“The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” by Ezra Pound is an adaptation of Li Po’s Tang poem. Pound skillfully negotiates the shift from the original Chinese classical rhyme scheme to a modernist free verse whilst still opting to preserve the original meaning of the lines. Despite departing from the stringent constraints of Tang poetry, Pound’s use of sound patterning is unaffected by this lack of a strict meter. Even though the poem is not molded within a consistent rhyme scheme, Pound employs consonance, such as the repetition of the sound “s” in “small,” “suspicion,” “sorrowful,” and “swirling.” He hence preserves both the musicality through these examples of nuanced sound patterning and the emotional depth of the speaker’s writing to her beloved husband, who has yet to reunite with her. Using these methods, Pound retains the nostalgia found in Li Po’s original piece while modifying it for a different structural framework. The adaptation brings forth a conversational tone as shown in lines like “While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead,” where Pound’s directness captures the purity of the speaker’s youth, much to Li Po’s intention in his original piece. This direct and simple use of diction is static throughout the entire poem, alluding to how the emotionally charged words of the speaker are unadorned and not affectatious.

The poem vividly unfolds the various life stages of the speaker through detailed and concrete portrayals of her daily life. By employing imagery, the beginning six lines depict a scene reminiscent of the speaker and her husband as innocent children playing in a rustic setting. The subsequent four lines in the first stanza, starting with “At fourteen I married My Lord you,” provide an intricate illustration of the newlywed life of the young bride, delving into her inner thoughts. Being initially “bashful” and “lowering her head” at the start of this traditionally precocious marriage, the speaker’s sentiments towards her husband eventually developed to a profound love and ultimately to a piercing yearning for him after he left. The poem pays close attention to portraying the changing psychological states of the speaker at different life stages. As the poem progresses, it digs into the deep emotions of the speaker yearning for her distant husband by using vivid descriptions and the changing seasons:

"At sixteen you departed

You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river of swirling eddies,

And you have been gone five months.

The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went out.

By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,

Too deep to clear them away!

The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.

The paired butterflies are already yellow with August."

The auditory details of the monkeys’ mournful cries, the visual descriptions of the inundating layers of moss that indicate the long time since the husband last stepped foot by the gate, and the painting of leaves falling early are all evidence of how the speaker is borrowing various aspects of the scenery to express emotions of longing. The emphasis on how even butterflies were “paired” suggests that the speaker was in fact implementing or reflecting her own yearning for her husband’s return onto every object, be it inanimate or animate, around her. This writing technique that Pound adopts is very characteristic of Tang poetry: using a less personal and more reserved avenue of expression, which is the seemingly objective descriptions of the surroundings, to convey emotions.

Pound’s figurative language, particularly the metaphor of “mingling dust” for eternal union, reflects the love that transcends human mortality. Pound’s decision to not rephrase Li Po’s original line but rather to stick to it retains an important cultural indication: Chinese men traditionally mingled the ashes of their remains with their first ever primary wife, called “fa qi” ( 髮妻), to symbolize a life-long love that defies mortal boundaries. “Fa” means hair, and the obsession with using hair as a symbol of commitment in ancient Chinese culture can be seen in the opening line as well: “While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead.” This alludes to the Chinese tradition of “ji ji zhi nian” (及箕之年), signifying a girl’s coming of age and marriageable age, typically around fourteen or fifteen. This detail emphasizes the cultural context of early marriages and the associated emotions of bashfulness and apprehension. Other specific cultural elements are efficiently protected as well. Pound maintains the idiomatic core of Chinese culture, which is encapsulated in the Chinese phrase “qing mei zhu ma” (青梅竹馬), translating to “blue plums and bamboo horses.” This idiom represents the idea of childhood sweethearts and youthful innocence, exemplified by the image of a carefree childhood in the lines, “You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse/You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.” Pound’s translation hangs on to these culturally significant elements while modifying the poem’s structure and style to suit his modernist approach. By omitting a rigid poetic structure, Pound streamlines the poem, prioritizing emotional resonance and accessibility while still preserving its essence.

In “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter,” Pound skillfully unites two different poetry styles: the western modernist style and the classical Tang poetry. The original piece’s feelings are preserved because of Pound’s deft use of sound patterning and imagery. The poem also notably captures the speaker’s changing life phases, including her innocence as a child, the difficulties of her young marriage, and her intense longing for a distant husband. Pound upheld the poem’s rich Chinese roots by keeping the cultural allusions and idiomatic components while transforming it into a more modernist style. Pound has successfully facilitated readers’ connections to the speaker’s feelings through this adaptation and shed light on the universal theme of love and longing.