Read The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry Online
Authors: Tony Barnstone
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Kang-I Sun Chang and Haun Saussy, eds.,
Women Writers of Traditional China: An Anthology of Poetry and Criticism
(Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 720.
The story of Six Dynasties Period Princess Chen Lechang, as told in Meng Qi's Song dynasty compilation
Poetry Stories
, goes like this: “A man named Xu Deyan married Princess Chen Lechang. When the Country of Chen was on the verge of being conquered, the man told his wife: ‘When the country falls, you will certainly be taken into a powerful man's house. If your love for me doesn't die, I hope we will have the chance to be together again.' So, the lovers broke a mirror into two halves and promised to sell their mirror halves at the capital's market on the 15th of January in an attempt to meet again. Eventually, Chen was overrun and Princess Lechang was taken to be the woman of Yang Su, a duke from the country of Yue. Xu wrote a poem:
The mirror and the person are gone.
The mirror returns. The person doesn't.
I don't see the Moon Lady's shadow,
Bright and empty moonlight lingers.
The princess received this poem and wept without end. When Yang Su learned of this, he sent for Xu Deyan in order to return his wife. But first he ordered Princess Lechang to write a poem about this situation.” The poem that follows is the poem she wrote.
I feel so frantic today.
New husband faces old
and I don't dare laugh or cry.
How hard it is to be a woman.
THE TANG DYNASTY WAS CHINA'S GOLDEN AGE, A TIME OF
extraordinary achievement in science, medicine, art, music, and calligraphy. But the Tang is especially known for the amazing number of poets it produced from every walk of life and for the extremely high level of achievement of these poets. Tang poetry is particularly famed for its “regulated verse” (
lu shi)
, though wonderful verse was written in other forms as well. The Tang represents the apex of Chinese poetry, a time when all the verse forms of the past were practiced and their uses extended as variations on them as well as wholly new forms were developed. In the words of Liu Wu-chi, “Tang China, like Elizabethan England, was virtually a nation of singing birds.” The Qing dynasty collection
The Complete Anthology of Tang Poetry
contains more than fifty thousand poems by more than two thousand poets.
While Tang poetry opened itself up to a wider range of themes and emotions than had been explored in previous dynasties, much of Tang poetry is of the occasional sort, written to celebrate a meeting or event or to mark a separation from a friend. According to Burton Watson, “The Chinese, aware that profundity and originality are hardly to be expected in such conditions, have usually been content to settle for grace and technical skill in place of greatness…. Verse has been for many Chinese writers the medium for recording not only life's moments of intense feeling and conviction, but the countless minor events and scenes of everyday existence as well. They have used it as writers of other cultures have used the diary, the autobiography, or the sketchbook….”
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It took a while for Tang poetry to reach its height, and the poetry of the Early Tang (the seventh century) was typically less innovative than later work. It has been accused of being overly mannered and ornate and imitative of the worst aspects of the Six Dynasties and Sui dynasty styles. Although the Tang was a period of great wealth and stability, particularly the Early Tang, it was the poets who suffered through the An Lushan Rebellion and other disasters in the declining years of the dynasty who truly opened up Chinese poetry to the world. The social commentary and narrative abilities of such poets as Bai Juyi and Du Fu give their work great pathos and emotion.
The High Tang (713–765), represented by the three giants of the Tang, Li Bai, Du Fu, and Wang Wei, was the period of the greatest accomplishment in Chinese poetry. This period largely overlaps with the ill-fated reign of the Tang emperor Xuangzong (685–762, ruled 713–756). Xuangzong was among China's greatest emperors, but he neglected his rule once he met the famous beauty Yang Guifei and took her to be his concubine. Worse, Yang Guifei's adopted son, An Lushan, a Turkic general, led a rebellion in 755 that devastated the empire and sent many of the poets of this period into exile. Yang and her brother, the prime minister, were blamed and killed, and later Xuangzong abdicated the throne. The story is beautifully recounted in Bai Juyi's long poem
Song of Everlasting Sorrow.
Later Tang poetry declined in quality, becoming at times shrill and pessimistic, probably in response to the uncertainty of life in the twilight of the dynasty, but wonderful poets wrote at this time as well. Li He and Li Shangyin wrote poetry the likes of which China had never seen before, ghostly, obscure, strange, and extraordinary. One of the finest poets of the Tang was the last Tang emperor, Li Yu, who wrote marvelous poems in a new form of song (
ci
poetry) intended to be performed by singing girls. Though such lyrics were most often a kind of erotic boudoir poetry, Li Yu mar-velously extended the uses of the form, using it to sing about the sorrows of losing his kingdom. In the Song dynasty that followed the Tang, this form of lyric poetry came to be the dominant form, in which the finest work was written.
