Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju (179–117 B.C.), one of the earliest and greatest writers in the fu or rhyme-prose form, left no statement as to what he thought the characteristics of the form ought to be or how it should be employed.1 It is probable that, like many artistic creators of genius, he allowed his works to find their own form, without undue worry as to whether in doing so he was abiding by or departing from patterns set by previous writers. There would seem to have been few important works in the fu form before his appearance on the literary scene—only one in my selection, Chia Yi’s “Fu on the Owl,” is certainly earlier—and in many respects he is its virtual creator. Nearly all the themes of the typical Han fu—the great hunts, palaces, and ceremonies of the capital; rivers and mountains; birds, beasts, flowers, and trees; beautiful women and musical instruments; journeys or meditations on the past—can be traced back to some passage in his works. As the reader will observe when he comes to the “Sir Fantasy” fu, Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju adorns his works with an almost endless profusion of scenes and objects, any one of which might be borrowed by a later writer and made the subject of a single poem.
The fu in its early form generally consists of a combination of prose and rhymed verse (hence the English term “rhyme-prose”), prose serving for the hsü or introduction that explains the genesis of the piece, as well as for occasional interludes, verse taking over in the more rhapsodic and emotionally charged passages. The verse employs a variety of line lengths, from three-character to seven-character or more, arranged usually in blocks of lines of a uniform length that alternate with one another. A strong preference for the four-character and six-character length is apparent, and many poems are made up almost entirely of such lines. The poem often concludes with a summary in verse called a luan or reprise. End rhyme is used throughout the verse portions, as well as frequent alliteration, assonance, and other euphonic effects. Rhetorical devices such as parallelism and historical allusion abound, and the diction is rich with onomatopoeias, musical binomes descriptive of moods or actions, and lengthy catalogues of names, often of rare and exotic objects, that are calculated to dazzle the reader and sweep him off his feet. The fu, in fact, though it is a purely secular form, owes much to the shaman songs and chants of the folk religion, incantations empowered to call down deities or summon lost or ailing souls, such as are found in the earlier Ch’u Tz’u or Songs of the South. The works of Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju in particular seem capable of bewitching one with the sheer magic of rhythm and language, and it is not surprising that Emperor Wu, when he had finished reading one of them, announced that he felt as though he were soaring effortlessly over the clouds.2
It was this very exuberance and wildness of language that in some quarters occasioned reservations about the value of works in the rhyme-prose form. The historian Ssu-ma Ch’ien, author of a biography of the poet, reports that when Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju’s “Sir Fantasy” was presented to Emperor Wu and his court, objections were voiced that it “overstepped the bounds of reality and displayed too little respect for the dictates of reason and good sense.”3 Ssu-ma Ch’ien himself approves the poem on the grounds that it concludes with a plea for greater frugality in government, and accordingly deserves to be regarded as a feng—a work of satire or veiled reprimand. But the fervor with which he argues the didactic worth of Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju’s poems suggests that there were many who questioned it.
One of the most important critics to express such doubts was the philosopher Yang Hsiung (53 B.C.–A.D. 18). In his youth he wrote ornate works in the fu form descriptive of imperial hunts and outings in the manner of Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju, whom he admired and took as his model, laboring so fervently over one of them, we are told, that he brought on a nervous collapse and was ill for a whole year.4 But later, as he reports in his Fa yen or “Model Words,” section 2, he abandoned the writing of fu. He felt, it seems, that the feng or element of reprimand, which was held up as the justification for such works, was too often lost in the torrent of verbiage, and that the effect was often quite the opposite, actually lending encouragement to the Han rulers in their costly and luxurious ways.
The word fu had many meanings in ancient Chinese. Among other usages, it was employed as one of a group of critical terms in discussions of the Shih ching or Book of Odes, where it denoted those songs or parts of songs that were primarily descriptive and straightforward in nature, as opposed to those employing metaphor or allegory. The word fu also appears in pre-Han texts signifying a poetical “offering,” that is, a song or recital, either original or quoted from the Book of Odes, presented by the participants in a social gathering or a diplomatic meeting. Han scholars, with their passion for synthesis, understandably sought to pull together all these various meanings of the word. Yang Hsiung, in his attack on poetry in the fu form referred to above, contrasts the Han fu with the fu or descriptive passages of the Book of Odes, declaring: “The fu written by the poets of the Book of Odes are both beautiful and well-ordered; the fu of the rhetoricians are beautiful but unlicensed.”5 By “unlicensed” (yin) he no doubt meant both extravagant in language and of dubious moral and didactic value.
