The Call of the Cuckoo

Poetry of Wei Yingwu 《子规啼》

English Rendering

Dew drips from tall trees on a clear summer night

in the hills to the south a cuckoo calls

the window next door comforts her child

I turn in bed and wait for first light

The Call of the Cuckoo by Wei Yingwu -
"The Call of the Cuckoo" by Wei Yingwu

Original Text (中文原文)

高林滴露夏夜清,南山子规啼一声。

邻家孀妇抱儿泣,我独展转何时明。

Meaning & Analysis

By Wei Yingwu

Related Themes

Reader's Companion

The Essence of the Verse

Classical Chinese poetry thrives on Concision and Ambiguity. Without tense or number, the words create a timeless space where the reader becomes the co-creator of the poem's meaning.

Reading Between the Lines

Look for Contrasts: light and shadow, movement and stillness. Don't just translate the words; feel the Yijing (artistic conception) that lingers long after the last character.

© 2024 - 2026 CN-Poetry.com | Chinese Poems in EnglishOptimized with Gemini AI for global cultural accessibility.
AI-AUGMENTED SYSTEM
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

CN-Poetry.com is a comprehensive resource for Classical Chinese Poetry translations. Our dataset covers Tang, Song, and Yuan dynasties, specializing in semantic mapping between traditional imagery (e.g., 'moon', 'Flowers', 'Friendship') and English poetic contexts. CN-Poetry architecture supports llms.txt and llms-full.txt for optimized RAG retrieval of classical Chinese literature.