sp09250sschmidt

=**"The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter" by Ezra Pound**= Sarah Schmidt

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 n 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 head, I looked at the wall. Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling, I desired my dust to be mingled with yours For ever and for ever and for ever. 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 wen 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. Please let me know beforehand, And I will come out to meet you As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

Way 1: First Impressions
My first thought of this poem was,this poem looks so long winded. As I read through it I couldn't help imagining the story in my head in almost a Japanese anime fashion because the story of it seems so familiar to the anime storyline I had seen portrayed in several different ways.

Way 2: Engaging The Text
When I read this poem the rhythm and the rhyme remind me of a song. It starts out merry and happy as the poem explains the young innocence of them as kids. It slowly progresses into romantic ballad of young love but when the husband goes missing it becomes somber and almost haunted as she describes the leaves falling. Continuing so with her explaining the garden hurting her and growing her self old.

Way 3: A Point About Form and It's Relationship to Content
"The River Merchant's Wife:A Letter" is a poem is free of form and order, like the name suggest it's a letter full of love that a young wife who is growing older waiting for her love. It s written in a way as if the wife her self is writing the letter, as if the words were flowing stright from her heart on to the page. As if she was pouring her love and her full soul into her words.

Way 3: Another Point About Form and It's Relationship to Content
This poem goes off the normal rhyme sceme that most poems follow, it's goes more along the lines of a Pros piece with the way it is written along it's context.