The original text and translation of Travel Inn are as follows:
Original text: There is no good company in the hotel, and the love will be quiet. The cold lamp reminds me of old things, and the broken goose alarms melancholy to sleep. The distant dream returns and invades the dawn, and the letter from home arrives the next year. There is a beautiful moonlit sky in Cangjiang River, and the door is a fishing boat.
Translation:
Staying in a hotel without any friends or close friends, I feel sad and sad alone. Looking at the lonely lantern in front of me, old memories flooded into my mind, and the miserable cry of the lost geese outside the window woke me up again from my sleep that was already full of melancholy. I only dreamed of going home in the morning, and the letter I sent to my hometown might not arrive until next year. The misty moon on the river outside this door reminds me even more of the fishing boat tied in front of the door in my hometown.
This is a nostalgic piece of traveling. After being away from home for a long time, I would envy the fishing boats outside the hotel door. Hateful and homesick, truly desolate. The neck couplet "A distant dream returns to invade the dawn, and a letter from home arrives next year" has many twists and turns, and is actually an aphorism that has been tempered over time.
The first couplet breaks the theme and points out the situation and mood of the stay. The poet stayed alone in the hotel, without a close friend who could talk to him sincerely, so he had no choice but to meditate quietly alone. His homesickness and longing for his relatives burst out and he could not control himself. As an important theme in classical poetry, wandering thoughts generally express loneliness and longing for distant relatives.
For example, "trees with deciduous leaves in a foreign country are like people who are alone at night under the cold lamp", "trees with yellow leaves in the rain are like people with white heads under the lamp", etc. In this poem, Du Mu uses the word "without good company" to describe the loneliness and sorrow of "being a stranger in a foreign land", and the word "self-quiet" to convey the depression and melancholy of the mood. Where does this melancholy come from? Readers cannot help but ask this question.
The chin couplet explains the reason for "self-quietly". Facing the dim lonely lamp in the room, I recalled all the past events in my hometown. What sweet and happy memories they were! Unfortunately, the beautiful memories could not stop. The mournful cry of the lone wild goose in the sky awakened the poet from his dream, and the poet was forced to return to his dream again. Faced with the lonely and desolate reality, it is difficult to sleep.
These two sentences are neatly contrasted, using a series of adjectives such as "cold", "old", "broken", "sad", etc., to combine images such as hotels, cold nights, lonely lanterns, broken wild geese, and melancholy sleep. Together, we sketch a picture of homesickness as a lonely guest on a cold night.