The historian Pan Ku (A.D. 32–92), author of the Han shu or History of the Former Han, utilized the same play on the different meanings of the word fu to defend the rhyme-prose form and to establish its respectability as a later development of the poetry of the Book of Odes. In the preface to his “Fu on the Two Capitals” (Wen hsüan 1), he describes the fu as “deriving from the poetry of ancient times,” and his discussion of the form in the Yi-wen-chih or “Treatise on Literature” of the Han shu elaborates this connection. (See Appendix I.) This passage in the “Treatise on Literature” represents the earliest extant attempt at a history of the fu form. In his eagerness to establish the antiquity of the form, however, Pan Ku in effect makes all pre-Han poetry a variety of fu, treating not only the Book of Odes but also the works of the late Chou statesman Ch’ü Yüan as though they were examples of early rhyme-prose. Thus, while he forcibly links together in one process of development a number of ancient usages of the word fu, he completely obscures the actual evolution of the fu form in late Chou and early Han times, creating confusions that unfortunately have carried over into many later descriptions of the form.
Why would a historian attempt to pass off on the world such an unhistorical account of the origin of the fu form? The answer would seem to be that, as a writer of fu himself, Pan Ku hoped in this way to reconcile his literary endeavors with his Confucian conviction that literature should offer instruction and moral uplift. By tracing the beginnings of the fu form back to the Book of Odes, which had supposedly been edited by Confucius himself, he could argue that the works of men like Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju, lacking as they seemed to be in didactic value, represented no more than late aberrations, departures from the original intention of the form.
If Pan Ku and those who shared his convictions were not, like Yang Hsiung, to give up fu writing entirely, they obviously had to find some way to restore the form to what they saw as its earlier high purpose, to instill true instructional worth into their compositions. They began by eliminating the element of fantasy and hyperbole that had been found objectionable even by Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju’s contemporaries. Exponents of rationalism, the main intellectual current of the day, they quite naturally frowned on poems on imperial hunts that pictured the emperor and his attendants flying through the air in their chariots, and substituted more realistic themes and manners of treatment in their own works. Their impulse was probably a wise one. For, even if they had wished to, it is unlikely that they could have successfully recreated the old air of fantasy and verbal magic that had permeated the fu of Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju, or the works of Ch’ü Yüan and his followers from which Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju drew his inspiration.
Some of the difficulties these men encountered when they tried to produce edifying works in the rhyme-prose form may be perceived in Pan Ku’s already mentioned Liang-tu fu or “Fu on the Two Capitals.” It is cast in the form of a debate between exponents of the two Han capitals, one speaking in praise of Ch’ang-an, the capital of the Former Han, and the period in history which it represents (206 B.C. to A.D. 8), the other in praise of Lo-yang and the Later or Eastern Han, the period of the writer. In the first section, on Ch’ang-an, the poet allows himself to write in the grand manner of Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju, sparing no eloquence in his portrait of the gorgeous palaces and sumptuous ways of the Former Han court, for all this effulgence is to be censured later in the poem. But when he comes to the second section, in praise of his own ruler and time, he is hard put to create a picture that in interest and richness will even match, much less appear superior to, that of the former age. We are meant to condemn Ch’ang-an’s sensuality and applaud the sober mores of Lo-yang, but the language of the poem works against such aims. As so often in literature, vice turns out to be more attractive than virtue, and one can hardly help preferring Ch’ang-an to the bleak and austere classicism of Lo-yang, whose inhabitants
Are ashamed to wear clothes of fine, sheer-woven fabric,
Who look down on rare and lovely things and do not hold them dear.
