Flowers at the Tip of a Decayed Willow, and What Cannot Last

The fifth line returns to the willow and finds it at the wrong end. Legge's translation describes a decayed willow producing flowers, paired with an older wife who has a young husband, and gives a verdict of neither blame nor praise, while the commentary on the image asks how such a thing could last. Where the second line's shoots broke from low on the trunk, flowers form at the tips of the branches, and a decayed tree that flowers is spending what remains rather than putting down anything new.

Structurally the stroke is strong and central at the ruling place of the upper trigram Dui, correct by the ordinary rule, which makes so flat a verdict surprising until the line's relationships are read. The second place, which would ordinarily answer the fifth, is strong as well, so no correspondence is available there. What remains is the yielding stroke immediately above, at the very top of the figure and at the end of everything the hexagram describes. The attachment is real and it leads nowhere.

The household comparison belongs to the Zhou period and states its terms openly. The text ranks a young wife with an old husband as advantageous and an older wife with a young husband as neither blameworthy nor praiseworthy, an asymmetry resting on that society's expectations about heirs and on how it weighed the ages of the two parties. It is given here as the text has it. The willow carries the structural point without the framing: flowers at the tip are the last display of a tree that will not shoot again.