The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter analysis

The speaker remembers childhood play, marriage, and the husband’s departure on a journey. As months pass, moss, leaves, butterflies, and the river make absence visible.

The final request imagines a reunion but receives no answer, leaving the letter emotionally open.^[2]

Separation reveals the depth of love: ordinary memories become intense because the beloved is absent.^[3]

The poem is also a modernist translation or re-creation, not a word-for-word rendering. Pound’s images and lineation make an ancient situation new in English.^[2]

• Love and separation

  Shared childhood becomes evidence of a bond that absence tests.

• Time and identity

  Ages fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen organize emotional growth.

• Nature and waiting

  The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.

  The paired butterflies are already yellow with August

  Seasonal change measures the speaker’s loneliness.

The poem uses free verse, uneven stanzas, no fixed rhyme scheme, and conversational syntax.

Age markers, repeated “forever,” and concrete images provide structure in place of regular meter.^[2]

• Concrete imagery

  You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,

  You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.

  Tactile objects carry the relationship more effectively than abstract declarations.

• Anaphora

  At fourteen I married My Lord you.

  At fifteen I stopped scowling,

  At sixteen you departed,

  Repeated ages create a compressed chronology.

• Seasonal imagery

  The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

  Natural sound becomes emotional evidence through the speaker’s perception.

Cathay appeared in 1915 and identifies its poems as translations from Rihaku, Pound’s name for Li Bai. Pound worked from Fenollosa’s notes and other decipherings.

Yale’s Modernism Lab emphasizes that Pound altered details to craft innovative English poems and that Cathay appeared during World War I.^[2]

• “The poems in Cathay might be more profitably considered translations of certain states of mind or modes of existence than of specific words on a page.”

• “It explores themes of love, loss, and separation.”

1. Project Gutenberg
2. Andrew Karas, Yale Modernism Lab
3. Poem Analysis
4. Wikisource