9 Heptasyllabic Regulated Verse (Qiyan Lüshi)
Heptasyllabic regulated verse (qiyan lüshi, or qilü) came into being along with pentasyllabic regulated verse during the Early Tang but remained a relatively marginal form through much of its early history. One of the key figures in expanding the range and importance of the form was Du Fu (712–770), who did more than anyone else to establish it on an equal footing with its pentasyllabic counterpart. This chapter focuses on a particular line of development linking Du Fu’s heptasyllabic regulated verse with the “hermetic” mode in Late Tang writers such as Li Shangyin (813–858), in which the form’s potential for complexity of syntax and compression of image is fully realized. Du Fu’s engaging, intimate, and often paradoxically informal writing in this technically demanding mode was influential on poets from the Late Tang on, while the intensity and stunning structural complexity of the work of his last years remained an unsurpassed standard for the qilü. Li Shangyin’s compressed, allusive, and ambiguous qilü style was influential in the early Song dynasty—the so-called Xikun style (Xikun ti) based on this vein in Li Shangyin became, for a time, the dominant poetic fashion at the early Northern Song court. While this style of shi poetry was subsequently criticized, and to a great extent abandoned in favor of other models, the enigmatic and elusive poetic atmospheres created by Li Shangyin retained a significant influence, particularly in the genre of the song lyric, or ci.
THE LEGACY OF DU FU
Du Fu was undoubtedly the most adventurous writer of heptasyllabic regulated verse of his age. The form was one in which he seems to have been drawn to challenge the boundaries of poetic craft. He composed, for example, a number of heptasyllabic verses that follow the general eight-line expositional structure of regulated verse but that also include deliberate violations of the regulated tonal patterns or the customary syntactic groupings within the line, intended to create the “craggy” or “rough-hewn” feel of “ancient-style” poetry (guti shi). Later critics formulated the category “skewed regulated verse” (ao lü), largely to accommodate this sort of formal experimentation by Du Fu. The poems discussed here are all prosodically strict regulated verses, but we can see in these works as well Du Fu’s recurrent preoccupation with the tension between technical polish and deliberate awkwardness.
Returning from court, day after day I pawn my spring robes;
2 each day by the lakeside I drink my limit, and only then go home.
Wine debts, everywhere I go, are common;
4 life spans reaching seventy, from ancient times, are few.
A flower-weaving butterfly, deep within, appears;
6 a water-dabbling dragonfly, slow and placid, flies.
Pass word to these fine scenes, to linger and roam together:
8 “Let’s enjoy each other for a short while, and not part company.”
[QTS 7:225.2410]
[Tonal pattern Ia, see p. 172]
In “The Qu River, No. 2” we recognize tonal pattern Ia (chap. 8)—that is, a slight modification of type I to allow for a rhyming first line (as indicated, in the table, by the hollow triangular rhyme marker △).1 Deviation from the expected tonal category (as indicated by X) is always permissible in the first syllable in the heptasyllabic regulated line, and is usually permissible in the third syllable (that is, the position corresponding to the first syllable of the pentasyllabic line).2 Thus the only deviations from the expected category that need comment are those appearing in the fifth and sixth syllables of line 7. The level tone in the sixth syllable is felt to “correct” the preceding oblique tone. This particular modification of the fifth and sixth syllables of the type III line is quite common, particularly in a poem’s penultimate line.
“The Qu River” is one of Du Fu’s earlier efforts in the form (at least among those that have come down to us), dating from his brief stint as a court official in 758. Yet already we glimpse the juxtaposition of dazzling technical craft with the elusive ironies of the poet’s self-depiction that continued and intensified in his later work. The Qujiang (winding river) was in fact a lake, surrounded by a park, at the southeastern corner of the Tang capital Chang’an; it was a favorite spot for outings among the capital elite. The poet presents himself in an attitude of studied casualness, and the tone oscillates between delighted absorption in the natural beauties of the season and wry commentary on the poet’s own state of unkempt dissipation.
Tonal Pattern of “The Qu River”
Lines 3 and 4 juxtapose a deflating avowal of the poet’s condition (debt) and its cause (drinking) with a sort of banqueter’s philosophizing on life’s impermanence. The interest of the couplet stems in part from the way in which its informal tone belies its virtuosity. The parallel relations established between the two lines—such as that between wine debts and human life (both noun phrases, formed of attributive plus class noun), which seems to posit the open bar tab as a universal condition of existence—display a whimsical brilliance. The parallel between xun chang (ordinary, -ily) and qi shi (seventy), furthermore, depends on a sort of pun on the alternative sense of xun and chang as measures of length; it is as quantities that they form a suitable parallel for the number seventy. This device of treating terms as parallel via wordplay on secondary meanings is a bravura technical effect that later critics called borrowed parallelism (jiedui).
