I am disappointed, just like a pear in Dongzhu, how thoroughly and clearly I see this complicated secular life in the earthly and self-clearing.
This poem was written in the tenth year of Xining in the Northern Song Dynasty (Su Shi was forty-one years old). In the ninth year of Xining, Su Shi left Mizhou for Xuzhou, and wrote five quatrains to Kong the following spring. This is one of them.
Feeling: Su Shi is now nearly 30 years old. After all kinds of displacement and suffering, this politically dismembered poet is disheartened. So the sadness in his poems is self-evident. Up to now, he just lamented that time is in a hurry and things have changed. It is better to take it lightly and regard the ups and downs of this world as a pear flower.