Pound's River Merchant's Wife

The River-Merchant’s Wife: a Letter
While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my heard, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a through sand times, I never looked back.
At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?
At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-yen, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the right Kiang,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.
By Riaku 1915
Pound does an excellent job of showing progression through this poem. The young narrator takes the reader on a progression from childhood to young adulthood that shows her transformation from innocence to resistance, to finally submission. Through this progression, Pound is able to show a definite power struggle between the male and female; but more relevantly, man and wife. It shows the subservient role of the wife to her husband, yet also sheds light on the eventual acceptance and appreciation of this role through the absence of the husband. However, through maturation, the wife (narrator) is also able to find emotional attachment to her husband, yet it is gradual, and involves not only an emotional connection, but also a physical and spiritual connection. This is evident in the line “ I desired my dust to be mingled with yours/forever and forever and forever.” It is unclear to me whether this “mingling” refers to a sexual connection, but I mostly feel that the narrator is referring to a more spiritual or emotional connection. The longing of the narrator for her husband is apparent through the imagery of the last stanza. Her description of the moss that is overgrown is a strong image of the time that has past in his absence, and she states, “I grow older”.