Empress Yang Meizi: Quatrain on Spring’s Radiance

During the Southern Song, artists and connoisseurs who wished to express their emotional responses to paintings frequently added poems to them. Empress Yang's poems appear on a number of paintings by such court artists as Ma Yuan (active ca. 1190–1225) and Ma Lin (active ca. 1180–after 1256); this quatrain must once have complemented a fan painting of flowers, but it reveals more about the state of mind of the empress than about the lost painting it accompanied:

My makeup worn and faded, only the scent lingers;

Still I shall enjoy spring's beauty before my eyes.

Once you said to me, how a year blooms quickly and as quickly dies!

Might we now forsake worldly splendors for the land of wine?