The wait is over

Husband is home

Jade Pavilion Songs (12)
Quan Deyu

The traveller’s come,
    A thousand miles,
        His wakeful wife,
            In her compound.
In the mirror,
    Her lamplit eyes
        Cannot hold still,
            Keep darting round.

权德舆  玉台体十二首·其十二
万里行人至，深闺夜未眠。
双眉灯下扫，不待镜台前。

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In the final poem of the cycle, the wife’s agony is at an end. Her husband has returned, and they will be reunited.

But it’s interesting that Quan does not give us the actual moment of togetherness. I think he reveals a lot about his own interests here. What he enjoys writing about is the constraint, the pressure, the distance, the wanting. That final moment of happiness is not his goal. He enjoys his heroine more when she is still in limbo, trying to do her makeup at the table but being betrayed by her own wandering eyes - and so that’s where he leaves her, no longer wracked by loneliness, but still in a state of delicious tension.

I’ll put up the whole sequence next, and then let us move along.