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21
君 子 于 役
My lord is in service,
不 知 其 期
I don't know for how long.
曷 至 哉 ?
When will he come back home?
鸡 栖 于 埘
The chickens are lodged in their coops,
日 之 夕 矣
The sun is already setting,
羊 牛 下 来
The sheep and cows come down [from the hills].
君 子 于 役
My lord is in service,
如 之 何 勿 思 !
How can I not miss him!
................. ...............................
君 子 于 役
My lord is in service,
苟 无 饥 渴 ! 18
May he not be hungry or thirsty!
(lines 1-8; 15-16)
An echo of the preceding poem, in which because of the demands exacted by territorial defence
a husband had to leave his wife, can be heard in Wang Changling's “Boudoir Lament” (“Guiyuan” 闺
怨
19
). In this quatrain, a wife begins another spring morning in joyful oblivion, unaware of the sorrow
of separation percolating in her heart. Direct solicitude for the absent husband of the kind seen in “My
Lord is in Service” is conspicuously unstated. However, at the moment the wife suddenly apprehends
the colour of willow trees, despair over having allowed, perhaps even encouraging, 20 her husband to
leave and seek a government position on the frontier emerges in a complex of regret and longing. The
grief is rather beautiful with its subtle and pregnant suggestiveness: 21
18 Shijing, p.36
19 Ren Wenjing provides a substantial background to the figuring of the “boudoir lament” (guiyuan 闺 怨 ) poem as it relates
to Tang frontier poetry by subdividing frontier “boudoir laments” into those where the male voice of the poet adopts a
female perspective to emphasize the steadfast love and loyalty of wives for their distant husbands (zhongzhenxing 忠 贞
型 ), expressions of feelings of grief in response to years of separation and the torturous effects of not knowing whether
one's husband was alive (aiyuanxing 哀 怨 型 ), and investigations of a wife's bitterness in knowing that her husband had
died while serving on the frontier (beicanxing 悲 惨 型 ). See Ren Wenjing, Tangdai biansaishi de wenhua chanshi, pp.
186-204.
20 As hypothesized by Xu Fangming. See Xu Fangming 许 芳 铭 ed. Wang Changling 王 昌 龄 (Beijing: Wuzhouchuanbo
chubanshe 五 洲 传 播 出 版 社 , 2008), p. 97.
21 See pp. 51-55 of Jing Huey Yang “The Study of Wang Chanling's Seven Character Quatrain” MA thesis, University of
British Columbia, 1993, for a discussion of Wang Changling's use of implication in the conveyance of meaning . Yang
also provides a detailed explication of “Boudoir Lament” (translated as “A Young Wife's Sorrow”). Regarding Wang
Changling's powers of implication see pp. 76-78 where Yang discusses how the “regret” of the final line in Wang's poem