đông đào tây ai bạn cùng ‘my body is like a bolt of brocaded silk floa

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ABSTRACT

By way of contrast, the flamboyant flower, and leaf’, is a provocative and forcefully female image:

Kapok and mango, too, are similarly invoked, while the coconut furnishes us with a telling juxtaposition. The scholar-recluse Khiêm (1491-1585) wrote a poem in his collection the Bạch vân âm thi tập (cf. Schneider 1974:611 sqq.) commending the coconut thus:

đông đào tây ai bạn cùng ‘my body is like a bolt of brocaded silk floating in the middle of the market, not knowing into whose hand it will fall. I sit on the bamboo branch, I lean on the apricot bough, peach of the East, willow of the West, who shall I take as my life’s companion?’

ABSTRACT