Read The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry Online
Authors: Tony Barnstone
From the truth in the mirror, Cui Hui
1
painted a self-portrait,
but who can convey the beauty of the Goddess of Luo River?
2
Seasons move faster than a finger snap
and fallen flowers are wreckage when spring is gone.
A pink-faced immortal needs to slough off three lives' bones
along a purple road where fragrance disappears in ten feet of dust.
I walk a hundred times around a tree and my heart speaks to my
mouth: next year who is going to be x-ed out of this world?
Tai Lake is broad, with wave on wave to infinity.
The sky is frozen in ten thousand acres of lake light.
Green mountains are tiny dots in the distance.
The cold sky inverted in the lake blends into white air.
Diyi
3
is gone for a thousand years
but his high manner is still admired today.
Wu and Yue rose and fell with the flowing water.
All that's left from then is a moon to light the fishing boats.
I don't pursue the pill of immortality, don't meditate,
eat when hungry, sleep when tired,
and to make a living, I've a painter's brush that also writes poetry.
My footprints can always be found by flowers and willows.
In the mirror I am aging with the spring.
By a lamp my wife and I share the full moon.
Ten thousand occasions of pleasure, a thousand times drunk,
I am a lazy person in the human world, an immortal on earth.
1
Cui Hui was a singing girl of the Tang dynasty who was in love with a man named Fei Jingzhong. When they were forced to separate, she asked a painter to paint her portrait and send it to Fei. Tang dynasty poet Yuan Zhen wrote a poem about this titled “Song of Cui Hui (with a Preface).”
2
”The Goddess of Luo River” is the subject and title of a long rhyme prose (
fu)
poem by Cao Zhi (192–232). In it the poet describes a river goddess's beauty and how he (or the narrator) falls into doomed love with her.
3
Diyi is the epithet by which Fan Li referred to himself. He helped the King of Yue destroy the Wu State and boated on Tai Lake with the beauty Xi Shi.
Xu Zhenqing was known as one of the “Four Gentlemen of Wu,” and later as one of the “Earlier Seven Masters of the Old Phraseology School,” an archaistic movement in which poets chose to imitate the diction, imagery, and style of High Tang poetry, especially that of Du Fu. They also imitated the poetry of the Han and Wei dynasties and disdained all other earlier periods, feeling especially that the Song dynasty was a debased era for literature. Xu Zhenqing was a brilliant scholar from a military family. His poetry was well known even when he was just a youth. He came from Suzhou to the capital in Beijing and passed the highest imperial exam, becoming a judge in the Grand Court of Revision. In 1509 he began working in the National University. He wrote poetry, fiction, and prose (including biographies, anecdotes of strange events, and meditations on Tai Lake) and was deeply interested in Daoist religion, with its promises of longevity and immortality. He died at the age of thirty-two, survived by a son, who was also a poet.
The leaves are not falling yet into Dongting Lake.
Autumn is poised to rise along Xiaoxiang River.
In this tall house I hear rain tonight,
sleeping alone in Wuchang City. Burdened with a homesickness,
I grieve here where the Han and Yangtze Rivers merge
and can't understand why those geese outside the sky
are so happy about long migration.
Yang Shen was a brilliant scholar who came from a distinguished family in Xindu, Sichuan. He took first place in the imperial examination in 1511 and held a series of offices. When he opposed Emperor Zhu Houcong's wish to offer imperial rituals to his deceased father, who had not himself been emperor, Yang Shen, along with 133 other men, was beaten in prison, bastinadoed in the imperial courtyard. He was sentenced to exile in Yunnan as a convict in permanent military service. In his thirty-five years in exile, he became a popular, extremely prolific scholar, writing poetry, scholarly works on the classics and etymology, and collections of miscellaneous jottings, compiling anthologies, and editing editions of other authors' works. A political failure, Yang Shen was an extraordinary success as a writer and a scholar, traveling widely in his mind even as his body remained in exile in Yunnan. His second wife, Huang E (1498–1569), was a talented poet.
Ocean wind blows ocean trees
and for ten days I shut my doors,
sitting here, grieving the loss of spring blooming
and counting red petals falling over the wall.
Wang Shizhen came from Taicang, near Suzhou, and was descended from a family of scholars and officials who traced their lineage back to an important Six Dynasties Period family. Like Xu Zhenqing (1479–1511), Wang was associated with the Old Phraseology School, in which poets imitated the style of older work, especially that of the High Tang, and to some extent that of the Han and Wei dynasties. Those who followed the Old Phraseology School were told that “One should not read anything after the Tang dynasty,” but Wang, especially later in life, was happy to learn from Song dynasty poets Su Shi and Lu You and Tang dynasty poet Bai Juyi, whom the Old Phraseology writers tended to disdain. Wang is closely associated with Li Pan-long (1514–1570), a leader of the movement, who was his great friend; many letters and poems they wrote to each other survive. Together they were part of a group of Old Phraseology writers known as the “Later Seven Masters.”
Wang passed the highest imperial exams, but in 1559 he gave up his provincial post to return to the capital in an unsuccessful attempt to save his father, a famous military man who had been ordered executed by the prime minister, an enemy of Wang Shizhen's. He found himself unable to sustain regular postings after this. He became the leading literary light of his day, revered for his passion and his scholarship (he was a poet, historian, and scholar of the arts). Scores of acolytes flocked to him for instruction
and advice. The Old Phraseology School that he was a part of fell into disrepute after his death, but his reputation helped to cement it as the principal movement of the sixteenth century.
We walk to the riverbank hand in hand.
Looking back from the far bank, I'm already gone.
You stand alone in the dark and ride home late.
