Things change, life goes downhill

(Er, so we should seize the day, I guess? Or maybe just sigh?)

A Hard Road to Walk (2)
Helan Jinming

Don’t you see?
The willow beside the gate
Spends more of its life in a desolate state
Than in bloom.
Don’t you see?
The wildflower that grows by the track, in rough squalls
Is uprooted and blown till it falls
On someone’s home.
When a wife’s left at home, how sadly we stare
At her anxious expression and thicket of hair
She won’t comb.
Her husband away for so long in her prime,
He’ll return to her beauty in wasting decline
In her life’s evening gloom.

贺兰进明  行路难五首·其二
君不见门前柳，荣曜暂时萧索久。
君不见陌上花，狂风吹去落谁家。
谁家思妇见之叹，蓬首不梳心历乱。
盛年夫婿长别离，岁暮相逢色凋换。

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In the second of these poems, the punchline seems to have gotten lost. A lot of Hard Road to Walk poems have the carpe diem theme: they tell us that all good things will pass, so we should enjoy them now. In this version, Helan tells us that all good things fade… and just leaves it at that! I’m fairly sure that he means for his audience to understand the unspoken conclusion: we must take our pleasures while we can. But having set up the image of the beautiful young wife with her husband away, if he urged the listener to gather some rosebuds, it might sound a bit scandalous!

This kind of poetry harks back to older models of writing, in which a poem was often just a series of classical allusions for the listener to put together. The revolution in Tang poetry was that writers became more explicit and direct. But here Helan uses the older model, with beautiful images in place of classical references. The images are left for us to process and combine for ourselves.