Liu Ch'e
Liu Ch'e - context Summary
From Pound's Cathay
This brief piece is one of Ezra Pound’s translations in his 1915 collection Cathay. Pound presents a single, concentrated image of an emptied courtyard and a woman hidden beneath fallen leaves. The poem functions as a pared-down rendering of a classical Chinese melancholy scene, relying on economy and suggestion to convey absence, domestic stillness, and a small, intimate grief embodied by the wet leaf at the threshold.
Read Complete AnalysesThe rustling of the silk is discontinued, Dust drifts over the court-yard, There is no sound of foot-fall, and the leaves Scurry into heaps and lie still, And she the rejoicer of the heart is beneath them: A wet leaf that clings to the threshold.
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