枫桥夜泊
Mooring by Maple Bridge at Night
Original
月落乌啼霜满天，
江枫渔火对愁眠。
姑苏城外寒山寺，
夜半钟声到客船。
Translation
Moon sinks, crows caw, frost veils the sky;
River maples, fishing lamps, match my sleepless grief;
Outside Gusu City, Cold Mountain Temple stands nigh;
Midnight bell tones drift to my passenger ship.
Line by Line Analysis
About This Poem
Mooring by Maple Bridge at Night is a pinnacle of Tang Dynasty travel lyric poetry, crafted when Zhang Ji, a disheartened imperial exam candidate, was stranded on a boat in Suzhou’s frigid autumn waters. The poem unfolds a sequence of intimate, sensory scenes: the sinking moon, cawing crows cutting through the frost-laden night, dim fishing lamps flickering beside river maples, and the distant, reverberating bell from Cold Mountain Temple. It encapsulates the profound loneliness and quiet despair of a wanderer far from home, turning ordinary nocturnal sights into a universal meditation on solitude, transience, and the unspoken sorrow of unfulfilled aspirations. Its soft, haunting tone and vivid imagery have made it one of the most beloved and widely recited poems in Chinese literary history, resonating with generations of travelers and dreamers.
About the Poet
张继
Zhāng Jì
Zhang Ji (c. 715–779) was a Chinese poet of the mid-Tang Dynasty, a period bridging the golden age of High Tang and the transitioning Late Tang. Though over 40 of his poems are preserved in historical anthologies, he is primarily renowned for his meditative travel-themed works that capture the quiet melancholy of wanderers. His magnum opus, Mooring by Maple Bridge at Night, has become a timeless classic, celebrated globally for its vivid sensory imagery and profound emotional resonance.
Cultural & Historical Context
Historically, this poem emerged in the mid-Tang Dynasty, in the wake of the devastating An Lushan Rebellion (755–763), which shattered the High Tang’s golden prosperity and displaced countless literati, fostering a pervasive sense of wanderlust and melancholy in literary works. Culturally, Cold Mountain Temple was a revered Buddhist sanctuary in Suzhou, and temple bells in Tang culture carried symbolic weight as a call to spiritual solace, often used in poetry to evoke transcendence amid worldly distress; travel poetry itself was a long-standing genre in Chinese literature, centered on expressing the sorrows of nomadic scholars. Socially, imperial civil service exams were the primary gateway to official status, but with staggeringly high failure rates, many scholars spent years in nomadic poverty, grappling with disappointment and homesickness. Personally, Zhang Ji composed this piece after failing the imperial exams, moored alone on a boat in Suzhou’s cold autumn night, drowning in unspoken grief and longing for home. Artistically, the poem’s purpose is to convey intimate travel melancholy through synaesthetic imagery—blending visual, auditory, and tactile details—without direct emotional declarations. It uses the contrast of the distant, resonant midnight bell breaking the silent, frost-covered night to amplify the protagonist’s solitude, turning mundane nocturnal scenes into a timeless, relatable portrait of human longing.