A Woman Wishing for Longevity

A Woman Wishing for Longevity

Author: Feng Yansi (903—960)

At a feast celebrating spring,

I drank a glass of greenish-white wine before singing.

Let me make three wishes while praying:

May my husband live a millennium-long!

May my health allow me to come along!

And may we resemble that pair of swallows on a beam of our ceiling,

Year after year staying where we belong...

Feng was one of the poets who created tsi, a genre of Chinese poetry that allows lines of different lengths in a poem. With his creativity, Feng impressed the second emperor of the Southern Tang Dynasty, Li Jing, who appointed him prime minister.

From a woman’s point of view, this tsi expresses a wife’s fidelity to her husband and her sincere wish of “year after year staying where we belong...”. Although the language is simple and easy, it is filled with true feelings.