Night Rain: Sent North
夜雨寄北
Yè yǔ jì běi
Li Shangyin’s Night Rain Sent North, with Chinese text, pinyin, and English notes tracing return-date uncertainty into a hoped-for candlelit conversation.
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Read the original and its translation together. Open a line’s word meanings for a closer look.
About the text and pronunciation
The simplified view changes character forms, not the edition. Notes and sources retain the cited text.
The Chinese source is shown in traditional characters by default, with a simplified view available. Pinyin is modern standard Mandarin, a reading aid, not Tang or Song pronunciation.
Word by word, in the order of the line. A gloss is a crib. It is not the translation.
Word meanings — Line 1
- 君 jūn you
- 問 wèn ask
- 歸期 guī qī return date
- 未 wèi not yet
- 有 yǒu have
- 期 qī date
Word meanings — Line 2
- 巴山 bā shān Ba mountains
- 夜 yè night
- 雨 yǔ rain
- 漲 zhǎng swells
- 秋 qiū autumn
- 池 chí pool
Word meanings — Line 3
- 何當 hé dāng when will
- 共 gòng together
- 剪 jiǎn trim
- 西窗 xī chuāng west window
- 燭 zhú candle
Word meanings — Line 4
- 卻 què then in retrospect
- 話 huà tell
- 巴山 bā shān Ba mountains
- 夜 yè night
- 雨 yǔ rain
- 時 shí time
English translation by PoemWell.
Read the whole poem
Original
君問歸期未有期，
巴山夜雨漲秋池。
何當共剪西窗燭，
卻話巴山夜雨時。
Translation
You ask when I will return; there is no date yet.
Night rain in the Ba Mountains swells the autumn pool.
When shall we trim a candle together by the west window,
and speak of this time of night rain in the Ba Mountains?
Try it from memory
After reading, recall the underlined word or phrase in each line. Say its meaning before opening the answer. These prompts use the text edition printed above.
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Line 1 · What does the marked word mean?
君問歸期未有期，
Pronunciation hint
guī qī
Reveal meaning and translation
歸期 — return date
You ask when I will return; there is no date yet.
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Line 3 · What does the marked word mean?
何當共剪西窗燭，
Pronunciation hint
hé dāng
Reveal meaning and translation
何當 — when will
When shall we trim a candle together by the west window,
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Line 4 · What does the marked word mean?
卻話巴山夜雨時。
Pronunciation hint
bā shān
Reveal meaning and translation
巴山 — Ba mountains
and speak of this time of night rain in the Ba Mountains?
One more question: what changes?
Compare the opening and closing lines. What changes in the scene, the speaker’s attention, or the feeling? Choose a Chinese word as evidence, then compare your reading with the notes. More than one answer may be reasonable.
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Line-by-line notes
A question the speaker cannot answer
歸期 is a return date. Its 期 appears again in 未有期, “there is not yet a date,” so the first line asks and withholds almost in the same breath. 君 identifies an addressed “you” without giving a name. The poem alone does not establish whether that person is a spouse or a friend.
The second line supplies something definite in place of a schedule: night rain in the Ba mountains is raising an autumn pool. 漲 is zhǎng, to rise or swell. Waiting has a visible, accumulating counterpart without becoming a literal clock.
When the present becomes a story
何當 opens a hoped-for future, not a memory of a reunion that has already occurred. 共 matters because two people will share the candlelit scene. 剪燭 refers to trimming the wick, not cutting a candle in half; it evokes the ordinary maintenance of light while conversation continues.
卻話 then looks back from that imagined future. The repeated 巴山夜雨 returns as something the two might talk about. Follow the order carefully: present uncertainty, present rain, imagined togetherness, and the present reconsidered as a future memory.
The last line does not resolve the missing date. It creates a way to endure its absence. Compare the more confident promised return in Visiting an Old Friend’s Farm.
Compare the spaces on either side of 共. The rain and the pool are what the speaker has in view alone. The west window is imagined as a place where two people can attend to one small light. The recurrence of 巴山夜雨 carries the experience from the first space into their future conversation.
Form and tone
In four seven-character lines, repetition creates two kinds of time. The repeated 期 closes off certainty, while the repeated rain phrase links present isolation to imagined reunion. The final couplet is one question whose answer remains outside the poem.
See jueju for the larger formal pattern. Pinyin gives modern Mandarin pronunciation; a historical level/oblique grid is not inferred from those modern tones.
Historical context
The received title says the poem is sent north. It has often been read as a letter to a wife, but the title and lines do not alone settle the addressee or date. This translation retains “you” and lets the intimacy emerge through the shared candle.
Continue with Li Shangyin and the love reading path. Compare Parting from My Younger Brother Zongyi and Dreaming of the South: Washed and Combed using the reading connections below.
Read this poem alongside the contrasting selections in our homesickness reading guide.
Sources
夜雨寄北 — Chinese text. Checked against the linked Wikisource transcription. The displayed traditional text follows this reading. Punctuation and line breaks are editorial. Translation, glosses, and reading notes are original to PoemWell.
English translation, gloss, and notes by PoemWell. The translation is original to this site.
The Chinese source is shown in traditional characters by default, with a simplified view available. Pinyin is modern standard Mandarin, a reading aid, not Tang or Song pronunciation.
Updated .
Cite this reading
Li Shangyin. “Night Rain: Sent North” (夜雨寄北). PoemWell. English translation by PoemWell. Updated .
https://poemwell.org/poems/night-rain-sent-north
Credit the poet for the Chinese original and PoemWell for this translation and commentary. Use the permanent page link above; source editions are listed separately.