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Burton Watson,
Chinese Lyricism: Shih Poetry from the Second to the Twelfth Century
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), p. 139.
Wang Bo, together with Yang Jiong, Lu Zhaolin, and Luo Bin-wang, was one of the “Four Eminent Men of the Early Tang Dynasty,” a group of poets from two generations who moved past the conventional forms and images of early Tang court poetry (in which individuality and emotion were submerged to craft). Wang Bo is also admired as a master of ornate, rhymed, rhetorically structured prose. Born in what is today Shanxi province, he was considered a child genius and was presented to the emperor, whereupon he was taken into the service of a prince. Despite this auspicious beginning, he did not become a major official. The emperor took offense at a spoof Wang wrote about a cockfight and had him dismissed from his post in the capital. He became a minor provincial official and was convicted of murdering a slave girl he had helped escape from prison, sentenced to death, and later granted amnesty. He died, probably by drowning, on a trip to Vietnam, where his father had been exiled after Wang's arrest.
It shushes, shushes, and a cold landscape forms
as coolness clarifies woods and valley,
it chases smoke, seeks out the gate of a ravine,
carries mist out of mountain columns,
comes and goes and leaves no trace,
moves and pauses as if with emotion,
as sun dies and mountain water quiets
it makes pines sing in waves for you.
He Zhizhang came from Yuezhou-Yongxing (in what is today Xiaoshan County, in Zhejiang province). He was one of a group of poets from the Lower Yangtze Basin known as the “Four Scholars from Wuzhong” that included Zhang Ruoxu (whose work is also included in this volume), Zhang Xu, and Bao Rong. A career politician, He Zhizhang retired from politics at age eighty-five to become a Daoist hermit near Lake Jinghu in Zhejiang province. He was a great friend of Li Bai and in fact gave him the appellation “Banished Immortal.” He was himself called one of the “Eight Immortals of the Winecup” by Du Fu, and his idiosyncrasies earned him the name “Crazy Zhang.” Known for his openhearted love of the lower classes and for his freethinking, he is presented in later Daoist tales as a man who achieved immortality. Only nineteen of his poems remain.
Green jade decorates a tall tree,
thousands of emerald ribbons hanging down.
Who cut those tiny leaves so fine?
The March wind like scissors.
Little is known about Zhang Ruoxu. Along with He Zhizhang he achieved fame as one of a group of four poets from the Lower Yangtze Basin known as the “Four Scholars from Wuzhong.” Only two of his poems survive. On the basis of one of them,
“Spring, River, and Flowers on a Moonlit Night,” he has become a famous poet.
The tide in the spring river meets the flat ocean.
On the sea a bright moon is born from the tide
and shimmers waves for thousands of miles.
Nowhere on the spring river is without bright moon.
The river meanders through fragrant fields
and in the flowering woods moon makes everything snow,
until even frost flowing in space is invisible
and on the shores white sands disappear in light.
River and sky merge in one dustless color.
Bright, bright sky, with only the moon's wheel.
Who first saw the moon on this riverbank?
What year did this river moon first shine on men?
Generations keep passing without end,
but the river moon looks the same year after year.
I don't know for whom the river moon is waiting;
I only see the long river seeing off the flowing water.
One scarf of white cloud fades into distance,
leaving unbearable sorrow in the estuary's green maples.
Whose husband is drifting away in a flatboat tonight?
Who is missing her lover in a moonlit tower?
What a pity, the moon wandering through the tower;
it should light the mirror stand of the traveler.
She cannot roll it up in the jade door's blinds,
or wipe it from the rock where she beats clothes clean.
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At this moment, they see the same moon, but cannot hear each
other.
She wishes she could flow with the moonlight onto him.
The wild goose flying off cannot escape this light.
When fish and dragons leap and dive I read patterns in the waves.
Last night she dreamed of fallen petals in a still pool;
what sorrow: with spring half over, the man hasn't returned.
The current has almost washed the spring away
and the setting moon tilts west again in the river pool.
The slanting moon sinks deep, deep into the sea fog.
Between Brown Rock and the Xi ang River is a long way
and I don't know how many people ride the moonlight home.
