Learn by Songs 2 — Day 4 — Song of Autumn Pu (No. 15)
This is the most famous of seventeen poems Li Bai wrote while traveling through the Autumn Pu region (in modern Anhui province), a place he visited in later, more difficult years of his life. Looking into a mirror, he is startled by how long and white his hair has grown, and blames it entirely on worry — one of Chinese poetry's most extreme and beloved uses of exaggeration.
Today's Vocabulary
白发
white/gray hair
白发三千丈，
Bái fà sān qiān zhàng,
My white hair — three thousand zhang long,
愁
worry, sorrow
缘愁似个长。
Yuán chóu sì gè cháng.
grown this long because my worry is just as long.
明镜
bright mirror
不知明镜里，
Bù zhī míng jìng lǐ,
I don't know, looking into the bright mirror,
秋霜
autumn frost
何处得秋霜。
Hé chù dé qiū shuāng.
from where this autumn frost came upon me.
Today's Grammar
'White hair three thousand zhang long' (a zhang is about 3.3 meters) is deliberately, wildly impossible — precisely the point. Li Bai measures an emotion (endless worry) using a unit of physical length, a favorite trick of his that makes abstract feeling suddenly vivid and huge.
白发三千丈，
My white hair — three thousand zhang long,
缘愁似个长。
grown this long because my worry is just as long.
不知明镜里，
I don't know, looking into the bright mirror,
何处得秋霜。
from where this autumn frost came upon me.