The same problems faced Chang Heng (78–139), the leading fu writer of the second century A.D., when he imitated Pan Ku’s poem in his Liang-ching fu or “Fu on the Two Metropolises.” Borrowing heavily from his predecessor and expanding the descriptions of the two Han capitals to twice their former length, he labored to invest the Lo-yang section with additional interest so that it would provide a better balance to that on Ch’ang-an. Thus, in contrast to Pan Ku, who focused almost exclusively on the pomp of the court, he introduces a lively description of a ceremony believed vital to the life and well being of the city as a whole:
Then at year’s end comes the Great Exorcism
To expel and drive out a host of ills.
The Exorcist seizes his halberd,
Male and female shamans brandish stalks,
With ten thousand good girls and boys,
Vermilion-capped, clad in robes of black;
From peachwood bows, arrows of mugwort
Issue in ceaseless volleys;
Showers of flying pebbles pelt like raindrops
Till the toughest demon is certain to be slain.
Torches, flaming, speed like shooting stars,
Chasing the red pestilence beyond the four borders.
Later the celebrants cross the Lake of Heaven,
Pass over floating bridges,
Felling the hsü-k’uang,
Cutting down the wei-t’o,
Braining the fang-liang;
They imprison the “plowing father” under Ch’ing-ling waters,
Drown the “woman-witch” in the Sacred Pond;
They slaughter the k’uei and hsü, the wang-hsiang,
Kill the yeh-chung, crush the yu-kuang.
Because of them the spirits of the eight directions pale and tremble—
How much more so the chi-yü elves and the aging pi-fang!
And on Mount Tu-shuo each evildoer
Is eyed by Yü-lü,
Shen-shu to assist him;
One at each arm, the victim is bound with rushes;6
Sharply they peer into cracks and crannies,
Seizing and arresting every malicious sprite,
Till the houses of the capital are purified and clean,
Not a one left unsanctified. (Wen hsüan 3)
Again, in his description of Ch’ang-an, Chang Heng has tried to add variety and a touch of greater realism, deserting the palaces and royal gardens that are the center of earlier fu and conducting the reader into the market place to show him
The hundred tribes of merchants and vendors,
Men and women for whom each sale brings a pennyworth’s gain,
Peddling good merchandise mixed with bad,
Swindling and hoodwinking the country folk;
or the city’s self-appointed rhetoricians and doctors of debate
Gabbling on street corners, arguing in alleys,
Ferreting out every good and evil,
Analyzing down to the tiniest hair,
Probing more than skin-deep, drawing ever finer lines. (Wen hsüan 2)
In another work in what, with the reader’s indulgence, might be called the urban fu category, the “Fu on the Southern Capital,” Chang Heng demonstrates a similar interest in homey and realistic detail. This time he moves into the suburbs of Wan in Nan-yang, the city which is the subject of the poem, to show us a typical Han farm:
From the streams
Tunnels have been bored that lead the rushing current
Flowing into these rice fields,
Where channels and ditches link like arteries,
Dikes and embankments web with one another;
Dawn clouds need not rise up—
The stored waters find their way alone,
And when sluices are opened, they drain away,
So that fields are now flooded, now dry again,
And the winter rice, the summer wheat
Ripens each in its proper season.
In the broad meadows
Are mulberry, lacquer trees, hemp, and ramie,
Beans, wheat, millet, and paniceled millet,
A hundred grains, thick and luxuriant,
Burgeoning, ripening.
In garden plots
Grow smartweed, fragrant grasses, turmeric,
Sugar cane, ginger, garlic,
Shepherd’s purse, taro, and melons. (Wen hsüan 4)
Both the devotion to realism and the fondness for cityscapes evident in these works of Chang Heng reached their logical culmination in the gigantic “Fu on the Three Capitals” by Tso Ssu (fl. A.D. 300). In a lengthy introduction, translated in Appendix I, the author criticizes not only Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju but Yang Hsiung, Pan Ku, and Chang Heng as well, for exaggerations or errors of fact in their descriptions of cities. He, on the other hand, he assures us, has carefully researched the geography of the capitals he intends to depict, has investigated their flora and fauna, studied their folkways and mastered their history, so that he will not be guilty of similar inaccuracies. But though his poem may be factually impeccable, and was apparently much admired by his contemporaries, it fails, it seems to me, on structural grounds. Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju in his “Sir Fantasy” describes three great hunts, those of the feudal lords of Ch’i and Ch’u, and that of the Han emperor; but he is careful to make the descriptions of varying length and complexity so that, as the reader moves from one to another, the poem will build to a climax. Tso Ssu, on the other hand, allots approximately equal space to all three capitals, detailing the same aspects of each and in the same order. As a result, his poem plods along without variation in tempo or intensity, devoid of any real core of interest.
