Pure of heart and therefore hungry,
All night long you have sung in vain -
Oh, th is final broken indrawn breath
Among the green indifferent trees !
Yes, I have gone like a piece of driftwood,
I have let my garden fill with weeds.
I bless you for your true advice
To live as pure a life as yours.
Original Poem:
「蝉」
李商隐
本以高难饱，徒旁限费声。
五更疏欲断，一树碧无情。
薄宦梗犹泛，故园芜已平。
烦君最相警，我亦举家清。
Interpretation:
Li Shangyin lived in the turbulent late Tang Dynasty, and his personal encounters were extremely difficult. This poem is a metaphor for cicadas, expressing his own innocence, poverty and lack of ambition.
Cicadas stand high in the trees and drink the wind and dew, it is difficult to get a full meal, even if they are dissatisfied with the present situation and make indignant cries, it is futile. The author uses the cicadas as a metaphor for himself, integrating the cicadas’ situation with his own life, showing his noble attitude towards life. Since he has chosen such a life path, he has to bear all the poverty, loneliness and isolation arising from it, which is a kind of self-compassion of the poet.
Cicada’s call is too easy to arouse the poet’s resonance, so the poet is tired of it – life’s difficulties, do not think about it, muddle through, get by, even if, and the cicada’s call to wake me up, so that I once again soberly realised that my whole family living a hard life, the reality of too many things are not as good as they should be. The poet is not really tired of the cicadas’ chirping, but he is just expressing his inner depression and injustice from another angle. From the metaphor of cicadas to the warning of cicadas, the poem shows the complexity and subtlety of the poet’s feelings, and also shows the poet’s flexibility in the choice of lyrical carriers, and his superior artistic ability. The whole poem is rounded at the beginning and the end, the object and I are one, and the angle of expression is multi-pronged, which is a masterpiece in the aria poem.
Poem translator:
Kiang Kanghu
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”.
