized (final couplet). The first two lines present the "blockage" of reality, the last two the "passage" of the dreamscape. Yet, the dream's unimpeded passage precisely contrasts with reality's obstruction. The melancholy upon waking, though unwritten, already permeates the lines. Cén Cān's brilliance lies in juxtaposing the concrete obstruction of the "River Xiang" with the generalized pursuit of "thousands of li south of the Yangtze," giving the longing both a specific direction and an unbounded, diffuse quality, thus expanding the space for emotional resonance.
The poem's language is as clear and lovely as water, using not a single obscure character nor a trace of forced effort. Yet, relying on images steeped in cultural-emotional color—"spring breeze," "inner chamber," "River Xiang," "spring dream," "region south of the Yangtze"—and the immense tension between "a fragment of time" and "thousands of li," it creates a dreamlike poetic realm that is gentle yet persistent, hazy yet vividly real, showcasing the supreme charm of poetry where "words end but meaning is endless."
Artistic Merits
- Classical Choice of Imagery with Emotional Resonance: "Spring breeze," "River Xiang," "region south of the Yangtze" in the poem are all deeply sedimented lyrical images in classical poetry. Cén Cān's cleverness lies not in simple accumulation but in making the "spring breeze" the trigger, the "River Xiang" the symbol of obstruction, and the "region south of the Yangtze" the distant shore of pursuit, constructing a clear emotional trajectory. This allows these public images to glow with individualized brilliance within a specific narrative logic.
- Dream-Logic in Temporal-Spatial Treatment: The core artistry of the poem lies in its poetic distortion of time and space. The extreme contrast between "a fragment of time" and "thousands of li" is not physical truth but psychological and emotional truth. This concept of time and space, which follows emotional rather than physical logic, accurately captures and recreates the essence of dreams and profound longing, producing a powerful artistic effect.
- Subtle Voicing from a Feminine Perspective: The entire poem is written from a feminine voice ("inner chamber" typically refers to a woman's quarters), with delicate, gentle emotion. That Cén Cān, a male poet, successfully executes this "role-based" writing with authentic, unmediated feeling demonstrates his keen empathetic ability and profound artistic expressiveness, broadening the thematic boundaries of his poetry.
- Structural Art of Interweaving Real and Unreal: The first couplet describes reality (breeze rises, person is separated), the second describes the unreal (traveling in a dream). The real scene provokes the unreal scene, and the unreal scene reflects and intensifies the emotion of the real. This structure of moving from real to unreal, using the unreal to mirror the real gives the short four-line poem rich layers and profound artistic conception, avoiding the monotony of straightforward narration.
Insights
This exquisitely crafted little poem reveals to us a transcendent power of the human emotional world: when physical distance in reality becomes an obstacle, the mind has the ability to create another kind of "distance"—one belonging to emotion and imagination, capable of traversing myriad rivers and mountains in an instant. The "spring dream" in the poem is the perfect symbol of this mental power. It reminds us that deep emotions like longing and love often operate in nonlinear, leaping, reality-transcending ways. They do not follow the rules of clocks and maps, but the laws of the heartbeat and memory. In the material world, the "River Xiang" is a nearly insurmountable barrier; but in the world of spirit, "thousands of li south of the Yangtze" can be reached in "a fragment of time." This conquest and reorganization of time and space by the mind is proof of human spiritual freedom and creativity.
Simultaneously, the poem shows how art gives form—and beautiful form at that—to such intangible emotions. Cén Cān transforms a restless longing into the elegant image of "journeying all the miles of the region south of the Yangtze," allowing a private emotional experience to assume a public, aesthetically perceptible poetic form. This inspires us: when facing turbulent, inexpressible inner emotions, we might try to find or create our own "poem"—a mode of expression that can comb internal chaos into external order, and elevate private ache into universal beauty.
Ultimately, this work lets us see that even in the heart of a poet famed for his vigorous, robust frontier verse, there exists a tender place where spring breezes sway and dreams haunt a thousand li. This is perhaps the endearing and profound aspect of complete humanity: we can face the harsh wind and snow of the external world, while also guarding the internal springtime warmth and blossoming.
Poem translator
Xu Yuanchong (许渊冲)
About the poet
Cén Cān(岑参), 715 - 770 AD, was a native of Jingzhou, Hubei Province. He studied at Mt. Songshan when he was young, and later traveled to Beijing, Luoyang and Shuohe. Cén Cān was famous for his border poems, in which he wrote about the border scenery and the life of generals in a majestic and unrestrained manner, and together with Gao Shi, he was an outstanding representative of the border poetry school of the Sheng Tang Dynasty.
