[updated September 2022]
Four-Line Poem
绝 句 西 首
两 个 黄 鹂 鸣 翠 柳
一 行 白 鹭 上 青 天。 窗 含 西 岭 千 秋 雪
门 泊 东 吴 万 里 船。
Jue Ju Si Shou
Liang ge huang li ming cui liu
Yi hang bai lu shang qing tian. Chuang han xi ling qian qiu xue
Men bo dong wu wan li chuan.
Four-Line Poem
Two orioles sing in emerald-green willow trees
One line of white egrets across the blue sky. Window contains western mountain ranges, with a thousand
autumn snows
Door reveals the anchorage for thousand-mile boats,
heading east into Wu.
Notes:
Jueju: A classical poetic form in China, it literally means a poem of four lines, each containing five or seven characters. A strict tonal pattern and rhyme scheme is required.
Thousand boats: Large river boats built to travel long distances. Literally “ten thousand li” in Chinese, or a ‘three thousand mile boat”, or a “long-distance boat”.
Wu: Ancient kingdom in and around the present day province of Zhejiang.
Commentary:
Good example of a parallel poem. Compare and contrast the colors of the words yellow (used in the word for oriole) and emerald-green with white and blue, as well as orioles and egrets, in the first couplet. Windows and doors, west and east, and the numbers of one thousand and ten thousand in the final couplet.