Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Hail University.
Faculty of Arts.
Department of English

Slides Prepared by
Dr. Mujahid Alwaqaa
An Assistant Professor of English Literature.

E-mail: [email protected]
 While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
 I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
 You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
 You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
 And we went on living in the village of Chōkan:
 Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

 At fourteen I married My Lord you.

 I never laughed, being bashful.
 Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
 Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.
 At fifteen I stopped scowling,
 I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
 Forever and forever, and forever.
 Why should I climb the look out?
 At sixteen you departed
 You went into far Ku-tō-en, by the river of swirling eddies,
 And you have been gone five months.
 The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
 You dragged your feet when you went out.
 By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
 Too deep to clear them away!
 The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
 The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
 Over the grass in the West garden;
 They hurt me.
 I grow older.
 If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
 Please let me know beforehand,
 And I will come out to meet you
 As far as Chō-fū-Sa.
 Summary:
 A lonely housewife hasn't seen her husband for five months, so
she decides to write him a letter.
 In the letter, she recalls her first memory of their meeting. Then
she recalls how she acted after they first got married—at the
tender age of fourteen.
 Then, when she was fifteen, the wife started to feel more settled in
the marriage.
 But when she was sixteen, her husband had to go to work. While
the husband travels and sells his goods, the wife tells him (through
this letter) all the beautiful things he's missing and how she can't
wait for him to get back home.
 Lines 1-2
 While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
 To begin with, we know that this is a letter from a wife to her husband and that her
husband is a merchant.
 We can guess that the detail about having hair cut straight across her forehead
implies that she's writing about herself as a child.
 Additional details about her childhood include the memory of a specific event when
she was pulling flowers out by the front gate where she lived.
 Notice how the flowers seem reluctant to being picked. They aren't plucked, or
picked even. They're "pull[ed]" from the ground, which sounds like they may have
been reluctant to go.

 Lines 3-4
 You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
 The speaker recalls when this boy (who we guess now to be her husband
and the addressee of the letter) came by on stilts.
 Apparently it caught her attention, because he was playing about and
maybe even juggling some plums.
 Also, notice the two different uses of "playing."
 The first "playing" suggests that the boy (now husband) pretended to be
(or to ride) a horse, while the second playing suggests something like
juggling.
 Also, we have the possible way to read the word "seat." It could be, in the
literal sense, a chair in which the girl sat.