The same tendency toward greater realism is seen in treatments of the travel theme in the fu form. David Hawkes, in his illuminating article “The Quest of the Goddess” (see bibliography), has identified the itineraria or journey, usually of a magical nature, as one of the characteristic themes of the Ch’u Tz’u or Songs of the South attributed to Ch’ü Yüan and his followers. We have noted how it is carried over in the works of Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju, in which emperors travel through the sky in carriages. In later works in rhyme-prose form, however, the journey becomes no longer a fantastic aerial flight but a sober progress on land. Thus the “Northern Journey” of Pan Piao (A.D. 3–54), the father of Pan Ku, embodies an account of an actual trip made by the writer as he fled north from Ch’ang-an, though it is given an added dimension in time through the skillful use of historical allusions woven about the various stages of the itinerary. The “Eastern Journey” by Pan Piao’s daughter Pan Chao—one can see that it was a very literary family—is even more restrained, hardly venturing beyond a straightforward description of the trip interspersed with expressions of uneasiness appropriate to a well-bred lady and rounded off in Confucian pieties.
With increasing realism came a more personal and subjective note, a turning away from the great public themes of palace, hunt, and royal garden to expressions of private moods and concerns. True, works of this type appear to have been written in earlier times as well, treatments of the tristia or disillusionment theme, the other important element which, as Hawkes points out, was taken over by the fu writers from the Songs of the South. Chia Yi’s “Fu on the Owl,” the second poem in my selection, certainly has as its starting point a very personal experience and predicament, though it moves on to the enunciation of general philosophical principles. And other works, attributed to Tung Chung-shu and Ssu-ma Ch’ien though of doubtful authenticity, express the disgruntlement of the authors at the failure of the world to recognize and make use of their matchless talents, surely as subjective and melancholy a theme as one could find in all fu literature.
But so long as the showy, court-sponsored works of Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju and Yang Hsiung continued to attract admirers and imitators, these more modest and personal works remained to some extent outside the mainstream of literary development. It was only when authors, because of moral scruples, rejected the writing of poems that might be construed as encouragements to luxury and lavish spending in government, or when they no longer felt capable of creating viable works on the former grandiose scale, that they began to use the fu form with increasing frequency for the expression of personal feelings and experiences.
Many of the late- and post-Han works in my selection belong to this latter category. Wang Ts’an’s “Climbing the Tower” was written in the region of the upper Yangtze, far from courts and capitals, to voice the sorrows and frustrations of a lonely traveler. Ts’ao Chih’s “Goddess of the Lo” at first reading appears to depart from the prevailing current of realism which I have outlined above, describing as it does a vision of Fu-fei, the goddess of the Lo River, as she reveals herself to the poet. But, unlike the descriptions of supernatural beings in earlier works, this one is enclosed in a carefully factual framework, and it is left to the reader to decide whether to view the goddess as an actual being or merely a figment of the poet’s overwrought imagination. Hsiang Hsiu’s “Recalling Old Times” and P’an Yüeh’s “The Idle Life,” as their titles suggest, deal with the private lives and reminiscences of their authors.
