Jade Se Complaint, Wen Tingyun (Tang SHI #305)

[lnhammer]

Ice mat and silvered bed—I can’t start dreaming.
Jade sky like water—nighttime clouds are soft.
Far wild geese call, heading for Xiangjiang River.
Within the twelve towers, moonlight shines alone.

瑶瑟怨
冰簟银床梦不成，
碧天如水夜云轻。
雁声远过潇湘去，
十二楼中月自明。

The se is an ancient zither with between 25–50 strings and moveable bridges—ancestor of both the qin and zheng. Aside from the elegance the jade inlay implies, I’m unclear what the instrument has to do with anything. The implied speaker is a woman lying awake with longing. That her quarters have 12 towers on the grounds is probably rhetorical exaggeration. The river is in Hunan.

(Skipped #304 for the moment because tired of Li Shangyin’s knotty language.)

—L.

Comments

[sartorias]

Might jade se be an idiom whose meaning is now forgotten?

[lnhammer]

It's certainly possible. The couple of Chinese commentaries I consulted all gloss it as "jade-inlaid se" and comment on it being part of the cascade of elegant details in the poem (including the icy mat, to be understood as icy-fine rather than icy cold).