Red and yellow ink scattered around; your hair slants on your temples; For twenty rough and erratic years, we've been sharing our lives as one. Fencing it up with the metal, we made a rough vault for ourselves; Have we ever roamed the Heaven’s River together on the fairy raft? Repeated cries of the bugle mercilessly sound the “Parting Cranes”; Midnight calls the reed-flageolet to tear the rested crows apart. I have mistaken the last of autumn as late spring, when Willow catkins entangled in parting sorrow all over the sky. They enjoyed the intellectual game of writing poems to each other, each striving to surpass the other's skill. However, their nearly twenty years together had not been kind to them. The poem ends with an impassioned line. In Chinese poetic writings, the willow effectively symbolizes the fate of the courtesan who is bound to wander and drift like the willow catkins. The willow catkins are “all over the sky,” betokening her fits of sadness.