Farewell
Wang Wei
Series: Three Hundred Tang Poems
Farewell
Dismount and drink your wine, Ask you where you are.
You are dissatisfied with your words and return to the south mountain frontier.
But don’t ask again, when the white clouds are endless.
Notes
1. Drink your wine: urge you to drink.
2. Where to go: Where to go.
3. Go back to bed: live in seclusion.
4. Nanshan Frontier: Beside Zhongnan Mountain.
Translation
Please dismount and have a glass of wine. I want to ask you where you are going?
You said that you have failed in official life and want to retreat to the border of Nanshan.
Just go ahead and I won’t ask any more questions. The endless white clouds are enough for your own entertainment.
Appreciation
?This is a poem to send a friend off to hermitage. On the surface, the sentence may appear to be bland, but in detail, it is tasteless, but the words are shallow and affectionate, with profound meaning. The first two sentences of the poem are a narrative, a farewell message about drinking, and a question that leads to the following. The third and fourth sentences are to explain the reason why the friend went into seclusion - "unable to achieve ambition". The five or six sentences are about comforting friends and one's own envy for seclusion, and denying fame, fortune, glory and wealth. The whole poem is about losing ambition and returning to seclusion, using it to denounce fame and express the feeling of being intoxicated with white clouds and seeking happiness for oneself. The charm of the last two lines of the poem suddenly increases, the poetic meaning is thick, the heart is envious, and the emotion is endless.