critical response on the poem"The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter"

Ezra Pound’s “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” is my favorite poem ----- not because it expresses a feeling of love, simply because it conveys a change of feelings from “without dislike or suspicion” (line 6) to love. The title of Pound’s poem gives me a knowledge that the poem form is actually a letter which send from a housewife to her husband who is out for business. The speaker of the poem, a young woman (the housewife), narrates a story about how she finds her love for her husband. She tells the story with a sorrowful voice when her husband leaves her, and narrates with a hopeful voice when she wishes for her husband’s return. She doesn’t talk about love directly in the poem, but she uses imagery and metaphors to give me an idea that she loves her husband. The poem itself based on each stage of life of the young woman from her childhood to her husband is absent launches some vivid and bright pictures in front of us. The poem starts with the speaker’s recollection of her childhood. The words such as “played about” (line 2), “pulling flowers” (line 2), “bamboo stilts” (line 3), “playing horse” (line 3), “laying with blue plums” (line 4), depict their carefree childhood activities. She recalls her childhood memories so that we can share her sweet childhood, as if we can see that two innocent children play around without any sensation of love. Back in the eighth century China, the woman receives the limitation of the way of talking to her husband, and also is limited to do anything outside of her home. She regards him as “My Lord” (line 7) because the society makes her to do so. The way she acts, “never laughed, being bashful” (line 8) and “Called to, a thousand times, [I] never looked back” (line 10), is because she is shy about getting along with her husband. Stop by here, I recognize that she is doing everything by obeying the rules, she gets marriage not because she likes that boy, but because she is at the age which supposed to get married, she is obedience. When she is fifteen years old, love bud starts to grow in her heart. She declares her love in the statement “I desired my dust to be mingled with yours/For ever and for ever and for ever” (line 12-13). I can understand her feeling around her married man changes from here, she finds out that live with her husband is pleased and she hopes dwell with him eternally. The question she asks “Why should I climb the look out?” (Line 14) gives me a notion that she doesn’t want to being split up with her husband. The “look out” (line 14) she brings up, on one hand, she is immersed in a happy wedlock, and never thinks there will be a separation day that draws her to climb along the wall to look for her husband; on the other hand, Pound uses metaphor to referring that she doesn’t need to smash the rule for considering her husband by doing things outside of her home. When she is sixteen, a separation becomes real. Her husband reluctantly leaves her for business, even the noise produced by monkeys she hears seem sorrowful. She describes the mosses grown in different layers with different color by the unused gate render me a knowledge of how long that her husband has been left. She feels lonely when she sees “leaves fall early this fall” (line 22), and the leaves also remind her that nothing in the nature will last eternally. She feels left behind when she sees “paired butterflies” (line 23). She is sorrowful and jealous because butterflies are paired, why should she being left alone? She starts to realize that she loves her husband, unlike the beginning, her obedience changes into love. She is sorrow and feels lonely without her husband being around her. The absence of her husband makes she grows older. Her desire of her husband’s return is strong that she doesn’t care how far Cho-fu-Sa is, as long as she gets a message from her beloved husband that he is coming back home, she will “come out to meet [you]” (line 28). Back to the idea about the speaker’s feelings about her husband changes over time: her feeling begins with without dislike and changes to obedience and finally changes to love, brings us and emotional ups and downs.