The third couplet, though, is clearly the poem’s center of gravity. Here we see both vividly detailed observation and a masterful display of technique—note, for example, the way our sense in these lines of sudden, fleeting revelation is reinforced by the striking syntactic device of delaying the verb to the very last position in the line. In fact, for some later critics, the delicate artfulness of this couplet seemed almost symptomatic of the sort of display of small-scale craft for which they would criticize Late Tang and Song poetry.3
As we see in the following poem, this seeming tension between technique and naturalness is a persistent concern, for both Du Fu and his readers:
On the River, I Came upon Waters Surging Like the Ocean: For Now, I Give This Short Account
I’m an eccentric sort of person, captivated by fine lines;
2 until my language is startling, I’d sooner die than give up.
As I pass into old age, I throw myself into poems in a really slapdash way—
4 when spring arrives, the flowers and birds ought not to deeply worry.
I’ve newly added a pier by the water, to serve me as I dangle my fishing line;
6 remaining from before, my moored raft, to take the place of a boat to ride in.
How can I find an old hand with thoughts like Tao Qian or Xie Lingyun,
8 to have him compose and take excursions with me?
[QTS 7:226.2443]
[Tonal pattern I, see p. 171]
The first couplet of this poem is often cited as perhaps Du Fu’s most forthright statement of his obsessiveness as a verbal craftsman. The poem’s reticences and ambiguities, however, are equally important. First of these concerns is the relation of the poem to its title. Typically, the title of an occasional poem simply states the occasion: the poem is understood as the poet’s response to something in the world; the title reports what that something was. Clearly, such a straightforward formula cannot be applied here. The something that initially happened—Du Fu’s vision of the river waters as vast and powerful like the ocean—is never treated directly (although we may read the third couplet as alluding to it obliquely). The train of thought linking the title and the poem would seem to go something like this: “The grandeur, vastness, and power of that scene was too great for my meager ability to do justice to it. Therefore, in place of the ‘proper’ poem on that topic that I was unable to write, I substitute these lines, as a comment on this breakdown of my ability as a poet.” Read in this way, then, this is a poem about the failure to write a poem, and the final couplet a gently self-mocking wish for a more qualified substitute poet to call on whenever the demands of a poetic occasion are too much for Du Fu to handle.
This approach allows us to make general sense of the poem but is far from resolving the ambiguities of its tone. As a submerged counterpoint to that selfdeprecatory admission of failure, we can hear another set of possibilities: “I live for, and in, poetry. My faculty of poetic creation is as natural and powerful as the waters of a river. Whether or not my poem describes the flooding river waters, each remains the other’s perfect analogue. To find my true peers, one would have to look to the great poets of past centuries.” These tonal ambiguities are at their height in the poem’s middle, parallel couplets. The third couplet’s account of the poet’s “equipment” for enjoying the river scenery (his pier and his raft) emphasizes its slapdash, make-do aspect. Yet might it be that just such improvised, homemade work best suits the river; that the pavilions and excursion boats of more high-toned outings are, in comparison, artificial and inauthentic? In the second couplet, the poet’s wry self-mockery is again, paradoxically, voiced in language of startling technical brilliance. The opposition of lao qu versus chun lai is another instance of borrowed parallelism: while laoqu and chunlai work perfectly as parallels in the noun–verb senses “old age–go/springtime–come,” in Du Fu’s poem only the second pair, chun lai, can actually be construed as noun–verb; the first line of the couplet requires that we take lao verbally as “grow old” and qu as a verbal complement, “-away.” While parallel couplets generally tend to create a sense of stasis and balance, this stroke of verbal invention gives this couplet a dynamic asymmetry and an effect of informal spontaneity. In fact, the poem as a whole is remarkable for the way in which, even while rigorously observing the symmetries and formal constraints of the regulated verse form, it conveys the immediacy of rambling speech.
The word man (in line 3) is a key term here. In its basic sense, it refers to the “overflow” of a liquid. In its derivative adverbial uses, it describes things that happen in a manner that is out of control, excessive, sloppy, impulsive, or not thought out. Thus Du Fu jokingly reassures the flowers and birds (which might have their secret essence revealed, or be definitively “captured,” by a more impressive poetic talent) that they need not worry—this particular old man has no pretensions to being a great poet, so they can rest easy. Yet even as we register this surface meaning, it is impossible not to hear an alternative suggestion: this effortless and slapdash manner is a sign not of a lack of power but of a fully achieved power; the flowers and birds have no more need to fear this power than they fear any other power of nature. The man (slapdash) manner of his poetry is a counterpart to the “overflowing” power of the river’s surging waters. Characteristically, Du Fu’s deepest reflections on poetry here are inseparable from the ironies of his self-depiction.
