The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter by Li Bai (trans. Ezra Pound)
Quick answer: The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter, analysed: how Pound's version of Li Bai turns objects into emotion, and what its quiet free verse teaches poets now.
A young wife in a river town writes to her merchant husband, five months gone into the gorges. She never says I miss you. Instead she mentions the moss grown too deep by the gate to clear away, the paired butterflies already yellow with August, the leaves falling early this autumn. By the time she offers to walk out and meet his boat, the reader is carrying her whole interior life.
The poem appeared in Cathay in 1915, Ezra Pound's small book of Chinese poems reworked from the notebooks of the scholar Ernest Fenollosa. The original is by Li Bai, the great Tang dynasty poet, whom Pound knew by the Japanese form of his name, Rihaku. The result is one of the most influential poems of early modernism.
What the poem says
The letter moves through time by ages. First childhood: her hair still cut straight across her forehead, playing about the front gate while the boy who would become her husband clattered by on bamboo stilts, playing horse. Two small people, she says, without dislike or suspicion. Then marriage at fourteen, when she was too bashful ever to laugh or raise her eyes. At fifteen she stopped scowling and wished her dust mingled with his forever and ever. At sixteen he departed into the river gorges, where the water swirls and monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
The final movement returns to the present. His footprints by the gate are grown over with mosses. The leaves fall early. The paired butterflies in the west garden hurt her, she admits, because she is growing older. Then the astonishing ending: if he writes ahead when he is coming down river, she will come out to meet him, as far as Cho-fu-Sa. The distance she is willing to walk is the only measure of love the poem gives, and it is enough.
How it works: objects instead of adjectives
This is Imagist doctrine in action: the natural object is the adequate symbol. Nearly every feeling in the poem is delegated to a thing, moss for absence, butterflies for time passing in pairs while she waits alone, early falling leaves for a season of life going by too fast. Only once does the wife state an emotion plainly, when she says the butterflies hurt her, and that single confession lands hard precisely because everything around it is withheld.
The verse is free but disciplined. Flat, declarative sentences, most of them end-stopped, in a voice that never raises itself. The ages, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, give the poem its architecture, three stanzas of growing intimacy cut short by departure. And the ending refuses summary: instead of a vow, a place name. Concreteness does the emotional arithmetic.
Why it lasts
Cathay changed what English poetry thought free verse was for. Here was verse without rhyme or metre that felt quieter and more precise than the rhapsodic free verse that preceded it, and generations of poets learned restraint from this one poem. It is also a dramatic monologue across gender, culture and a millennium, handled with unusual tenderness.
Honesty requires a note on translation. Scholars have documented Pound's departures from Li Bai's Chinese, and the poem is best read as a collaboration across centuries, Pound's English poem standing in conversation with the Tang original rather than replacing it. That double life is part of its fascination.
What today's poet can steal
Steal the object transfer. List the emotions in your draft, then replace each stated emotion with a thing that has changed over time: the moss principle. A reader who deduces the feeling owns it more deeply than a reader who is told.
Steal the timeline too. Structuring a poem by ages or dates, at seven, at fourteen, last Tuesday, creates motion without a single connective, and the gaps between entries do silent narrative work.
What poets can take from this
- Replace stated feelings with objects that have visibly changed since the beloved left.
- Allow yourself one direct confession per poem, and place it where the restraint around it makes it detonate.
- Use ages or dates as stanza markers to move through years in a few lines.
- End on something concrete, an offer, a distance, a place name, rather than a summary of emotion.
- Keep sentences flat and declarative when the content is at its most emotional.
Try it yourself
Write a letter poem from someone waiting, in which the speaker never names the feeling of missing someone. Give them three objects that have changed since the departure, one memory told through an ordinary childhood game, and an ending that is a specific, measurable offer.
Questions
Is The River-Merchant's Wife a translation or an original poem?
Both, in a sense. Ezra Pound reworked Li Bai's Tang dynasty poem from Ernest Fenollosa's notes for Cathay in 1915. Scholars note real departures from the Chinese, so it is usually treated as Pound's English poem in conversation with Li Bai's original.
What does the ending of the poem mean?
The wife asks her husband to send word before he returns, so she can walk out to meet his boat, naming the far point she would reach. Instead of declaring her love, she measures it in distance, which is the poem's method throughout: concrete facts carrying feeling.
What form is the poem written in?
Free verse arranged as a dramatic monologue in letter form. It has no rhyme or regular metre; its structure comes from the wife's ages, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, and from plain declarative sentences that hold the emotion under the surface.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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