The River-Merchant’s wife is an adaption of Li Bai’ s
changganxin.
The attitude of the wife in this poem is a sort of changing.
As we can seen from the poem, at fourteen I married my
lord you, I never laughed, being bashful. We can easily
find out that at the first period of their marriage, the wife
was pretty shy and timid. Despite the fact that they’ve
grown up together in the village of Chokan without
dislike or suspicion, the husband called her a thousand
times, she never looked back. When the wife was fifteen,
she stopped scowling and desired her dust to be mingled
with her husband’s forever. At that moment, the attitude
of the wife has changed. Forever and forever and forever,
here Pound uses three forever at a time, this can be
regarded as the wife’s deepest love toward her husband.
Only one year, such a huge change has made. This can
imply the happy life they have had after their marriage.
When the wife was sixteen, her husband went into far
Ku-to-en, by the river of swirling eddies. The wife began
to miss her husband, deeply miss her husband. As a result,
the monkeys shouting became sorrowful noise five
mouths after her husband’s leaving. The paired
butterflies are already yellow with August over the grass
in the west garden. They hurt me. I grow older. These
several sentences have already showed us how the wife
felt when her husband was not at home. Even the paired
butterflies made the wife miss her husband. And these
butterflies really hurt the wife deeply. At last the wife
said inside herself that she will come out meet her
husband as far as Cho-fu-Sa. No matter how far it is, the
wife will do anything to meet her husband. The poem
come to an end, the attitude of the wife seems to be on
the peak.
To sum up, all the words that Pound used in this poem
are ordinary language, there’s no exaggerate. But in
Poe’s To Helen, Poe tried to express his feeling to Helen
through comparing Helen with three beauties. They are
Helen who represented the true beauty, guiding him
when he was helpless; Naiad who represented the
physical beauty, lighting him when he was desperate;
Psyche who represented the spiritual beauty, helping him
achieve the truth about beauty, art and value. Poe used
the classical and mythical characters to express the
feelings, quite different from Pound who used the own
words to express the feelings.