The set of eight heptasyllabic regulated verses entitled “Qiu xing” (Autumn Meditations) represents a point of culmination, for both the qilü form and these tensions within Du Fu’s poetry between the image of the powerful creator and that of the quirky and ineffectual old man. Written in 766, within four years of the end of his life, they show us the poet as he realizes that his dreams of making a mark in public life are not to be fulfilled. The “Autumn Meditations” reflect on the end of a year, of a life, and of an age—and the idea of autumn becomes a hall of mirrors within which all those endings are jumbled and superimposed. Following is the final poem of the series:
Kunwu park and Yusu lodge are out there in the remote distances;
2 the shadow of Purple Tower peak enters Meipi lake.
Fragrant rice: leftovers from pecking, parrots’ grains;
4 emerald wutong trees: till old age perched, phoenixes’ branches.
Lovely ones gathered kingfisher feathers to give as springtime gifts;
6 transcendent companions shared a boat, moving off again toward evening.
My many-colored writing brush once strove with the climate;
8 now my white head, chanting and gazing, in despondency droops.
[QTS 7:230.2510]
[Tonal pattern I, see p. 171]
Kunwu Park, Yusu Lodge, Purple Tower Peak, and Lake Meipi were excursion sites nestled in the Zhongnan mountain range, south of Chang’an. Du Fu had frequented this area on outings during stints at the capital early in his career and had composed occasional poems on those visits. Line 2 of this poem seems to be a deliberate echo of a striking image from one of these earlier poems, “Song of Lake Meipi” (Meipi xing), in which the poet, on a boating excursion on the lake as evening falls, sees the black masses of the surrounding mountains inverted on the water’s surface.
Thus as the Du Fu of the “Autumn Meditations,” in his southern exile at Kuizhou on the banks of the Yangtze River, gazes out into the imagined distance far into the north to the capital, he gazes back as well into his own past as a minister of the empire and as a poet. This personal retrospective is, in turn, interwoven with a more general meditation on the fortunes of the Tang, which seemed already to Du Fu—as for many writers throughout the remaining century and a half or so of the dynasty—to have permanently lost something magical with the fall of the capital and the flight of Xuanzong (r. 712–756) in 756. Moreover, particularly in the final poems of “Autumn Meditations,” this retrospective extends still further to include the far remoter Han dynasty past. The poem immediately preceding this one in the cycle is largely a meditation on fragmentary remnants of Han grandeur, and we are meant to register that the very names “Kunwu park” and “Yusu lodge” are themselves relics of the grand Shanglin Park, developed under the auspices of Emperor Wu of the Han (Yusu means “imperial lodging place,” so-called because Emperor Wu stayed there on his excursions) and immortalized by the fu (rhapsody) writers of that age.4 All these frames of reference are telescoped together, creating extreme compression, multiplicity, and fragmentation of meaning.
The most striking case of such compression in this poem occurs in the second couplet. Here parallelism becomes a formal container that suggests a completeness and stability that the words themselves never quite yield. As we move through each line, we are repeatedly thrown back and forced to start over in our effort to resolve the syntax. Nouns are followed by verbs but cannot be the subjects of those verbs—rice does not “peck,” and wutong trees do not “perch”—and these verbs are immediately further skewed by the addition of the odd verbal complements “leftover” and “old,” and so on through the line. Parallelism by its nature allows for more syntactic flexibility than would be possible in linear composition, as the stability of the “vertical” relations between lines within the couplet allows the “horizontal” relations of line syntax to be correspondingly relaxed. But the degree of syntactic disruption in this couplet remains extraordinary. We might compare the much milder effect of the third couplet in “The Qu River”: “A flower-weaving butterfly, deep within, appears; / a water-dabbling dragonfly, slow and placid, flies.” As we saw, these lines involve a kind of “loading” in which the somewhat complex relations of attributive clause, noun, and adverb await a release that is delayed to the very end of the line. The far denser syntactic loading in the “Autumn Meditations” couplet, by contrast, leads not to a clear moment of resolution, but to an indefinite suspension. We finally have to construe the syntax of the third through sixth syllables of these lines as attributive clauses with inverted subjects, together modifying the final-position nouns “grain” and “branch.” But the exact relation between these nouns and the “fragrant rice” and “emerald wutong tree” that open the lines could be predication, apposition, or contrast or a range of other possibilities. All that seems certain of the relation is that a grain is a fragment of rice, and a branch is a fragment of a tree. Thus all our efforts to resolve the line’s fragmented syntax leave us with fragments. In this cycle, Du Fu meditates on the material and literary remnants of personal and cultural history, saddened by the failure of those fragments to cohere, to recapture a lost wholeness. In couplets like this, we see the poet creating a verbal texture that mirrors that struggle in the mind.
