Yellow Crane Tower Farewell

Lines 1–2: a friend on the river

故人 is an old friend; the title identifies him as the poet Meng Haoran. 西 locates the departure at Yellow Crane Tower relative to the eastward journey. It does not send the boat west. 下 means downstream in this river setting.

廣陵 in the title and 揚州 in the second line refer to the destination associated with present-day Yangzhou. The poem is a departure scene, not an account of arrival.

煙花 brings haze and blossoms together. It is spring scenery, not fireworks in the modern sense of that compound. 三月 is the third month of the traditional calendar; translating it simply as “March” would impose a different calendar. The season gives the journey brightness even while the friend recedes.

Line 3: what disappears

孤帆 singles out a sail. It need not prove the river was empty of all other boats. The speaker’s attention has selected the one that matters.

遠影 is a distant visible outline or shape, not necessarily a shadow cast on the water. 盡 says that this shape is gone from view. The poem does not specify how many minutes the watching took. The eye following something until it vanishes creates that duration.

We print 碧山, “blue-green mountains,” following the main reading in the source below. Many readers know 孤帆遠影碧空盡, with “blue sky” instead. The same source records 空 as a variant. Both readings let the sail disappear into a larger field of color; our translation keeps the hills because they are in the text we print.

Line 4: what remains

唯見 means “only see.” The person and then the sail have left the visible field; the river continues. 長江 is the name of the Yangzi as well as, literally, “long river.” 天際 is the sky’s edge or horizon.

Our translation supplies “remains in view” to bring out the connection between 唯見 and the loss in the previous line. The Chinese does not state “I am sad.” The view has changed so that the absence becomes legible without that explanation.

Some editions print 惟 for 唯. This spelling difference should not be confused with the more visible 山 / 空 difference in line 3.

This seven-character jueju rhymes at the ends of lines 1, 2, and 4: 樓, 州, 流. The third line, which ends 盡, breaks that chain at the very point where the sail disappears.

The sequence is easy to follow: departure place, destination and season, diminishing sail, continuing river. It is more useful to notice that sequence than to force every quatrain into the same four-part rhetorical formula.

The pinyin gives a modern Mandarin reading, not reconstructed Tang pronunciation. We omit a historical tone grid on this page. The textual variants do not change the poem’s line count or the position of its rhymes.

Li Bai and Meng Haoran belong to the Tang poetic world of travel and friendship. Here one poet writes the other’s departure into a recognizable landscape. The exact year is not supplied by the poem; a confident date would require evidence beyond its spring month.

Read Meng Haoran’s Spring Dawn afterward to hear the departing friend’s own voice. For a different farewell gesture, turn to Sending Yuan Er to Anxi, which asks for another cup before the journey. Grass on the Ancient Plain makes the spreading grass carry the departure. The farewell and nature shelves bring these comparisons together.

The source is 《全唐詩》, juan 174, with its recorded variants. Our English translation follows the displayed Chinese and was written for PoemWell, as were the gloss and notes.