659–744
He Zhizhang
賀知章
He Zhizhang’s willow and homecoming poems turn ordinary sights and questions into compact discoveries, with original English readings and notes.
He Zhizhang, courtesy name Jizhen, was a Tang poet and official. The poems here offer two small encounters: a close look at spring leaves and a meeting with children after returning home. Both develop through a question, but the questions do very different work.
A question that remakes a tree
Ode to the Willow begins by transforming the tree into precious materials. Green jade becomes its adornment, and hanging branches become silk ribbons. The question about who cut the leaves leads to one more transformation: spring wind becomes scissors.
Follow the sequence before treating the willow as a ready-made symbol. The poem’s pleasure lies in moving from appearance to an imagined process of making. Its final answer would be less surprising without the material comparisons that prepare it. The notes explain the lunar month and distinguish the source’s graph form from the one displayed in the reader.
A question that unsettles a return
Returning Home: I begins with the speaker’s own account of elapsed time. His home accent survives, while his body has changed. Then the poem gives the scene to children who have no reason to recognize him.
Their question calls him a visitor. It need not be a deliberate insult: the children’s ordinary perspective is what makes the situation moving. We do not add an answer from the returning traveler. The English reading lets their final word of arrival remain the poem’s close.
Two uses of the quatrain
Both works use four seven-character lines, but form alone does not determine their emotional movement. The willow’s question receives an imaginative answer; the homecoming ends with a question unanswered. Compare them through the jueju, nature, and homesickness shelves. Quiet Night Thought is a useful next reading: it thinks toward a home that remains elsewhere, while He Zhizhang’s traveler has already arrived.
The dates, courtesy name, and broad biographical outline above follow the Wikisource author record, which links the traditional biographies. Each poem’s source note identifies its publicly accessible Chinese text and any relevant editorial choice; the English translations and commentary are original to this site.
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