The poem’s close alludes to a story told of the Southern Dynasties poet Jiang Yan (444–505): Jiang Yan meets the Jin dynasty writer Guo Pu (276–324) in a dream; Guo Pu asks him to return the multicolored writing brush that Guo Pu had lent him long before. On waking, Jiang Yan finds that his literary talent has left him. By now, it should not be entirely surprising that even as Du Fu creates radically new possibilities for poetic language, he presents himself as a poet whose talent has failed him, a bitter old man by the riverside.
AMBIGUITY AND FRAGMENTATION IN LATE TANG STYLE
One of the pivotal figures in creating a distinctively Late Tang poetic landscape is Li He (791–817). Li He came to be viewed as the very embodiment of many characteristic Late Tang traits: an obsessive, even pathological, fixation on craft; an aesthetic sensibility centered on the fragmentary line or image; and more generally the idea of poetry as difficult, for both the poet and the reader. Li He wrote very little in the regulated forms, but he was a key influence on several important writers who did, so our discussion of Late Tang style will begin with the following example from Li He, an unregulated heptasyllabic song:
Old hare and cold toad weep sky’s sheen;
2 a cloud-enfurled tower half opens: on the walls slants whiteness.
The jade wheel presses dew: wet balls of light;
4 simurgh bells and pendants meet on cassia-scented lanes.
Yellow dust, clear water, beneath the Immortal Mountains,
6 change in turn, a thousand years like a horse that gallops by.
Gaze far off on the middle continent, those nine spots of smoke:
8 a single stream of ocean water poured into a cup.
[QTS 12:390.4396]
One perceptive critic has noted that in “Dreaming Heaven” we cannot tell whether the dream is in heaven or heaven in the dream.5 The translation may seem to leave many of the relations between images undetermined, but in fact in many instances it involves a narrowing down of the imaginative possibilities that remain open in the original. In line 2, for example, we do not know whether the cloud tower is a tower veiled wholly or partly in clouds (which would be the normal terrestrial way of construing the phrase), or a tower built on, in, or out of clouds (all of which, for all we know, might well be normal heavenly ways of construing it). “Slanting” is often used in descriptive poetry of oblique rays of light, but in this poem the marked absence of any clear sense of up or down or level makes it anyone’s guess whether it is the light or the wall that “slants.” “Jade wheel” is a familiar kenning for the moon, but the specificity and concreteness of the idea of a jade wheel pressing dew makes it impossible to resolve the image into any single recognizably human perspective on the moon. Here and elsewhere in Li He, we are dealing with a poetic language that creates a remarkably vivid and immediate experience—but in the end leaves us unable to pin down what it is an experience of. For example, synecdoche—the designation of a whole by one of its parts—is a familiar device by which traditional descriptive poetry achieves economy and vividness of expression. In Li He, however, synecdoche is commonly used to defamiliarize the familiar, or to hint cryptically at modes of perception that are beyond ordinary human bounds. When “simurgh bells” (conventionally an ornament found on carriages) and “pendants” meet in the “cassia-scented lanes” (the cassia being the tree traditionally supposed to grow on the moon), we may be dealing with a meeting of carriage riders and pendant wearers, but the predominant impression we retain is of an otherworldly strangeness. Any whole of which these fragmented images might be part remains tantalizingly beyond our grasp.
Li Shangyin (813–858), perhaps the most important Late Tang poet, was deeply influenced by Li He—in fact, the only model of comparable importance for his work was Du Fu. We see something of this blend of influences in “Milky Way: Syrinx-Playing”:
Despondent gazing at the Milky Way: a jade syrinx plays;
2 the tower is cold, the courtyard chill, all the way to daybreak.
Beneath layered quilts, in far-off dream, another year breaks off;
4 on a lonely tree, a wandering bird last night cried out in fear.
By the moonlit gazebo a familiar scent, after rain, wafts out;
6 in the windblown curtain a dwindling candle, through the frost, burns clearly.
No need to think wild thoughts of ascending from Mount Gou;
8 the zither of the Xiang and the panpipe of Qin have feeling all their own.
