In 36 lines, Li Ho gives a vivid insight on his poetic form of an extravagant oriental poem about a young woman's beauty. He writes the poem in a desirous tone, making the reader want to read on. The poem is very sensuous and shows that the speaker yearns for this young delicate blossom. His wide range of figurative language uses many similes, metaphors, and a collection of descriptive adjectives such as, "her mirror, two phoenixes, and a pool of autumn light." Li Ho carries an imaginative style that puts the reader into his poems and allows them to see what he describes in this particular setting.
This artsy piece of work by him does not carry any punctuations throughout the entire poem. He makes the poem continuous, like the young female's long hair in line 16, "a cloud down to the floor." Li uses a rhythm that seems to personify the motion of a comb going through the young girl's hair. The reader is seeing through vivid use of word language on the speaker's viewpoint of her captivating beauty. She captures the speaker's attention in the poem, and puts him in an almost translucent state of mind. Li begins to set the mood of this scene early in the morning even before the sun rises into the sky, "awake at dawn," with aromatic fragrances pertaining to the smell of her long coiled hair.
The question is open to whom the unknown speaker is and determining the gender of this person. We will assume the speaker is male for now, because many arguments can be made on either side. He seems to wake up before the sun can rise into the sky. The male begins to watch the oriental female from a distance as she is dreaming in her slumber. As the day breaks and light starts to fill her room, the beautiful girl wakes up from a restful night of sleep. She stands up on her ivory bed and looks into the mirror while unraveling her hair that falls like "a cloud to the floor" along with her jeweled comb.