Sun Ch’o’s “Wandering on Mount T’ien-t’ai” follows the pattern of earlier works on the journey theme, but with one important difference: the journey described in the poem, though it embodies elements from the real world, is clearly identified as taking place solely in the imagination of the poet. Like the ancient shamans, whose bodies remained stationary while their spirits roamed through the universe, Sun Ch’o ascends to the top of Mount T’ien-t’ai, and the religious and philosophical heights which it represents, in mind alone. In this respect his work, like Ts’ao Chih’s “Goddess,” breaks from the tradition of Han rationalism and seems to be returning to the old wizard world of the Ch’u Tz’u poets. The difference is that, while the shamans invariably depicted their peregrinations in terms of breathless exhilaration and ecstasy, Sun Ch’o’s mountain top turns out to be a region of profound spiritual calm, even annihilation. The frenzied rapture of the old folk religion has in his work given way to the serenity of Buddhism and philosophical Taoism.
Four post-Han works in my selection stand, in contrast to the above, as later representatives of the relatively objective and impersonal type of fu. The first is the “Fu on the Sea” by Mu Hua. I have included it not because it displays any substantial advance over the descriptive powers of earlier masterpieces by men such as Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju, but because it applies these powers to a wholly new subject, the sea. The novelty of the subject raises the poem above the level of imitation and gives it a fascination all its own. The second, “The Snow” by Hsieh Hui-lien, belongs to a type of work that was probably common in late Han and Six Dynasties times, a poetic fiction set in the past in which the writer presents his verse as though it were the creation of the great fu writers of antiquity. The events described in “The Snow” occur at the court of King Hsiao of Liang in the second century B.C., where Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju and other courtiers are regaling their lord with poetic offerings. In structure, therefore, the piece closely resembles the first work in my selection, “The Wind,” attributed to Sung Yü, which also deals with a ruler of antiquity and the entertainment provided him by his court poet and may be a similar fiction of later times. In such works we see the fu form being returned to what was probably one of its earliest and most important usages, that of providing a pleasant literary pastime for men of taste, a fitting accompaniment to the pleasures of music, wine, and good fellowship.
Far more somber in tone are the third and fourth works, Pao Chao’s “Fu on the Desolate City” and Chiang Yen’s “Fu on Partings.” The former is a meditation on the evanescence of worldly glory, a perennial theme in Chinese literature, occasioned in this case by the sight of a once great and prosperous city reduced to ruins. The latter, similarly cast in that most favored of all late Six Dynasties modes, the dolorous, is a poetic catalogue of farewells, a description of the types of separation imposed upon various members of society—the lover, the swordsman, the soldier, the official—evoked through a hundred pathetic details of their dress and surroundings, and those of the loved ones they are forced to leave behind.
The last work in my selection, the “Fu on a Small Garden” by Yü Hsin, begins by sounding like P’an Yüeh’s account of a happy retreat, but ends on a note of poignant despair. In it, the fu is once more restored to its earlier role as a vehicle for the expression of deepfelt and highly personal sentiments.
As my remarks above have perhaps suggested, the fu form is a difficult one to handle well. The writer must decide whether he wishes to provide his poem with a prose introduction or interludes, and if so, what proportion of prose to verse is most suitable. He may conclude with a reprise, with songs in a different meter, with a combination of these, or with neither. Above all, he may make his poem as short or as long as he wishes. Unlike Chinese lyric forms, which are often strictly prescribed in length, the fu is open-ended, and the temptation, as we have seen in treatments of the famous-city theme, is to make one’s own poem just a little bit longer than any previous handling of the theme. A writer in the fu form must therefore know when to stop, as well as how to shape and balance the structural elements of his poem, if he is to achieve true artistic success.
Writers of the fu in Six Dynasties times, perhaps because they found so much freedom irksome, moved more and more in the direction of increased regularity and compactness of form. Lines of verse, which had often been of irregular length in the early fu, now fell invariably into fixed length patterns. As tone became a recognized element in Chinese prosody, precise tonal patterns were added to those of rhythm and syntax, until a new form, the lü-fu or tonally regulated fu, came into being in the T’ang. A reaction against so much nicety of form took place in the Sung, leading to the creation of another type of work, the wen-fu or “prose-fu,” which is so free in form and relaxed in diction that it is hardly distinguishable from ordinary prose.