[QTS 16:540.6185]
[Tonal pattern IIa, see p. 172]
Several of Li Shangyin’s most distinctive heptasyllabic regulated verses are left untitled. Other poems, like this one, have enigmatic titles drawn from phrases in the poem’s opening lines. As we have seen, the customary function of the title in classical Chinese poetry is to state the poem’s occasion—or at the very least, as in the case of yuefu poetry, to give clear generic signals as to how to go about reading the poem. To leave a poem untitled, or to give it an enigmatic title, is therefore a pointed gesture. Many critics of Li Shangyin, taking this gesture as a challenge to the reader to ferret out some actual context of composition that the poet withheld, have read such poems as veiled expressions of erotic or political meanings that were too scandalous to be stated more openly. For our purposes, however, it would seem more promising to look at these untitled or ambiguously titled poems in a different way: by suspending the usual relation between title and poem, Li Shangyin has created a form in which he can explore disorienting poetic textures and images that deliberately allow for a multiplicity of readings. This poem, for example, might be (and has been) read as a yongwu poem on the syrinx, as an occasional poem upon hearing syrinx-playing (Li He had written several fantastic poems on listening to music that might have served as models), as a poem on roaming transcendents, or as a poem about, or in the voice of, a lover longing for an absent beloved.
If the general atmosphere of chilly, nighttime mysteriousness recalls Li Shangyin’s debt to Li He, the middle couplets show a compression and multivalence that recall late Du Fu. Line 3 involves the shattering of a dream—but were those “other years” something dreamed of, is a dream once dreamed in other years now recalled, or do those “other years” themselves appear now like a broken dream? While the idea of a causal link between the sound of the bird’s cry and the waking is there if we choose to take it up, what the lines convey more immediately is the awakening mind’s state of disorientation. The bird’s cry, in turn, can be either a literal birdcall or a figure for the sound of the syrinx. The sense of temporal disorientation in particular is developed in the following couplet, where the terms “familiar” and “dwindling” both point to unspecified spans of past time, the first on the scale of a life, and the second on the scale of one night (and the dream that unfolded as the candle was burning down). Beneath the surface of these images lies that commonplace dear to Late Tang storytellers and poets alike: life is like a dream.
The final couplet involves a flurry of allusions to traditions about immortals. The penultimate line refers to Prince Jin (also known as Prince Qiao), a Daoist transcendent and master syrinx player who rode into heaven on a white crane on the seventh day of the seventh month from Mount Gou. In the final line, the phrase “zither of the Xiang” refers to the consorts of the legendary sage-king Shun, E Huang and Nü Ying, who became goddesses of the Xiang River—a passage in the Chuci poem “Yuan you” (Far Roaming) portrays a spirit of the Xiang River playing the zither. The phrase “panpipe of Qin” refers to the tale of Xiao Shi, who summoned a phoenix with his panpipe and, together with his betrothed, the princess Nong Yu, rode into heaven. This set of allusions to immortal lovers also calls to the association of the Milky Way with the Oxherd and Weaver Girl, celestial lovers (and constellations) separated by the “river” of the Milky Way and allowed to cross and meet for one night each year, on the seventh day of the seventh month. Thus the final couplet seems a call to choose companionship over a solitary quest for transcendence—although the context in which this call is voiced remains impossible to pin down.
Another type of poem in which Li Shangyin wrote quite innovative regulated verse was the historical meditation, of which “Sui Palace” is one of the most renowned examples:
Purple Spring palace halls lay locked in mist and haze;
2 he wanted to take the “ruined city” as a home of emperors.
The jade seal: if not because it returned to the sun’s corner,
4 brocade sails: they would have arrived at heaven’s bounds.
To this day, the rotting grass is without fireflies’ flash;
6 through all time, the drooping willows have sundown crows.
Beneath the earth, if he should meet the Latter Lord of Chen,
8 would it be fitting to ask again to hear “Flowers in the Rear Courtyard”?
[QTS 16:539.6161; also translated and discussed under C18.1]
[Tonal pattern Ia, see p. 172]
Ninth-century poetry on historical themes often shows affinities in both choice and handling of its material with works in short narrative fiction (the genre later referred to as chuanqi) from the same period. Whereas historical poetry of earlier eras tends to didacticism, elegy, or veiled allegory on contemporary events, poets in this period often used historical themes as vehicles for daring flights of fancy, or to delight in logical paradoxes of historical causation.6 This poem meditates on traces of the Sui dynasty, the regime that, in 589, reunified China after the long period of division known as the Southern and Northern Dynasties (420–589), only to be quickly supplanted, in turn, by the Tang in 618. The central figure of this poem is the Sui emperor Yang, who spent huge sums on massive public-works projects and indulged in frequent excursions through the newly conquered south. He ordered the construction of elaborate palace compounds in the southern city of Guangling (present-day Yangzhou), to serve as a temporary capital during these southern sojourns; a newly constructed system of canals linked the Sui’s northern and southern capitals.
