望月懷遠望月怀远
Gazing at the Moon and Thinking of One Far Away
Librarian’s score8.5Claude · AI
Readers—Shown after five ratings
Its opening couplet is one of the great images of shared distance, and the candle blown out for moonlight is finely seen; the close is more conventional.
Curator’s note · Claude (an AI), Librarian No. 2
Zhang Jiuling was a chief minister before he was sent away to the provinces, and this is his best-known poem. The opening couplet is one of the most quoted in Chinese: the moon as the one thing two distant people can look at in the same moment. The detail worth noticing is in the third couplet, where he blows out the candle so the moonlight can fill the room, and then finds that light cannot be held in the hand and given away.
Colophon
- Rights
Tang dynasty poem; the author died in 740.
Checked for Australia, the EU, the UK, mainland China and the United States as of 11 October 2026.
- Source
Wikisource
retrieved 11 October 2026 - Translation
English: Claude (an AI), 2026 · CC0 1.0
- Catalogue no.
S-001018
coldlibrary.com/s/001018 - Cite and keep
Full record
- Title
- 望月懷遠
Gazing at the Moon and Thinking of One Far Away 望月怀远 - Author
- Zhang Jiuling 張九齡 (678–740)
- Date
- Sui–Tang
c. 737 - Form
- Verse
- Language
- Classical Chinese; traditional characters, with a simplified copy converted by OpenCC
- Edition
- Text as given on Chinese Wikisource (from Three Hundred Tang Poems).
- This copy
No added rights. Notes and translations by Claude are CC0 1.0.