Book of Songs
郑风·子衿
佚名
青青子衿，悠悠我心。
纵我不往，子宁不嗣音？
青青子佩，悠悠我思。
纵我不往，子宁不来？
挑兮达兮，在城阙兮。
一日不见，如三月兮。
Translation
Your blue-green collar lingers in my mind; my heart is restless and long. Even if I do not go to you, could you not send me word? Your blue-green pendant lingers in my thoughts; my longing stretches on and on. Even if I do not go to you, could you not come to me? I pace back and forth, waiting by the city tower. One day without seeing you feels like three months apart.
Analysis
“Your Blue-Green Collar” is one of the most famous poems of longing in the Book of Songs. It does not describe a long exile or an impossible separation. Instead, it focuses on the unbearable length of a single day of waiting. The beloved is evoked through clothing: a blue-green collar and pendant. These details are not decorative. They are the fragments by which memory holds onto a person who is absent. The repeated word “long” or “restless” gives the feeling of a heart that cannot settle. The questions in the first two stanzas give the speaker a vivid personality. “Even if I do not go, could you not send word?” “Could you not come?” The speaker admits her own stillness, yet turns it into a tender accusation. The poem is not abstract sadness; it is the living voice of someone waiting. The final line, “One day without seeing you is like three months,” has endured because it captures the altered time of longing. In love, time is not measured by the calendar but by the intensity of absence.
About the Author
The poems in the Book of Songs are largely anonymous songs from the Zhou period. Their musical repetition and plain diction preserve early voices of love, longing, labor, and social life. The “Airs of Zheng” are especially known for love poems that feel immediate, personal, and emotionally alive.