Yi Jian Mei: A Longing in Two Places

A season felt indoors and out

紅藕 refers to the red lotus through the name of its plant, not to a red root being smelled. 玉簟 is an elegant bamboo mat described as jade-like: smooth and cool. Autumn is felt in that coolness as well as in the failing scent. The English supplies “cools” because 秋 has to do more than name a month in this compressed line.

羅裳 is a gauze skirt or lower garment, with 裳 read cháng in this literary word. 解 means loosen or undo. The precise practical action before boarding the boat is not explained. 蘭舟 is an ornamental literary name for a fine boat; the phrase does not require orchids floating alongside it. The movement is outward, but 獨, “alone,” follows the speaker into the excursion.

Waiting for a letter

錦書, literally “brocade writing,” is a literary expression for a valued letter, especially one associated with affection. Our translation uses “letter”; the gloss keeps the compound together as “a cherished letter.”

雁字 imagines the line or angled formation of flying geese as writing. Geese also belong to the poetic language of messages sent over long distances. The question “who will send” and the return of geese can therefore occupy the same sky. The lyric does not say that a letter actually arrives.

月滿西樓 can mean that moonlight fills the western upper room or building. It need not mean that the moon is astronomically full. We choose “moonlight fills” to keep 滿 attached to the space of the room.

The second stanza: one feeling, two locations

The two 自 in 花自飄零水自流 let flowers and water proceed on their own. They do not wait for the speaker’s mood to change. 飄零 is a compound for drifting and falling; the gloss keeps it together.

一種相思 and 兩處閒愁 set one shared longing against two places. Our English retains the fragmentary shape. “Idle” translates 閒 without suggesting the sorrow is trivial. It is a feeling with no useful task to occupy it.

The last two phrases turn a bodily expression into a movement inward. 眉頭 is the brow where a frown can be seen; 心頭 is the heart or mind where the feeling continues. The feeling has scarcely left one place before it enters the other. There is no cure in the closing image.

Textual choices

We retain 羅裳, 兩處, 才, and 卻 from the collected text linked below, with traditional character forms normalized. The English follows those displayed words. A different wording in another edition should be compared with its source before changing the text here.

Yi Jian Mei, often translated “A Sprig of Plum Blossom,” is the tune title of this ci; there is no plum tree in the lyric itself.

The two stanzas match: 7, 4, 4, 7, 4, 4 characters in each, for a total of 60. The repeated short phrases give the second stanza its sharp contrasts: one / two, brow / heart, down / up. The principal rhyme endings include 秋, 舟, 樓, 流, 愁, and 頭.

Modern Mandarin pinyin is a reading aid. It does not reproduce Song song performance. We do not supply a historical tone grid without a separate check of the tune’s accepted patterns. In the title and 一種, 一 is read yì before a third tone.

This lyric is transmitted under Li Qingzhao’s name in the collected-text tradition of 《漱玉詞》. It is commonly read as a wife’s longing for her absent husband. The words make reciprocal longing explicit, but they give neither a personal name nor a date. We read the relationship without turning the lyric into a dated diary entry.

It is a natural starting point for Chinese love poetry. To see another kind of attachment, read Su Shi’s Shui Diao Ge Tou: his preface names his brother, and his ending makes the moon something they can share. Li Qingzhao’s Ru Meng Ling shows that flowers in a Song lyric do not always carry an explicitly romantic situation.

The Chinese can be checked in 《漱玉詞》, Siku quanshu edition. This later collection preserves a received text; it is not Li Qingzhao’s handwritten copy. The English rendering, gloss, and notes on this page are original to PoemWell.