Active early 8th century
Wang Wan
王灣
Read Wang Wan through a river journey, a moonlit gathering, and a playful wish for the celestial lovers to meet twice in one year.
Wang Wan’s three poems in this collection turn on changes in time: night becoming day, rain giving way to a clear evening, and a calendar that repeats a month. They are useful companions because a familiar seasonal image does something different in each setting.
A journey between seasons
Mooring below North Solid Hill places sunrise within the last of the night and the first signs of spring within the old year. The middle couplets of this regulated verse hold those transitions in balance. A final question about a letter then gives the traveler a direction beyond the visible river: home in Luoyang.
The source preserves another substantially different version under the title 江南意. Read the early edition note before comparing a quotation from elsewhere. A change in wording may belong to a different received text, rather than being a translation error.
Time shared, time wished for
Moonlit Drinking with Director He brings moonlight into a social gathering. Broken reflections move across the feast and seem to fall into the wine. The final lines offer the freshness of the night to the writers present. This is an occasion of shared attention, unlike the private message imagined from the boat.
The Weaving Girl in a Leap Month makes a tender argument from the calendar. If the seventh lunar month occurs twice, perhaps the celestial lovers may meet twice too. Its “surely” expresses a wish through playful reasoning; it does not describe a rule of astronomy.
Follow the changes
Compare the poem’s first and last moments before assigning it a mood. Does time move the speaker farther from home, gather people together, or promise another meeting? The moon and homesickness shelves offer further readings of those differences.
Quan Tang shi, juan 115 supplies these Chinese texts and identifies Wang Wan as an examination graduate of the Xiantian era. The broad dating above avoids treating a precise lifespan as necessary to interpret the poems.
Updated