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121. Seeing Off Wang the Eleventh on His Journey South | Liu Changqing

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English translation

I watch you go, mist and water wide; I wave goodbye, tears wet my kerchief.

'Wide' is both the open water and sky and the space that will separate us from now on. The first line describes watching you off; the second catches the helpless motion.

The flying bird vanishes—no one knows where; the green hills face a person in vain.

In 'empty toward a person,' the word kong means facing someone for nothing, with no answer coming back. The friend is gone; the hills and waters remain, and their remaining seems superfluous.

A single sail on the Long River fades into the distance; under the setting sun, the Five Lakes region is spring.

The first line is what is before him; the second imagines the Jiangnan that Wang Shiyi is bound for, in spring. One real, one imagined.

Who sees me on the sandbar, longing and grieving over white duckweed?

Bai-pin is a floating water plant long used in older verse as an image of parting and drifting. The question 'Who sees' makes the longing a thing no one knows about.

赏析 · Commentary

四联就是四个镜头 · Four Couplets, Four Shots

这首诗几乎没有叙事，四联各是一幅画面：送别时的手巾、远去的飞鸟、江上的孤帆、沙洲上的浮萍。它们按远近距离排开，从贴身的动作一直到天边，最后又落回脚边的水草。刘长卿不解释自己的心情，「相思」两个字只在末句出现一次，位置却很好——前面所有的画面都成了它的注脚。

There is almost no narrative here; each couplet is a picture: the handkerchief at parting, the birds flying off, the lone sail on the river, the duckweed at the sandbar. They are arranged by distance, from a gesture at arm's length out to the horizon and back down to the plants at his feet. Liu Changqing does not explain his feeling. The word "longing" appears once, in the last line, and sits well — every image before it becomes its footnote.

「空」字在这首诗里做什么 · What "Empty" Is Doing Here

第三句的「空向人」是全诗最冷的一句。人已远，山水却还在摆给你看，这个「空」不是形容山水，是形容人的处境：面对风景而无人在旁，风景就成了一种提醒。唐代送别诗常把这一层单拎出来写，因为离别真正难受的部分不是告别的那一刻，是之后的许多天。

"Empty before a man" is the coldest line in the poem. The friend is far away and the landscape still arranges itself for you to look at; the emptiness is not in the landscape but in the man's position — facing scenery with no one beside him turns the scenery into a reminder. Tang farewell poems often isolate this layer, because the hard part of parting is not the moment of goodbye but the many days after it.

白苹为什么把诗收住了 · Why Duckweed Closes the Poem

末句用了一个很小的东西：沙洲上的一种水草。送别诗写到远方、写到春色，容易越写越空；刘长卿在最后拉住，回到眼前，回到一株草上。「愁白苹」是通感式的说法，愁在草上而不在人身上，等于把自己的心情推给景物去承担。这一推，诗就从抒情落回了画面。

The last line uses something very small: a water weed on a sandbar. Farewell poems that reach for distance and spring easily thin out; Liu Changqing pulls back at the end, returns to what is before him, returns to a plant. "Grieving the duckweed" is synaesthetic — the grief is placed on the plant rather than on the man, which hands his feeling over to the scene to carry. With that hand-off the poem settles from lyric back into picture.

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