The setting moon fills the river trees with shivering emotion.
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Traditionally, Chinese women wash clothes by a stream or river by beating them on a rock with a wooden club. In Chinese poetry the sound of beating clothes is typically associated with homesickness.
Meng Haoran came from present-day Hubei province. He lived for a time as a recluse at Deer Gate Mountain after failing to pass the official examinations. Though he was older than such great poets of the Tang dynasty as Wang Wei and Li Bai, he was their friend and was himself considered a supremely successful poet. Despite his failure to pass the imperial exam and become an official, he made friends with other major poets of the High Tang period during his visit to the capital to take the test. Some years later he was hired to be the assistant to the writer-official Zhang Jiuling, but he retired from the appointment within the year. He is well known for his nature poems and for his poems of recluse, and for the personality that suffuses his poetry.
I'm lonely alone, expecting whom?
Each morning I return empty, lone.
I'm ready to go looking for fragrant grass,
but lament this parting, old friend.
On the Way who will help me?
It's rare to find a soul mate
so I should guard my solitude,
just go home and close the gate.
Sleeping in spring, I don't feel the dawn though
everywhere birds are singing.
Last night I heard sounds, blowing, raining.
How many flowers have fallen down?
I moor my boat by the misty shore.
Sunset renews the wanderer's sorrow.
A plain so vast the sky dwarfs trees.
Clear river water brings the moon close.
Wang Changling was born in Changan, the Tang dynasty capital. Though he passed the imperial examinations, he served only in minor posts. He was, however, considered to be the premier poet of his time and was well represented in anthologies. Banished to Guangdong in 728, he was later murdered during the An Lushan
Rebellion. His poetics center on an aesthetic of intense focus, and his work was praised for its vitality and zest. Although his critical work,
Definitions of Poetry
, was lost in China, the Japanese monk Kukai quoted extensively from it, thus preserving his thoughts on aesthetics.
Crossing the autumn river I let my horse drink. The water's cold, wind a sharp blade. Sun is not yet sunk on the sand horizon and in the darkening distance I see Lintao where we fought near the Great Wall, filled with high morale. Now yellow dust fills present and past. White bones lie chaotic in the weeds.
Wang Wan was the police chief of Luoyang, the city of his birth, in present-day Henan province. His work appears in the famous anthology
300 Poems of the Tang Dynasty
, but most of it has been lost.
Man on a road through green mountains.
A boat sails the green waters.
The banks grow when the tide stills.
One sail taut in the wind.
The ocean sun emerges from broken night.
Spring flows in rivers as the year ages.
How can my letter find its way home
to Luoyang where the geese fly?
Wang Wei is considered, with Du Fu and Li Bai, one of the three greatest poets of the Tang dynasty. He was also a talented musician and a famous landscape painter who founded the Southern school of landscape painters. The central conflict in Wang Wei's life was between his career as a successful official and his devotion to Daoism and Chan Buddhism. Born Wang Mojie, he took the courtesy name Wei; the two names together (Wei Mojie) make up the Chinese transliteration of the Buddhist saint Vimalakirti, who affirmed the lay practice of Buddhism. Many of Wang Wei's poems express his desire to retreat from the “dusty, busy” world of the court to his estate at Wang River, the setting for his famous Wang River sequence of poems, whose almost purely objective landscape descriptions are subtly infused with a Buddhist consciousness or, more accurately, lack of consciousness. Wang Wei's poems often allude to Tao Qian (c. 365–427), whose own hermetic retreat was a model for future poets. Of all Chinese poets, Wang Wei is the one who comes closest to Zhuangzi's description of the perfect man: “Be empty, that is all. The Perfect Man uses his mind like a mirror—going after nothing, welcoming nothing, responding but not storing.” One of his most famous poems begins with “the empty mountain” as the landscape symbol for the annihilation of consciousness: “Nobody in sight on the empty mountain.” Yet Wang Wei always keeps one foot in the real world, and with simplicity, an accurate eye, and piercing social judgment, he portrays the military, the court, the rebellious Daoist drunkard, and the lonely rooms of women whose husbands
are fighting on the Northern frontier. His poems work with few words, often treating traditional themes, yet the mind behind these words is so fresh and authentic that each simple line takes on the quality of originality, of having been uttered on the first morning of speech. His poems are often described as spoken paintings, his paintings as silent poems. As Robert Payne observes, he “can evoke a whole landscape in a single line.”