Here, the place-names “Purple Spring palace” and “ruined city” are fraught with irony. The Southern Dynasties poet Bao Zhao (414–466) had written “Wu cheng fu” (Fu on the Ruined City) on the history of Guangling. This piece was commonly read as a veiled commentary on a Southern Dynasties prince who had begun an ill-fated rebellion in the Guangling area during Bao Zhao’s time. Thus to say that Emperor Yang wanted to “take the ‘ruined city’ as a home of emperors” amounts to an implicit criticism of his failure to learn from history. A still more recondite layer of ironies in these opening lines relates to the given names of Emperor Yang and the Tang founder who displaced him. Purple Spring was the name of a river in the Chang’an area, so “Purple Spring palace” refers to the Sui palaces at Chang’an, which Emperor Yang left behind, neglected and shrouded in mist, on his southern excursions. During the Sui, the place-name Purple Spring would have been written Ziyuan. But Li Shangyin, writing more than two hundred years later as a Tang subject, was required to observe the taboo on the name of the Tang founder, Li Yuan (r. 618–626), and call it, by a conventional substitution of synonyms, Ziquan. The city referred to indirectly here by means of the reference to Bao Zhao’s fu would have been properly called by its ancient name of Guangling during Li Shangyin’s time, but during the Sui it had been renamed Jiangdu (Metropolis on the Yangtze) to avoid violating the taboo on Emperor Yang’s given name, Guang. Through such arcane wordplay, Li Shangyin conveys a vision of history as a disorienting space of ironies and unrealized possibilities.
The view of history as a chain of cryptic ironies is carried to an extreme pitch in the second couplet. The “jade seal” is the symbol of imperial office, while the “brocade sails” refer to one of numerous fantastic narratives about Emperor Yang’s southern excursions, which describes brocade-sailed boats following one after the other for miles along the newly opened waterways. The couplet initially seems as dense as anything in “Autumn Meditations” and yields its meaning only when we recognize the extreme instance of borrowed parallelism around which it is constructed. In order to understand the couplet, we need to take ri jiao as the term from the art of physiognomy for hornlike protuberances on the forehead indicating a person destined to become emperor—that is, Li Yuan. Thus the couplet yields the sense, “If the seal of office had not been destined for Li Yuan, those chains of boats would have continued forever, to the very ends of the earth.” The riddling and eerily synecdochic quality of the lines presents the workings of history as something just as mysterious as the celestial realm depicted by Li He.
The poem’s second half alludes to further anecdotal traditions about the latter years of the Sui. Emperor Yang is supposed to have imposed a levy of fireflies on the populace, solely for the sake of releasing them to provide light during a nighttime excursion (medieval science held that fireflies were generated from rotting grass). Willow trees were also reportedly levied, to be planted along the banks of the extensive canal system that was to become, for later ages, the Sui’s most lasting monument. The surname of the Sui imperial house, Yang, was itself also the name of a kind of willow. The final couplet refers to an episode in an apocryphal tale about Emperor Yang in which he visits the former emperor of the last of the Southern Dynasties, the Chen. In the story, Emperor Yang requests to hear the former emperor’s favorite consort sing “Flowers in the Rear Courtyard”—a song that had become associated with the extravagance of the former emperor and, in retrospect, with the Chen’s downfall. Li Shangyin suggests that in the afterworld Emperor Yang, having himself succumbed to a similar fate, might be less quick to mock a defunct emperor.
The mode of poetic writing with which Li Shangyin was to be most closely associated was his distinctive hermetic brand of the poetry of romance:
Rustling, whistling, the east wind and the fine rain come;
2 beyond the lotus pool there is faint thunder.
Gold toad gnaws the lock: burning incense, it enters;
4 jade tiger pulls silk cord: drawing well water, it turns.
Miss Jia peers in at the curtain: Secretary Han is young;
6 Empress Fu leaves behind a headrest: the prince of Wei is gifted.
Don’t let your springtime heart vie with the flowers in blooming:
8 an inch of love longing, an inch of ash.
[QTS 16:539.6162–6163]
[Tonal pattern IIa, see p. 172]
The opening images of the onset of a rainstorm are fresh and vivid, and at the same time erudite: they echo atmospheric passages from the “Jiu ge” (Nine Songs) in the Chuci, particularly “Shan gui” (Mountain Spirit), depicting a thwarted tryst between a goddess and her mortal lover. The suggestion of a lovers’ tryst, whether actual or imagined, successful or frustrated, is continued in the sound image of line 2, since the rumble of thunder, in the poetry of romance, is a stock metaphor for the sound of the lover’s carriage wheels. But in this poem, while this stock image suggests a possible range of associations, we are never given quite enough context to allow us to determine a definite frame of reference. Thus the “faint thunder” here may be actual thunder or the rumbling carriage wheels of the lover, approaching or receding, in the distance. Li Shangyin seems to delight in creating ambiguous poetic atmospheres such as this one, in which we hear a sound, muffled by an indefinite distance, that might be either.
