Many scholars consider the Epic of Gilgamesh from the 2nd millenium BCE, as one of the oldest surviving works of good literature. This epic poem focuses on murder, life, love, death and immortality. Dante’s Divine Comedy is again about love, life and death, as are many of Shakespeare’s plays. Opera seems incapable of existing without these topics too. Poems about life, love and death often contain cliches, but the topic itself seems rather overdone. So when I read an early 20th century poem about life and death by Ezra Pound, The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter, I found it refreshing and surprising.

While some translators lambaste Pound for his poor translation of Li Bai’s (Li Po’s) original Chinese poem from “Changgan Xing,” I do not care because it discusses life and death in a personal and intimate way without much cliche. Unless I plan to learn Chinese to read the original, this poem belongs to Pound.

Translations create new works, derivative works yes, but they exist as separate entities in a different language than the original. Considering personas were something new in poetry, it is even more interesting that the speaker, the river-merchant’s wife comes across as a woman.

I don’t know why but I can’t imagine a man writing a letter with phrases like, “You dragged your feet when you went out” or “Please let me know beforehand, / And I will come out to meet you.” Pound’s word choices, phrasing, syntax, style and so on reveal the river-merchant wife’s intimacy and love for her husband.

But Pound did so using the English language, apart from the place names. So maybe I find the poem less cliched than normal for a life, love and death poem because it from a language and culture I do not know much about.

Then again, when I first looked at the title and after I read the first stanza, I had no idea Pound was writing about life and death. And as I said earlier, this is Pound’s work as he had the freedom to choose how to translate the poem.

In the first stanza, the river-merchant’s wife reminds the river-merchant how they used to play together as children. She explains how after they married when she was 14, she “never laughed, being bashful” and when “Called to, a thousand times” by her husband, “never looked back.” This behaviour suggests she never loved him. Though perhaps she was playing hard to get, but I doubt so.

However, when she speaks about life and death, the intimacy exuded by her words struck me:

At fifteen I stopped scowling,

I desired my dust to be mingled with yours

Forever and forever, and forever.

Why should I climb the look out?

Ezra Pound, “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter”

These words encapsulate life, love and death. Yes, there are similar elements elsewhere. For example, her willingness to travel a long distance (Chōkan to Chō-fū-Sa) to meet him at the end of the poem or when she says things like, “I grow old.”

But, “I desired my dust to be mingled with yours,” seems so intimate and beautiful in its simplicity. The way it sounds due to the “d” sound in “desired,” “dust,” and “mingled” adds to the overall sense of intimacy and beauty. We’re often told when writing, “show, don’t tell.” This line is a great example of “show, don’t tell.” And it’s about death. It even seems cliched when taken out of context due to its Romantic-era emotionality.

In context, however, Pound juxtaposes it with, “Forever and forever, and forever.” That line sounds childish next to the grandeur and adult nature of, “I desired my dust to be mingled with yours.” First, it shows how the river-merchant’s wife loves her husband with an almost childlike fervor. Second, it also shows how she cannot express her love through words and thus must repeat the same word, “forever.” Yet, she appears capable of emotional expression by writing, “I desired my dust to be mingled with yours.” Cremation was uncommon in China until recently. So dust refers to how their deceased bodies will be broken down over time and become one (“mingled”) after death.

Pound’s choice of “mingled” also reveals another idea. The 15th century word originally meant “to mix” or “to combine” something with something else. Since the 17th century, it also meant, “enter into intimate relation, join with others, be sociable.” These mean Pound could have used the word for both its meanings, as in “mix” and “intimate relations” that are both physical.

Perhaps Pound also chose the word for its relation to Chinese history, as part of it, “ming” could refer to its powerful Ming Dynasty that ruled from from 1368 to 1644. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, the dynasty, “exerted immense cultural and political influence on East Asia and the Turks to the west, as well as on Vietnam and Myanmar to the south.” Now, perhaps I’m going to far with this word. Either way, the image Pound evokes using the word “mingle,” a word that sounds intimate and is associated with intimacy reveals the beauty of this poem.

So that simple stanza evokes life, love and death in way that is not cliched despite it being written in the 20th century. “Forever” refers to life, love and death. “I desire my dust to be mingled with yours” also refers to life, love and death. Yet they are opposites. How Pound created such complexity with so few words is just brilliant. Maybe it was Li Bai’s concept, I don’t know. But as a Western reader, I view the poem from the Western perspective.

Pound’s version reveals a clear shift from the Romantic era’s grand notions of life, love, and death and that of Modernism. He and managed to evoke the kind of emotionality that the Romantics could only write about. Pound showed while the Romantics told. And because of that, the reader is left to imagine on a personal level the kind of intimacy the river-merchant’s wife had for her husband, based on the reader’s own experiences. This personal connection is perhaps another part of the individuality and intellectual freedom afforded to us by modernity. But its also a great example of how to revive the past to reveal something new and enticing, a brilliant case of show, don’t tell.

Photo by Bruno Sousa on Unsplash