The One and Only

Forcing myself to create a new poem before the year ends…

1 夕霞幾度胭脂紅 How many shades of red rouge are there in a sunset cloud?
2 羅帳殷勤侍春風 Silk curtains trying their best to serve the spring wind.
3 無情五更應鼓醒 Heartless is waking up in answering the call of the Fifth Hour drum,
4 上陽莫再長生逢 No longer would the Palace of the Supreme Sun meet the Hall of Eternal Life.

1 This line can also be interpreted as a statement – “the many shades of red rouge…” 霞 means “rose tinted clouds”.

2 At this point, the context of the poem is unclear until the last line.

3 A drum tower was used to announce the time in the night. A Chinese hour consists of two hours. The fifth hour is from 3 – 5am.

4 When An Lu Shan rebelled, Emperor Hsuan Tsung fled to Szechuan and Yang Guifei was killed before the army would proceed any further. With her gone, he soon abdicated and retired to the Palace of the Supreme Sun to live out the remaining days of his life. During the happier days before the rebellion, on one Seventh Night Festival, the emperor and Yang Gui Fei made a vow to remain faithful to each other. Now that the context is clear, the first line refers to the many shades of rogue represents the many past loves of the emperor. Line two alludes to the emperor peeping at the future Yang Guifei taking a bath at the Pool of Flower Purity to see if his daughter-in-law was beautiful enough for him to go through all that trouble to procure her for himself. The Tang Dynasty would have lasted longer if she had been less beautiful.

Wednesday, December 28, 2022