The last poem in my selection dates from the sixth century A.D. As I have indicated above, the fu form, though it had probably seen its finest days, continued to evolve and foster works of importance for many centuries to follow. Something of the magnitude of the literature in the form may be suggested by a description of the Li-tai fu-hui or “Collected Fu from the Centuries,” a compilation of all extant fu from earliest times to the end of the Ming dynasty (1644). Completed in 1706, it contains around thirty-five hundred complete works, as well as fragments of others lost long ago, arranged in categories according to theme. It begins grandly with a “Fu on Heaven and Earth,” from which it can patently move only in the direction of anticlimax. A great many of the works included are quite brief—mere sketches of an object or a mood without any formal beginning or end—but whether they are portions of longer works or are intended to be complete as they stand, it is impossible to judge. Because so many fu were written by court poets on the occasion of state ceremonies or banquets or were required as part of the civil service examinations (mainly because they were easy to grade on technical grounds), they tend to be laudatory, even sycophantic in tone, and to deal with felicitous occurrences in the life of the reigning dynasty such as the appearance of auspicious omens, or other topics of a congratulatory nature. Less obviously public in nature, though often the product of court outings and entertainments, are the numberless poems on the subject of particular musical instruments or other artifacts, trees, plants, flowers, birds, beasts, fish, and insects, or those which are designed to evoke particular emotions or moods. Most of the titles, as one might expect from a poetic form so often associated with the haut monde, breathe an air of refinement and grandeur, but I am pleased to report that the collection also includes a “Fu on Rats,” a “Fu on Shoes,” a “Fu on Fu” (by the celebrated T’ang poet Po Chü-yi), and, my personal favorite among fu topics, a “Fu on Sword-swallowing and Fire-eating.”
It would of course be presumptuous to attempt to assess the value of such a voluminous body of literature on the basis of an acquaintance with a mere fraction of it. I would like, however, to review some of the criticisms that have customarily been leveled at the fu form and to suggest a few of the ways in which, it seems to me, it has contributed to the growth and enrichment of Chinese literature as a whole.
One of the charges most frequently made against the fu, particularly by modern, sociologically oriented critics, is that it is representative of one class in society only, that of the ruler and his ministers and courtiers. It is true that nearly all the fu were written by scholar-officials (in most periods of Chinese history the only men who had the learning needed to handle such a demanding form), and many of them treat themes associated with the life of the court or the glorification of the ruling house. This unquestionably makes for a certain monotony of subject and tone, as the writers themselves long ago recognized. We have seen how Chang Heng attempted to relieve this monotony by introducing scenes from the life of the common people into his cityscapes, and the same desire to broaden the scope and appeal of the fu form is apparent in the works of Sung writers such as Su Tung-p’o. The fact that the rhyme-prose pieces are largely the product of a single class or group in society may well make them less varied or interesting than other types of literature. But, unless one is prepared to argue that the works of one social class are by definition inferior to those of another, I hardly think it makes them less valuable as artistic creations.
A second and more cogent criticism is that the fu are excessively obscure and pedantic in language. Certainly many of the fu, particularly those of Six Dynasties times, abound in historical allusions, but so do other works of the period in prose or in other poetic forms. Many of the descriptive binomes are hard to pin down in meaning, many of the names in the vast catalogues of wildlife are difficult to identify. But one must remember that such vocabulary is often intended more to astound the reader than to convey to him a clear and comprehensible picture of what is going on. Language, in the fu, is being employed in a quite different way from that in which it is used, say, in a simple folk song. And, although the diction of the fu may seem tryingly difficult on first encounter, one finds as he reads more works in the form that, like any other genres, it has its clichés and stock phrases, and what earlier appeared recondite soon becomes commonplace. Yang Hsiung is supposed to have advised a scholar who wanted to study fu writing under him, “If you read a thousand fu, you will be good at writing them.”7 On the basis of personal experience I would venture to add, if you read a hundred fu, you will be good at reading them.