Now in springtime, moonlight is twice as white as frost.
It is said in the past Li Bai
gave a long howl and climbed up this tower.
Once he paid a visit here,
and his high reputation remains for a hundred generations.
Behind the white clouds the sea dawns
with a bright moon, a celestial gate, and autumn.
As if to greet Li Bai's return,
the Ji River water flows with music.
Gao Panlong came from a wealthy family of landowners in Wuxi. His father gave him away to a granduncle who was unable to have his own children. Gao passed the provincial exams in 1582 and the imperial exams in 1588. A neo-Confucianist, a stoic, and a fatalist, he became a serious scholar associated with the philosophical and political movements of the Donglin Academy and was said to spend half of each day sitting in meditation
and the other half devoted to scholarship (see his poem, “Idle in Summer,” below). Following a political schism in 1593, he was demoted and sentenced to live far from the capital (Beijing), becoming a jail warden in Guangdong province. In 1595 he returned home after the death of both of his birth parents. He spent years without a position, simply attending to scholarly pursuits and helping to reestablish the decrepit Donglin Academy as a meeting place for local scholars. He used his wealth and land to help widows, orphans, and the poor.
With the Manchu invasion and the death of the emperor, Gao's friends, who had lost their positions in the purge of 1593, began to come back to power between 1618 and 1620, and Gao was appointed to a series of important positions. Wei Zhongxian, a powerful eunuch, became his enemy and managed to purge him and many of his friends starting around 1624. Some were tortured to death, others sent to serve as common soldiers on the frontiers; Gao was allowed to return home to Wuxi but was made into a commoner. The Donglin Academy and others were denounced as subversive and ordered to be destroyed. When he learned that the imperial bodyguards were coming for him, he drowned himself in a pond on his family's estate. His name and those of the other Donglin victims were officially restored after the emperor's death.
I sit in meditation in the long summer,
not a single word all day.
You ask me how can I do that?
My heart is at ease when I have nothing to do.
Fishing boats are returning in fine drizzle,
children are noisy in woods.
Northern wind suddenly turns south,
the sun sets behind a distant mountain.
I feel happy at this scene
and pour a drink to go with this great mood.
Gulls fly away from the pond.
In twos they keep coming back.
Xie Zhaozhe was a poet, scholar, official, collector, and traveler who was descended from a military family from Jiangdian, Changlo, Fujian province, a coastal town facing the Straits of Taiwan, although Xie himself was born in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, where his father was employed as a teacher. Xie took and passed the regional and imperial examinations and became a judge in Huzhou, Zhejiang. He held a number of other positions in Nanjing and Beijing with the ministries of Justice, War, and Works, and was a prolific writer who was known to compose meditations on the practices and customs of the areas in which he worked. He wrote prose, essays, collections of anecdotes, and poetry, but his most important contribution is an encyclopedia titled
Five Assorted Offerings
, a famous portrait of his times that was very popular in Japan (it was banned in China by the Manchus in the eighteenth century). He was a freethinker and a skeptic and was critical of superstitions, footbinding, greed, and sexual excess.
Spring grass is rampant in the Changxin Palace
1
and sorrow slowly grows and grows
since the emperor never comes here
until it's high as the jade steps.
1
The Changxin Palace is where the emperor's mother lived in the Han dynasty. This poem is written from the point of view of a palace maid, mourning the fact that the emperor leaves the women in his mother's palace untouched.
Descended from a military and scholarly family, Yuan Hongdao was one of three famous brothers who comprised what was known as the Gongan School, after the port town of Gongan (in present-day Hunan province) where they grew up. They celebrated the poetry of Bai Juyi and Su Shi and rejected the imitative poetry of their day. All three of the brothers passed the highest imperial exams. Yuan Hongdao was a magistrate known for his travel writings and poetry. In his correspondence and criticism he celebrated spontaneity and clarity in poetry. After his older brother died in 1600, he and his younger brother retired to an island in Willow Lake to study Zen with Buddhist monks, but in 1606 he returned to his official career at the Ministry of Rites and other departments. In addition to his poetry he wrote a play, a monograph on flower arrangement, a historical romance, two prose works on Buddhism, and a set of miscellaneous essays, observations, and meditations. He died at the age of forty-two.
By the Hengtang Ferry, walking close to the water,
you come from the west, and I'm going east.
I'm not a singing girl
but from big red houses with big names.
I spit on you by accident when blowing away flowers.
Thank you for returning my gaze.
I live by the rainbow bridge,
the red door at the crossroad.
Just find the lily magnolia,
but don't pass the poplars and plum trees.
With the exception of “A Nun in Her Orchid Chamber Solitude Feels Lust Like a Monster” and “We're Only Happy About Tonight,” all of the anonymous erotic poems presented here were collected by Ming dynasty scholar Feng Menglong, who compiled them in a small collection of erotic folk verse called
Mountain Songs
(earlier he compiled a similar collection titled
Hanging on Branches).
Feng was a prolific writer, well known for his short stories. He was also one of the scholars of his time who showed a deep interest in folklore. He collected not only folk poems but also practical cultural artifacts and practices, such as different forms of letters, proper ways to address people, and strategies for winning in certain gambling games. In his preface to
Mountain Songs
he writes: “Folk songs are indeed very vulgar; however, aren't they the descendants of Zheng and Wei songs from the
Book of Songs?
Now we are in a deteriorated dynasty, there are phony poetry and essays, but no phony folk songs—this is because folk songs do not compete with poems and essays for a reputation, so there is no need to fake anything. Since they do not bother to be pretentious, I collect them to preserve authenticity. Isn't that something reasonable?”