 Lines 5-6
 And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
 We guess that these two didn't really have much contact after that
encounter—at least for some time.
 They "went on living," which suggests that time passed as they
pursued their separate lives in a village.
 The wife refers to herself and to her now-husband as "two small
people," as though they didn't think of themselves as children at
the time but, rather, maturing adults.
 Still, they're not to adulthood quite yet. They're innocent in that
they don't go about hating people.
  STANZA 2
 Lines 7-10
 At fourteen I married My Lord you,
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.
 At age fourteen, they get married.
 According to the wife, her husband is her lord—or, more importantly, her "Lord."
 The capitalization of "Lord" suggests that the husband fits into the role of the
noble, and the wife is then the vassal/ servant/ slave.
 This fourteen-year-old child-bride is all shy and passive. She doesn't even look her
husband (or anyone else for that matter) in the eye. Yes, even when people called to
her, she never looked up from the ground or the wall.
 STANZA 3 SUMMARY
 Lines 11-14
 At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever, and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?
 Now that the couple has been married a year, the speaker has
become a little more comfortable with this whole marriage
business.
 She stopped scowling, which is like angry frowning.
 Now she's so comfortable that she proclaims her love for her
husband in a pretty dramatic way.
 Think of the mingling dust as a figurative way to describe the
wife's commitment to her husband.
 Like a lot of figurative language, the exact meaning here is
open to interpretation. It can be taken as literal: that, when
they die and are cremated, their remains be mixed together
so they stay together after death ("Forever and forever, and
forever").
 The second is more of a metaphor: that the two bodies, made
of the stuff of the earth, should become intertwined through
marriage. And, like all great promises of romantic love, this
one will go on without end!
 STANZA 4 SUMMARY
 Lines 15-18
 At sixteen you departed
You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
 So, apparently, just a year later, the husband left and went to another village.
 We don't know much about this place, other than that it's far away.
 The husband has been gone for five months now, so we can assume that our
speaker is lonely. Interestingly, though, she doesn't tell us that herself.
 We get that sense in the reflected mood of the sad monkeys. They are sad.
 It's as though the husband's absence has affected her entire environment.
 Lines 19-21
 You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
 The wife recalls that her husband dragged his feet when he left,
which is a figurative way of implying that he didn't actually want to
go.
 The wife returns to the present tense ("now") and thinks back to
the same gate. In the first stanza, she was pulling flowers there,
but now that same area is overgrown with moss.
 It seems like she's lost her ability to prune this area of vegetation.
Apparently, the mosses are really getting out of hand.
 Lines 22-26
 The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me.
I grow older.
 Here's where the poem starts to get really good, because we've broken
out of the wife's narrative and get into the highly descriptive language of
the setting.
 The leaves are falling early this year. The decay of the autumn season
(and the barren winter that it always precedes) is coming early this year.
 Like those sad little monkeys, this change in the weather seems to
reflect the speaker's melancholy mood.
 Also, yellow butterflies float about like the leaves, which also grow
yellow in August—right before they fall off the trees.
 The butterflies are in pairs, unlike the wife, whose husband is
missing.
 These fluttery butterflies are also hanging out "in the West
garden," which may be significant. The West is where the sun sets,
signaling the day's end (much like how the autumn is the signals
the year's end).
 Just seeing those butterflies—and probably their reminders of
isolation and decay—hurts the wife and makes her aware that she's
aging.
 We come away with an understanding how the butterflies are
concrete images to the wife that really remind her of her own loss.
 Lines 27-31
 If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.
Now we arrive at the wife's reason for writing this letter.
 She lets her husband know that, if he's coming back via a certain
route, he should send a word ahead.
 If he does send a word of his homecoming, she will come out and
meet him on the beach of Cho-fu-Sa. This beach hundreds miles
away from the village.
 Themes:
 THEME OF MARRIAGE:
 In "The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter," we observe the wife
remembering how she first met her husband and got married.
 Even though we only get the wife's side of the story, we have no
reason to assume that the marriage relationship is not mutual.
 Still, for the wife, her love doesn't seem to have been immediate.
Instead, she seems to have grown into loving her husband.
 She may have even resisted her role as a wife at first. But who can
blame her? She was only fourteen!
 THEME OF ISOLATION
 In "The River Merchant's Wife," it's appropriate that this
monologue/letter is written in isolation.
 There are no other people around that we know of, and
monkeys and moss just don't count as companions.
 It's almost as if the natural world and landscape have
completed the task of isolating the wife that her husband's
departure began.
 Her isolation seems so complete, in fact, that it seems integral
to the observations that she shares in the poem.
  The Form of the Poem:
 Ezra Pound was not the creator of this poem; he translated it from the original Chinese
version by the poet Li Po.
 Pound wrote his translation in free verse, structured around the chronological life events
of the river-merchant and his wife.
 The free verse makes the letter feel more authentic, as if it is a real letter from a wife to
her husband.
 The lack of prescribed meter allows Pound to bring out the rawness of the wife's
emotions, drawing readers directly into her loneliness without having to overcome the
barrier of an overly structured presentation.
 Lines 25 and 26 are two short lines that stand out because they appear in the midst of
longer lines.

 Therefore, these two lines capture the reader's attention just as the poem reaches its
climax and the wife acknowledges the deep sorrow she feels because of her husband's
absence.

 SYMBOLS:
 1. Spring usually represents abundance and new growth, and
this is when the couple's marriage relations are in bloom.
 2. In autumn, growth and greenery slowly wither away, leaves
fall, and the air grows colder. This indicates that there is a
problem in the marriage relationship.
 3. The moss has grown thicker and this symbolizes the
passage of time.
 4. The changing seasons represent the wife’s emotional
development over time.
 5. Rivers are also an important symbol in this poem. Rivers
constantly flow and change, just as the relationship between
the wife and her husband has evolved.

 A river forms the physical barrier between the husband and

wife, as the husband traveled along it to another village.