A third objection often voiced to the literature in the fu form is that it is wearisomely imitative and lacking in novelty. I know of no real rebuttal to such a charge. The later fu are indeed imitative of earlier works in the form, but so, for that matter, are later works in the shih or tz’u poetic forms. One can only note that the Chinese have customarily attached little value to novelty for its own sake, and that their literature, isolated from foreign influence during most of the long centuries of its development, had perforce to grow by feeding upon itself. If the English poetic tradition had begun in 1000 B.C. and continued unbroken to the present, as that of China has, one wonders whether it would have been any more successful in avoiding periods of arid imitation.
The works of genuine interest and importance produced in the fu form may be rather few—fewer, perhaps, than in other forms such as the shih. But the time and energy which poets have put into fu writing over the centuries were by no means a total waste, as some critics would have us believe. First of all, it is obvious that the Chinese derived great enjoyment from the rhyme-prose form. Some men wrote fu in hopes of attracting favorable notice from the rulers, others because at certain periods the civil service examination required them to. But many did so because they found it a pleasurable pastime, particularly when undertaken lightheartedly in the company of friends. The Chinese have always had a passion for occasional poetry, and countless convivial banquets and outings in the countryside were no doubt enhanced by bits of commemorative verse in fu form composed on the spot by the guests for their mutual amusement, even though most of the writings of this sort may have disappeared centuries ago along with their creators.
A great many of the fu, as I have mentioned, are devoted to descriptions of a single species of plant, tree, bird, or beast, or to a particular type of musical instrument or other artifact. They were often composed at social gatherings, when the object to be described was before the eyes of the group in the garden or hall of the host, and the writers presumably scrutinized it with care before attempting to capture it in verse. At the same time, these being cultured gentlemen, they would consider the associations the object might have with history or legend, what had been said about it by writers of the past, or what symbolism might attach to its form or name. The resulting poem, therefore, in most cases combined both a portrait of the actual object, its appearance and movements, and a recital of the historical, literary, and other associations it called to mind. Because the fu is not limited in length, the treatment could be as exhaustive and detailed as the author wished.
I need hardly point out what excellent discipline this provided for the training of poets. It forced them to examine objects closely and to note their peculiarities, to ponder what significance they might have for mankind, and to set forth the results in the highly structured form of rhymed verse. The poems which emerged from this process were sometimes of great beauty. Lu Chi’s Wen fu or “Fu on Literature,” to take a famous example, is not only a literary masterpiece in itself, but represents one of the earliest and most penetrating statements on Chinese literary theory. Others, being about “objects” of less universal interest, may be more limited in appeal. But whether a fu deals with the moon or the pine tree, the dragon or the lowly cricket, it obviously, aside from its intrinsic merits, is capable of serving as an invaluable source of inspiration for later writers who wish to incorporate these objects into their own creations. Because the fu writer has already explored the subject at such length, the writer of shih or tz’u in the centuries following is often able to select just those details and allusions that will evoke the object most succinctly.
The descriptive and narrative techniques developed in the fu form had a profound influence upon the growth of the early five-character shih, as a comparison of poems in the two forms by men of the second and third centuries A.D. such as Wang Ts’an and Ts’ao Chih will clearly show, assisting it to grow to maturity in a relatively short space of time. Not only are many of the same images and literary devices carried over from one form to the other, but the diction in the two is also often strikingly similar. Here, for example, is a poem in five-character shih form written by Wang Ts’an at about the same time as his fu, “Climbing the Tower,” which is presented on this page. The reader who compares the two works will see how closely they resemble each other in mood and imagery.
Tribes of Ching—that’s not my home;
how can I stay for long among them?
My two-hulled boat climbs the great river;
the sun at evening saddens my heart.
On mountain and ridge, a last ray of light,
slope and embankment in deepening gloom;
foxes and badgers hurry to their lairs,
flying birds go home to the woods they know.
Sharp echoes wake from the roaring torrents,
monkeys peer down from the cliffs and cry.
Strong winds flap my robe and sleeves,
white dew soaks the collar of my cloak.
I can’t sleep at night alone
but get up, put on a robe and play the lute;
strings and paulownia wood know how I feel;
for me they make a sorrowful sound.
On a journey that has no end,
dark thoughts are powerful and hard to bear!
