Relate the imagery in The River Merchant's Wife: a Letter to the feelings and emotions of the speaker.

Imagery in The River-Merchant's Wife: a Letter by Ezra Pound

In the poem The River-Merchant's Wife: a Letter, Ezra Pound uses vivid and figurative language to convey the feelings of the poem's speaker, the wife of a river-merchant who has left her to travel to another speaker. The language in this poem creates in each stanza a clear image of the scene that stanza describes, and in this sequence of verbal pictures, the reader can follow the evolution of the character's feelings over the course of the story the poem tells us.

The poem begins in the past tense, with a reminiscence of the speaker's childhood. The first stanza paints a picture for the reader of the speaker's life before her marriage:

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.

The speaker sits in her front yard by the gate, picking flowers, when the boy comes by playing horse on bamboo stilts. The imagery here foreshadows the separation to come, and hints at the inequality of their relationship. Even early in their life, she is the stationary one, and he moves about independent of her. Flowers, naturally rooted to the ground, are her playthings. He plays with stilts and imagines horses, playing with plums that leave the tree when they are ripe. At this time, however, these images don't bother the speaker. They are both merely two small people, equal, with no reason to think that it will ever be otherwise.

The second stanza is the first of three that begin with an age and seem to represent an important moment in that year of the speaker's life. The speaker is still speaking about the past, and the scene this time is of her marriage to her childhood friend, the river-merchant.

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.

The images here are sterile and confining, concerned with the speaker and her situation, without regard to her surroundings or those around here. The detailed natural imagery of the first stanza is gone here, replaced with sparse, artificial images of separation. The repeated 'I's give the reader a sense of the speaker's isolation. The only time the husband is mentioned in this stanza, he is separated by the honorific "My Lord." She no longer sees him as an equal as she did when they were children, and this adds to her feeling of separation from those around her. The only image of something other than the speaker in this stanza is the image of the wall. She stares at it, unable to enjoy her wedding day. Unconcerned with the other people that must surely be around her, she focuses instead on the barrier before her. She stands before it with her head lowered, a gesture of submission or acceptance. The final line in this stanza is interesting, because the reader is not told what was calling to the speaker. Was it parents, or some other relative? Was it something more abstract-the feelings conveyed in the first stanza, or the freedom that she will no longer have once she is married? Regardless, the speaker ignores the calling, focusing ahead on her duty and her future rather than dwelling on what is behind her.

One year later, in the third stanza, the wife has grown to accept her marriage and has even come to love her husband. She has come to view their relationship as eternal, and has no reason to think it will be otherwise. The picture here is more vague than in the previous stanzas, not consisting necessarily of a single defined moment, but rather a

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?

The imagery here is rather spare, but the reader can surmise from the very first line that although the speaker in the previous stanza was not happy about her marriage, she has come to accept it. This idea is confirmed and expanded in the next line. Not only has the speaker accepted her life, she now embraces it. The mention of dust immediately brings to mind images of death or the grave, such as ashes in an urn, or the return to dust in a burial: "Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust," is a phrase used commonly in funerals. The speaker's statement that she wishes that her dust be mingled with her husband's inspires the thought of traditional wedding vows, "To death do us part," and implies that she now wishes that she may be with her husband beyond even death. This notion of eternity is confirmed in the next line with the repetition of "forever."

The final image of the third stanza, of a lookout climbing a tower to keep watch, is complex. The tone of this line is very different from the first three lines of this stanza. The speaker had been looking ahead to a happy future; now the reader has the sense that she is looking back from an unhappy future, lamenting her lack of foresight. The speaker uses this image to say that she had no reason to be on her guard, or to think that anything would get in the way of her ideal of eternal togetherness. However, that she uses the image of a lookout is interesting. A lookout rarely posts himself to watch for danger to himself alone. Usually, a lookout bears the responsibility for warning others of approaching danger. That the speaker uses this particular image conveys a sense of guilt, a sense of having failed in this responsibility. The reader can guess that perhaps the speaker's hopes for a happy future made her unwilling to consider the possibility that she and her husband might be separated, and she now berates herself for not being wiser.

The fourth stanza, again, takes place one year later, and brings the reader up to the present in the third line. This is also the stanza that gives us the purpose for this poem: the speaker's husband has left her and she misses him.

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.

There are two vivid images in this stanza: that of the river of swirling eddies, and the monkeys making sorrowful noise overhead. "Swirling," invokes an image of chaotic waters, always moving and changing. The second image is rather incongruous if the reader knows anything about monkeys. They are loud and chattering, but rarely could they be described as sorrowful. These images are more a reflection of the speaker's view of her situation than descriptions of what is actually happening. Presumably, the speaker has not been to Ku-to-yen, but she associates it with choppy waters. It is interesting to note that eddies are currents that move in a different direction than the main current, and that the word can be applied to history or tradition. This image reflects the speaker's feelings concerning her husband's departure. It is against her plans and hopes for the future, and causes worry and disorder in her life. As a result, even the chatter of the monkeys overhead seems sorrowful to her, and she cannot help but keep count of the months it has been since he left.

The final stanza deals entirely with the present, with the exception of the first line, which returns to the previous stanzas' narration of the past. This first line is an important one, as it gives us the only image in the poem of the husband's departure, and the only insight into the husband's state of mind.

You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear away!

The reader can infer here that the husband was not happy about leaving his wife. At least, the wife thinks so, and this is the image that she has clung to since he left. The reference to the overgrown moss by the door is made significant by the last part of the line, "the different mosses." This image reflects the speaker's fears that differences will have grown between herself and her husband in the time he has been away. The second line's tone of despair in the next line makes sense in this light. Just as the mosses are now too deep to clear away, she fears that the differences time has created between the two of them will be equally hard to overcome. The images that follow are about things that end or happen prematurely.

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.

The leaves are falling early, and the speaker notes that they are falling in the wind; an outside force is shaking them off the trees. Already the yellow butterflies are flying in pairs, but her husband has still not come home. The paired butterflies are separated from her, not "by the gate" where the stanza begins, or "in this garden," which would indicate that the speaker is there now. The speaker, alone, feels a distance between herself and the paired creatures. It is this distance that hurts her in the next line, the vision of togetherness that she is still so far from is painful to her. The second half of this line seems odd, as the reader knows from the previous stanza that the speaker is only sixteen. In a metaphorical sense, however, the speaker has lost her dream of eternal togetherness, and this disillusionment is what makes her feel as though she is aging.

The final part of this stanza is in the form of a plea, as the speaker
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-sa.

Here the speaker mentions the narrows of the river. A narrows connects two larger bodies of water; in this image, the speaker is hoping that she and her husband will be reunited soon. The indention at the end of the poem is also an image, representing the line preceding it. The speaker wants so badly to see her husband again that she, who has remained stationary since the beginning of the poem, is willing to go out to meet him.

From the images in the poem, the reader can see how the speaker's feelings have changed from the scene illustrated in the beginning of the poem to the present in the final stanza. The first stanza expresses the speaker's innocence as a child, and her inability to perceive any difference between herself and her future husband. In the second and third stanza, the reader learns that the narrator was unhappy at her marriage and felt isolated and alone, but that these feelings changed over time and she eventually began to wish for an eternity with her husband. When he left, the speaker was sad, and has grown conscious of the time that passes and the distance between them. She is afraid of the changes that may divide them, and feels once again isolated, as she was on her wedding day. She is anxious for her husband's return, and will even travel to meet him if it will hasten their reunion.