— Luo Yin
Do not complain of golden cage and wings cut short;
The southern land is far warmer than the northwest.
Don’t clearly speak if you listen to my exhort;
You will offend if clearly your complaint’s expressed.
Note
Luo Yin (833–909 CE) was a late Tang Dynasty poet celebrated for his sharp intellect, social criticism, and philosophical reflections on power, freedom, and the plight of the marginalized. Often using animals, plants even landscapes as metaphors, such as The Coinlike Golden Flower. He exposed the tensions between talent and oppression, speech and silence, autonomy and control.
His poem “The Parrot” speaks through the voice of a caged parrot – its brilliant green feathers intact but its freedom lost. The bird is told: “Don’t resent your gilded cage; at least here in warm Jiangnan you’re spared the bitter cold of Longxi (the harsh northwest).” This opening seems comforting, but carries bitter irony: survival comes at the cost of captivity.
The real warning comes in the final couplet: “I urge you – don’t speak too clearly. / The clearer your words, the harder it is to escape.” In imperial China, parrots were prized for mimicking human speech, but here, eloquence becomes a trap. The more intelligently the parrot speaks, the more valuable – and imprisoned – it becomes.
This poem is widely read as an allegory for scholars and officials under autocratic rule: talent and truth-telling may bring attention, but not freedom. Silence or ambiguity might be the only path to survival. Luo Yin, himself repeatedly failed in the exams and critical of court politics, gives voice to the quiet despair of the gifted yet constrained.
Story behind the poem
This poem was written during the period when Luo Yin sought refuge in Jiangdong (the lower Yangtze region) and received patronage from Qian Liu, the powerful regional ruler who later founded the Wuyue kingdom. Living through the turbulent late Tang era – a time of political collapse, warlordism, and social chaos – Luo Yin constantly felt a sense of danger and instability. Coupled with years of frustration from repeated failures in the imperial examinations and unfulfilled ambitions, he developed a deeply critical, disillusioned outlook: fiercely engaged with reality yet relentlessly condemning its injustices.
Although he had accepted Qian Liu’s protection and chosen a life of “partial peace” in the south, Luo Yin never stopped longing for Chang’an, the Tang capital, nor abandoned his ideal of serving the Tang emperor loyally. Trapped between survival and principle, he was filled with inner turmoil but had no safe outlet for his discontent. It was in this state of suppressed anguish that he composed the short poem “The Parrot.”
Historical parallel
His inspiration echoes an earlier literary precedent: in the Three Kingdoms period, the brilliant but arrogant scholar Mi Heng wrote his famous “Rhapsody on the Parrot” during a banquet hosted by Huang Zu, the governor of Jiangxia. Having offended both Cao Cao and Liu Biao with his sharp tongue, Mi Heng found himself exiled and vulnerable. In his rhapsody, he used the caged parrot as a metaphor for his own plight – talented yet trapped, forced to serve others while fearing slander and punishment.
Similarly, Luo Yin’s “Parrot” is not merely about a bird; it is a veiled self-portrait. Through the parrot’s dilemma – valued for its speech yet imprisoned because of it – he expresses his own bitter awareness: in a corrupt world, clarity of mind and honesty of speech only deepen one’s entrapment. The poem thus becomes a quiet act of resistance, cloaked in elegance but charged with sorrow, caution, and unspoken loyalty to a fading dynasty.
鹦鹉
— 罗隐
莫恨雕笼翠羽残，
江南地暖陇西寒。
劝君不用分明语，
语得分明出转难。
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