Poetry Readers Challenge discussion

Among the poems I read this morning, this one by Li Bai struck me as being particularly resonant with our current lives, at the brink of springtime, after a year of social distancing:

燕草如碧絲
秦桑低綠枝
當君懷歸日
是妾斷腸時
春風不相識
何事入羅幃

My English-language crib:

In the eastern region of Yan, the grass is silky green;
in the western province of Qin, the mulberry tree is foliage-heavy.
You dream of visiting home;
my heart twinges.
Spring breeze, no friend of mine,
what are you lifting my curtain for?

Hi Jade Nicole, I feel this way, too. So much classical Chinese poetry seems to revolve around these themes of people being distanced from their loved ones by exile or other forces beyond their control, blossoms falling and spring and youth and time passing away irretrievably in the meantime -- the kind of thing for which I guess we'd now use the tag "mutual pining" :-D I particularly love the contrast in registers, how the more overtly literary use of parallelism in earlier lines gives way to a more immediate and direct-sounding speech in the final couplet, and how the sentence in the final couplet straddles the line break as if too emotion-driven to stop. These kinds of poetic tricks were known and used by a lot of poets of that tradition, and, now I'm rereading this, I'm thinking about what techniques we could learn from them and import into our own contemporary writing....

I love haiku, too, although I don't think I've read that particular anthology. I'll keep an eye out for it!