Not only did the fu influence the content and diction of the shih; in a sense, the shih became what it did as a result of the existence of the fu. Because a verse form of unlimited length whose main characteristics were lush language and exhaustive treatment was already at hand, the shih was free to explore the opposite possibilities, concentrating upon brevity of form, simplicity of expression, and greater depth and suggestiveness. Also, because the fu had from early times been utilized for celebrations of the dynasty or other themes of a public nature, the shih did not have to be employed for such purposes but could be left for the treatment of more intimate and subjective themes. (The traditional fu, with its rather high-flown diction, can of course hardly be used for homey subjects without creating a mock-heroic effect, which is the point of works such as the “Fu on Shoes.”) This poetic division of labor, I might add, worked all to the advantage of the shih, which is one reason why the fu of T’ang and later times so often lack appeal—most of the real creative energy, as well as the interesting themes and ideas, are in these periods being channeled off into the shih.
As a final example of the type of contribution made by the fu to Chinese literature, I will quote a passage describing the Ch’in or horizontal lute, mentioned in the Wang Ts’an poem quoted above. Though I have not included a representative of this type of rhyme-prose in my selection, such works on musical instruments were very popular in early times and provide valuable information to the student of Chinese musicology. In such pieces, it is customary to begin with an evocation of the wild and beautiful mountain forest where the wood or bamboo from which the instrument is fashioned grows. These passages are among the earliest extended descriptions of nature to be found in Chinese poetry, and as such are of great importance in the later development of landscape poetry. This one is from a work entitled Ch’i-fa or “Seven Incitements” by Mei Sheng (d. 140 B.C.), a contemporary of Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju. Brief though it is, it embraces all the principal motifs that, in greatly expanded form, were treated in later works on the subject, and stands as a kind of miniature masterpiece of early rhyme-prose style. The text is found in Wen hsüan 34.
The paulownia of Lung-men soars a hundred feet before it puts out branches, its center spiraling up amid a tangle of dark foliage, its roots sprawling outward this way and that. Above it stand the thousand-yard peaks; below, it peers into a hundred-fathom hollow, while swift torrents and lashing waves eddy and tug about it. Its roots are half dead, half alive; in winter it is buffeted by sharp winds, settling frost, the driven snow; in summer the sharp crack of thunder and lightning assault it. At dawn yellowbirds and pies are found singing there; at dusk the mateless hen, the lost bird roost there for the night. The lonely snow goose at daybreak calls from the top of it; partridges, sadly crying, flutter beneath its boughs.
Then, when autumn lies behind and steps have turned toward winter, the Lutemaker is sent to fell and whittle it, to fashion a lute, with silk of wild cocoons to make its strings. The buckle of the orphan child is worked for inlay; the ear stones of a widow mother of nine serve as studs.8 The Teacher T’ang is summoned to display his mastery of the instrument, while Po Ya composes a song for it:
Ears of wheat ripening,
The pheasants at morning fly,
Heading for empty valleys,
Forsaking the withered pagoda tree.
Perched on precipitous cliffs,
They look down on the winding stream.
Flying birds, when they hear its sound, fold their wings and cannot depart; savage beasts, hearing it, droop their ears and go no further. Even crawling insects, crickets and ants, gape open-jawed at the tone, unable to advance, for these are the saddest notes in all the world.
NOTES
1. I set aside the remarks attributed to him in Hsi-ching tsa-chi 2, since that text is of such doubtful date and provenance.
2. “Biography of Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju,” Records of the Grand Historian of China, II, 336.
3. Ibid., p. 321.
4. See the collected fragments of the Hsin lun of Huan T’an, Ch’üan Hou Han wen 14/6a in Yen K’o-chün, Ch’üan Shang-ku San-tai Ch’in Han San-kuo Liu-Ch’ao wen.
5. Fa yen 2.
6. Yü-lü and Shen-shu were brothers who lived on Mount Tu-shuo and punished demons by binding them with rushes and feeding them to the tigers. Pictures of the brothers were often pasted on doorways for protection.
7. Hsin lun fragments, Ch’üan Hou Han wen 15/5a.
8. So that the lute will take on the melancholy tone of the orphan and the widow.