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Jade Pavilion Spring: Year After Year I Ride My Horse

By Liu Kezhuang Song Dynasty

English Poetic Translation

Year after year, I spur my steed through bustling market streets,
A traveler's inn my home, my home a place where strangers meet.
With copper coins I buy my wine to while the hours away,
By glowing red-candle dice-play I greet the dawn of day.
So easy for the weaver's loom to spin its patterned text,
So hard to know what secret depths vex a jade heart next.
A real man looks to northern plains where sacred empires lie,
So shed no futile tears where Western River bridges bide.

Classical Chinese & Pinyin

年年躍馬長安市。
客舍似家家似寄。
青錢換酒日無何，紅燭呼廬宵不寐。
易挑錦婦機中字。
難得玉人心下事。
男兒西北有神州，莫滴水西橋畔淚。

nián nián yuè mǎ cháng ān shì
kè shè sì jiā jiā sì jì
qīng qián huàn jiǔ rì wú hé
hóng zhú hū lú xiāo bù mèi
yì tiāo jǐn fù jī zhōng zì
nán dé yù rén xīn xià shì
nán ér xī běi yǒu shén zhōu
mò dī shuǐ xī qiáo pàn lèi

Philological Direct Translation

Year after year leaping horses in Chang'an markets.
Guest lodge resembles home, home resembles a lodging place.
Green coins exchanged for wine, days passed in idle ease,
Red candles calling the dice, nights without sleep.
Easy to pick out the weaver's broidered words upon the loom,
Hard to grasp the jade-like person's inner heart.
A true man in the northwest has the Divine Provinces,
Do not let tears drip by the banks of the River West Bridge.

Scholarly Exegesis & Cultural Commentary

I. Formal Poetic Architecture & Meter

This lyric is composed to the tune of "Jade Tower Spring" (Yu Lou Chun), adhering to a standard 56-character Ci pattern divided into two stanzas. The rhyme scheme shifts across the stanzas, moving from abrupt, gritty depictions of urban dissipation to poignant military and emotional yearning. The meter reflects the erratic, high-strung tempo of a disillusioned literatus trapped in the Southern Song capital, contrasting the chaotic clatter of the marketplace with the heavy, solemn cadence of northern grief.

II. Historical Chronology & Existential Impulse

Liu Kezhuang (1187-1269) was one of the most prominent poets and critics of the late Southern Song dynasty, renowned for his uncompromising patriotic stance and his affiliation with the faction advocating for the recovery of the northern heartland. Living during a period of acute national peril and humiliating appeasement with the Jurchen Jin (and later Mongol) invaders, Liu's literary output frequently oscillates between cynical debauchery masking deep despair, and fiery nationalist fervor. This poem captures his existential paralysis and frustration in Lin'an (Chang'an metaphorically), torn between the hollow distractions of urban nightlife and the agonizing call of the lost northern territories.

III. Line-by-Line Exegesis & Allusion Decoding

Lines 1-2: Year after year, galloping a warhorse through the markets of Chang'an; the traveler's lodging feels like home, while home feels like a temporary station. The poet uses "Chang'an" as an anachronistic cipher for the Southern Song capital Lin'an, expressing a profound sense of rootlessness and alienation.
Lines 3-4: Exchanging green coins for wine, passing days in carefree idleness; with red candles calling the gambling dens, sleepless through the night. These lines depict compulsive dissipation—drowning political impotence and existential angst in alcohol and gambling.
Lines 5-6: Easy to weave patterns into the brocade from the wife's loom; hard to fathom the thoughts within a beauty's heart. Drawing on the classic motif of Su Hui's palindrome brocade, the poet contrasts the tangible, albeit intricate, art of domestic longing with the unfathomable, fickle complexities of human affection and social reality.
Lines 7-8: A real man has the Divine State of the Northwest in his mind; let no tears be shed beside the waters of Xixi Bridge. The final couplet delivers a dramatic pivot, invoking the Confucian imperative to reclaim the northern ancestral lands ("Divine State") and sternly forbidding private, sentimental weeping over romantic or localized grief in the south.

IV. Aesthetic Synthesis & Poetic Aftertaste

The poem achieves its striking power through a brilliant structural juxtaposition. By beginning in the muddy realism of urban hedonism and ending on the austere, windswept battlefield of patriotic duty, Liu Kezhuang exposes the psychological trauma of the Southern Song literati. The lingering aftertaste is one of bitter awakening—a sharp rebuke of idle melancholy that elevates personal suffering into a grand, tragic historical mandate.