5. Spring Longing | Li Bai

起手两句是这首诗的机关。燕在北，秦在西，中间的男人去了燕地，女人留在秦地。草刚抽出细丝的时候，桑树已经压弯枝条——同一个春天，在两地走到的程度不一样。李白没有写「我等了很久」，他先把这个时间差摆出来，让后面两句有地方落。这个写法省掉了所有关于等待的形容，读者自己会算出中间隔了多久。

The opening couplet is the mechanism of the whole poem. Yan lies north, Qin lies west; the man has gone to Yan and the woman stays in Qin. While the grass is still a thin thread, the mulberry has already bowed its branches — it is the same spring, but it has not advanced to the same point in both places. Li Bai does not write 'I have waited a long time'. He sets the time difference out first so that the next two lines have somewhere to land. This way of writing removes every adjective about waiting; the reader works out the length of it alone.

「当君怀归日，是妾断肠时」把上一联的空间差转成因果。她不说自己思念，说的是他一动归念，她这边就断了肠——两件事被写成同时发生，不是一前一后。中间那段距离对她的痛苦不起作用：他什么时候想起回家，她的痛就什么时候到，没有缓冲。

The second couplet turns the spatial gap of the first into cause and effect. She does not say she misses him. She says that the moment he turns his thoughts homeward, she is breaking inside — the two things written as simultaneous rather than sequential. The distance between them does nothing to soften her pain. Whenever he thinks of coming back, the pain arrives at exactly that hour, with no interval in between.

结尾转向春风：「不相识，何事入罗帏」。风是最没有意志的东西，她却拿质问人的口气问它。这一问没有答案，也不需要——思念已经涨到没有东西可以承接。前人写闺怨多在结尾收住，李白这里往外放。

The close turns to the spring wind: "We are strangers — what business have you here?" Wind is the last thing in the world that has a will, yet she addresses it in the tone used to question a person. The question has no answer and needs none; the longing has grown past anything able to receive it. Where earlier poets writing of a woman's grievance tend to gather the poem in at the end, Li Bai lets it out instead.