The second couplet shows us this evocative and atmospheric style at its best. The toad would seem to be part of a metal ornament on a lock, and the tiger a figuration on a well pulley. These zoomorphic ornaments may be read as a scene setting of the interior space in which the lover waits, and they may also suggest enigmatic analogies with the tryst. Although the lock is secure, the incense smoke seeps through; although the well is deep, the bucket returns to the surface, bearing water from the depths. More important, again, than reaching a definitive solution is to register the quality of mystery and indeterminacy created in this couplet, where we can see both the fragmentation and the compression of late Du Fu and the brand of synecdochic fantasy pioneered by Li He.
The third couplet hinges on allusions to legends of illicit loves. Line 5 continues the veiled analogy in line 3 between incense smoke, in its ability to penetrate otherwise impermeable barriers, and erotic mingling: Han Shou was a young and handsome clerk in the employ of the Jin dynasty official Jia Chong; Jia Chong’s daughter glimpsed Han Shou through a window and began an affair with him; the lovers were found out when Jia Chong, while meeting with Han, detected the scent of a rare incense from a private Jia family stock. The “headrest” of line 6 is involved in a more complex web of textual references, in which it may stand for either the frustration or the consummation of clandestine desire. The Wei dynasty prince and renowned poet Cao Zhi (192–232) wrote “Luo shen fu” (Fu on the Luo River Goddess), a fu that became one of the most renowned literary depictions of romance between a goddess and a human lover. Later tradition linked this poem with an apocryphal story of star-crossed love between Cao Zhi and Empress Zhen, wife of Cao Zhi’s elder brother, Cao Pi (187–226), Emperor Wen of the Wei dynasty. Cao Zhi, the story has it, had unsuccessfully sought the hand of the future Empress Zhen before her betrothal to Cao Pi. Years later—after Empress Zhen had been murdered through the machinations of a rival empress—Cao Zhi made an appearance at Cao Pi’s court, and Cao Pi happened to show him an ornately inlaid headrest that had belonged to the late empress. Cao Zhi burst into tears on seeing this object, and Cao Pi, divining the reason, gave him the headrest as a memento. On his journey away from the capital back to his own fiefdom, Cao Zhi paused by the Luo River, musing on Empress Zhen. Her spirit then appeared to him, identified the headrest as part of her dowry, and announced that she was transferring that dowry, and herself, from her former husband to Cao Zhi; their love was at last consummated. Cao Zhi then composed “Gan Zhen fu” (Fu in Response to Zhen’s Epiphany). Only afterward, the story goes, was the title altered by Cao Pi’s heir to “Fu on the Luo River Goddess,” to avoid scandal.
Such elaborate echoes of narrative prose texts remind us again of the close interrelations between the fantasies of storytellers and of poets in this period. Like the elusive and fragmented images, however, the references are used in this poem in such a way as to open up spaces of association while preventing us from being able to settle on a definite version of just what story the poem itself is telling. The observation about passion with which the poem closes could be applied as well to the texture of Li Shangyin’s language in this poem: cryptic clues create a tantalizing illusion of an alluring scent and suggest the nearness of a burning heat. When we attempt to gain a firm hold on just where and what it is, it proves as fragile and insubstantial as ash.
The brocade zither without reason has fifty strings;
2 each string has its bridge; one longs for the flowering years.
Master Zhuang, in dawn dream, is lost in a butterfly;
4 Emperor Wang’s springtime heart is entrusted to the cuckoo.
On the gray sea, the moon shines bright, and the pearl has tears;
6 At Indigo Field, the sun is warm, and jade gives off smoke.
This feeling, one can wait for it to become a recollection;
8 only at the time it was already bewildering.
[QTS 16:539.6144]
[Tonal pattern IIa, see p. 172]
“Brocade Zither” is almost certainly Li Shangyin’s best-known poem, and it is the poem with which many early editions of his works opened. Depending on how we look at it, it is either paradoxical or perfectly fitting that it is also surely the one poem in his collection whose precise meaning has been the subject of the greatest controversy. Here we lack even the sort of hint about the poem’s mode that we are given in the untitled poem just discussed. Like the poem “Milky Way: Syrinx-Playing,” “Brocade Zither” has been read as a yongwu poem on a musical instrument, as a lament for the poet’s wife, as a veiled comment on an illicit affair, and as a complaint about a patron’s neglect. Any reading offered here will necessarily be hypothetical, one possibility among many. I follow the lead of those traditional readers who have read the poem as introducing Li Shangyin’s collected poetry and thus more generally as a poem about the poetic art.
Line 1 alludes to an etiological myth (that is, a story purporting to explain the origins of an object or institution) about the zither. In the story, White-Silk Maiden played on a fifty-string zither for the mythic sage-ruler Fuxi, and the sound was unbearably mournful. To find relief from this sound, Fuxi broke the zither in half, creating the latter-day twenty-five-string zither. The fifty strings thus suggest a kind of expressive power and complexity that overwhelm the listener’s ability to bear; here, as each zither string is supported by its bridge, each element in that overwhelming mass of sound stirs corresponding tones in memory.
