When she sang, the sound modulated full of stylishness. An oriole speaking with clear perfection, singing out from a tree of jade. I went home broken-hearted under the midnight moon, sobering up from the weak ale, thousands of moments of melancholy. My lone lamp grew shadowed, dim as in a fog. On my pillow in indistinctly I heard her laughing words. I can't stand this spring dream being so unclear- I've completely forgotten where I met with her. It is a lyric with much to invite reflection: does he forget the circumstances of a dream encounter or what we took to be a waking encounter in the first stanza—but was it a waking encounter? His surviving poetry and prose provide some stable points of reference, but not enough. Modern Chinese scholars have a passion for the chronologically arranged collection of an author's works. This is a reasonable procedure for when an author was intensely conscious of his works within the story of his life and left ample evidence in both texts and the para texts for dating.