A ci for a husband who is not in the room · Song China, early 12th century
Yi Jian Mei
Li Qingzhao writes Song lyric while Zhao Mingcheng is away, and later after he is dead. The feeling leaves the brow and climbs the heart. The two weathers are not the same poem.
Li QingzhaoZhao Mingcheng
ZhangqiuJiangnan
Yi Jian Mei, a sprig of plum, is often read as a letter she could not send because he was on the road. Red lotus scent gone, a jade mat of autumn. Who in the clouds will send a brocade letter. The wild geese return. The moon fills the west chamber. One kind of longing, two places of idle sorrow.
Zhao Mingcheng died in 1129, in the wreck of the Northern Song. Her later ci, Sheng Sheng Man, is another climate: seek, seek, search, search, cold, clear, miserable. This house will not collapse the two. The marriage had collecting in it, and drinking, and a shared eye for bronze. Widowhood is not the only weather she ever wrote.
She is the most famous woman poet in Chinese. Fame is a later office. On the page she is still doing the small work: a brow, a heart, a moon, a husband who is not in the room.
The letter
此情无计可消除，才下眉头，却上心头。
此情无计可消除，才下眉头，却上心头。
Primary source · Li Qingzhao, Yi Jian Mei
This feeling has no way to be got rid of. It has only just left the brow, and already it has climbed the heart.
Editorial paraphrase · house paraphrase, not Rexroth · Editorial English of the close of Yi Jian Mei
Atlas plate · Song China, early 12th century
Yi Jian Mei
Li Qingzhao writes Song lyric while Zhao Mingcheng is away, and later after he is dead. The feeling leaves the brow and climbs the heart. The two weathers are not the same poem.
From one shore toward the other. A path of relation, not a lineage.
From
Between
Toward
Placement is approximate where the record is not a surveyor.
- From
- Jiangnan, south of the Yangtze
- Toward
- Zhangqiu, Shandong
- Distance
- 759 km
The line that survived
才下眉头，却上心头
Li Qingzhao, Yi Jian Mei
What happened next
The Northern Song fell. Mingcheng died. She remarried briefly, unhappily, a fact later moralists used against her and which the poems do not owe them. She kept writing in the south. The collected ci is the life that could be kept.
Distant echoes
Echo
A Gossamer LifeA woman's Heian record of waiting, in which the days themselves become the form.
Another language
The Woman in the Deutzia MonthAnother lyric in which absence has a grammar, and the body is the page.
Source / evidence
- Li Qingzhao, Yi Jian Mei and later ci·Chinese public domain. English translations of the twentieth century remain in copyright and are not quoted as if they were hers.
Twelfth-century Chinese. Rexroth, Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung, and later English versions remain in copyright. This house quotes Chinese and a labeled editorial paraphrase.
A word opens beside this story: qing
One question remains
When the feeling leaves the brow, who is it still addressed to?