Why won't you stay on Southern River any more?
Why leave its water clear, sand bright and mossy shore?
You cannot bear the grief revealed in the moonlight
By the Princess' twenty-five strings, so you take flight.
Original Poem
「归雁」
钱起
潇湘何事等闲回，水碧沙明两岸苔。
二十五弦弹夜月，不胜清怨却飞来。
Interpretation
Composed during Qian Qi's prolonged northern sojourn after assuming official post, this poem was inspired by southbound wild geese that stirred his homesickness and wanderer's melancholy. Titled "Returning Geese," it expresses nostalgic longing and reflections on life's journey through avian imagery.
First Couplet: "潇湘何事等闲回，水碧沙明两岸苔。"
Xiāo Xiāng hé shì děng xián huí, shuǐ bì shā míng liǎng àn tái.
"Why leave Xiao-Xiang's carefree streams? Jasper waters, gleaming sands, moss-embroidered seams."
The rhetorical question establishes dramatic tension, inverting normal migratory patterns to question the geese's departure from this idealized southern landscape. The poet's vivid description of Xiao-Xiang's pristine beauty (jade waters, luminous sands, emerald moss) heightens the paradox of abandonment.
Second Couplet: "二十五弦弹夜月，不胜清怨却飞来。"
Èr shí wǔ xián tán yè yuè, bù shèng qīng yuàn què fēi lái.
"Moonlit twenty-five zither strings' plaintive air—Unbearably pure sorrow drove my flight northward there."
Personifying the geese, the poet mythologizes their return as escape from the Xiang River goddess' melancholic music. This inventive adaptation of the "Xiang Goddess' Zither"典故 transforms natural migration into lyrical metaphor for the poet's own exile.
Holistic Appreciation
This poem employs the motif of returning geese to weave together layers of rhetorical questions and interplay between reality and imagination. The idealized realm symbolized by "Xiao-Xiang" is abandoned by the geese precisely because of an unbearable "pure sorrow" it evokes. This paradoxical conception embodies the poet's solitude in northern exile and yearning for home. With exquisite craftsmanship, the poem opens with captivating questions answered through mythical personification in later lines, endowing the geese with human qualities that make the poetic imagery both vivid and ethereal. Its restrained yet profound lyrical quality makes it a quintessential example of object-mediated emotional expression.
Artistic Merits
The poem's most distinctive artistic features lie in its fusion of reality and fantasy, and its skillful use of rhetorical reversal. The interrogative form conveys deep emotion while engaging readers' empathy, while the mythological narrative provides a romantic explanation that intensifies poetic tension. The language is elegantly refined, the structure tightly woven, with natural and fluid emotional transitions. Particularly noteworthy is the ingenious use of the "twenty-five strings" mythological allusion, which significantly enhances the poem's conceptual depth and artistic power.
Insights
Using the northward migration of geese as its central thread, this poem gives voice to the sentiments of displaced wanderers. It reveals how even amidst external splendor, one's inner sense of belonging and emotional attachments cannot be replaced by material surroundings. Through object-personification and historical allegory, the poet makes us feel the depth of homesickness and the diverse possibilities of lyrical art, while reminding us to cherish our authentic inner sense of home.
Poem translator
Xu Yuanchong (许渊冲)
Qian Qi (钱起, 722-780 A.D.)was a poet of the Tang Dynasty, Han nationality, and a native of Wuxing (now Huzhou City, Zhejiang Province), who was one of the “Ten Talents of the Dali” and the “Champion of the Ten Talents of the Dali”. In his early years, he was unsuccessful in several examinations, but finally he was admitted as a scholar in 751 AD.
