A lovely Chinese love poem with a fascinating story behind it

I very much like this poem written by Guan Daosheng to her husband Zhao Mengfu, some seven hundred years ago (I don't know who the translator is because the poetry collection I have on my Kindle doesn't say). I'll give you the poem, and then after that I'll tell you the story behind it, which is a fascinating and ultimately sweet story, even if you don't like poetry.

"A Poem of You and Me"

You and I
Have so much love,
That it
Burns like a fire,
In which we bake a lump of clay
Molded into a figure of you
And a figure of me.
Then we take both of them,
And break them into pieces,
And mix the pieces with water,
And mold again a figure of you,
And a figure of me.
I am in your clay.
You are in my clay.
In life we share a single quilt.
In death we will share one coffin.

《我儂詞》
你儂我儂，忒煞情多，
情多處，熱如火。
把一塊泥，捻一個你，塑一個我。
將咱兩個，一齊打破，用水調和，
再捻一個你，再塑一個我，
我泥中有你，你泥中有我。
我與你生同一個衾，死同一個槨。

Now for the story.

Guan Daosheng was an artist and poet in the days of the thirteenth-/fourteenth-century Yuan Dynasty -- you'll note that in the painting below, she has painted a poem onto the painting, thus combining both of her talents. (And no, I have no idea what the poem says because I can't read Chinese handwriting to save my life.) Her husband was himself a talented artist (arguably the father of modern Chinese landscape painting) -- in fact their son was a world-class calligrapher as well, much to the bemusement of the Emperor, who seems to have thought it wasn't quite fair for all that talent to be concentrated in a single family.

Daosheng and Mengfu married when she was 27, and they were very happy together for twenty years. But as they neared their fifties (and of course fifty was much older in the late 1200's than it is now), it was becoming trendy for older, well-off Chinese men to keep a young concubine, much as it apparently is in China now -- though I think modern Chinese businessmen don't typically tell their wives about their young women the way thirteenth-century Chinese nobles seem to have. Now Mengfu very famously loved his wife very much, but young and beautiful would-be concubines can be pretty tempting, especially when everybody else has one.

Well, Mengfu couldn't quite work up the courage to come right out and ask Daosheng if she would mind his bringing a concubine into the house. So he wrote a poem about it, in which he apparently (I haven't been able to find the actual poem) delivered the message, "I'd sort of like to bring in a PYT like my buddies are doing."

"A Poem of You and Me" was Daosheng's response.

[smiling] Mengfu apparently never again mentioned taking a concubine, and they lived on together very happily until Daosheng died, ten years later, at the age of 57. And three years or so later, Mengfu rejoined her in their "one coffin."

Bamboo and Stone

Ten Thousand Bamboo Poles in Cloudy Mist