The middle couplets create networks of association within which these correspondences are free to resonate. The images center on mysteries of transformation, and of occult sympathy, that span the gap between human experience and the creatures and objects of the natural world. Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly—so vividly that, on waking, he could no longer feel sure whether he was really Zhuangzi or a butterfly. Emperor Wang, legendary ruler of Shu, sent his minister Bie Ling to work on irrigation and flood control, and in Bie Ling’s absence had an adulterous affair with Bie Ling’s wife. On Bie Ling’s return, Emperor Wang was overcome with shame. He departed, abdicating his throne to his minister, and was transformed into a cuckoo. This bird was then forever linked in memory with Emperor Wang, whose given name, Du Yu, became an alternative name for the species. The verb tuo (entrust) is also used to describe the use of a figure of speech, so that when we use the image of a cuckoo as a metaphor to express feelings of sadness or regret like those of the legendary Du Yu, we also “entrust the spring heart of Emperor Wang to the cuckoo.” The third couplet alludes to still further myths of sympathy and transformation: line 5 combines the legend that pearls wax and wane in phase with the moon with the legend of ocean-dwelling mermaids (or shark people [jiao ren]) who weep pearl tears. Line 6 draws on a range of possible textual echoes: Lantian (literally, Indigo Fields) was in fact the name of a place renowned for its jade. The story of a hero named Chang Hong tells how, after he was unjustly killed, his blood turned to jade. The tale of a girl named Purple Jade tells how she returned as a spirit after her death to clear the name of her would-be lover, Han Zhong, of a charge of tomb robbery. Moved by Han Zhong’s earnest grief, she appeared to him in spirit and gave him a pearl from her grave hoard. When her mother rushed forward to embrace her, she dissolved like smoke. Another text often cited as a possible point of reference is the comment by Dai Shulun (732–789) that the scenes of poetry are like the mist that rises from the fine jade of Lantian in the warmth of the sun; they can be gazed at from afar but cannot be placed immediately before the eyes.
Li Shangyin seems to admit here that he himself has a difficulty similar to that we face as his readers: while the compression of his poetic language leads us to infer a latent intensity of emotion, that same compression obliterates the particularity of reference, and in the end the exact source and nature of this feeling eludes any attempt—by poet or reader—to pin it down once and for all. The problem of indeterminacy of poetic meaning, in this view, is ultimately a counterpart of the indeterminacy of feeling and memory: the heart, like the poem, is a zither with too many strings. Late Tang writers were indeed drawn to the poetic fragment; what we can see more clearly now is the way they seem haunted as well with a sense of the fragmentation of experience itself.
NOTES
1. Such rhyming first lines are optional in all regulated verse, but in practice they are a bit more common in the heptasyllabic forms, where the longer line seems to make it more desirable to establish the rhyme in the first couplet.
2. The exception to this rule occurs in line type II (│ │ ─ ─ │ │ ─), where an oblique-tone third syllable (or first syllable in the pentasyllabic line) requires alteration of the fifth syllable (or third in the pentasyllabic line) from oblique to level tone to preserve euphony. See the discussion on the four lüshi/jueju line types in chapter 8.
3. In fact, we can see anticipations of what we might call a Song manner in such works by Du Fu. A comparison of this poem with Lin Bu’s “Small Plum Tree in a Garden in the Hills, No. 1” (C15.1) suggests some of the “hereditary” connections between Du Fu and Song poetry.
4. For a sense of the literary legacy of these Han sites, see the discussion of Sima Xiangru’s “Fu on the Imperial Park” (C3.1).
5. Huang Zhouxing (1611–1680), Tang shi kuai (Pleasures of Tang Poetry), cited in Tang shi huiping (Collected Commentaries on Tang Poetry), ed. Chen Bohai (Hangzhou: Jiangsu jiaoyu chubanshe, 1995), 2:1948.
6. For another classic example of this mode of poetry in the ninth century, see the discussion of Du Mu’s heptasyllabic quatrain “Red Cliff” (C10.15).
SUGGESTED READINGS
ENGLISH
Graham, A. C., trans. Poems of the Late T’ang. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1965.
Liu, James J. Y. The Poetry of Li Shang-yin: Ninth-Century Baroque Chinese Poet. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969.
Owen, Stephen. The End of the Chinese “Middle Ages”: Essays in Mid-Tang Literary Culture. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996.
Rouzer, Paul F. Writing Another’s Dream: The Poetry of Wen Tingyun. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993.
Schafer, Edward H. The Divine Woman: Dragon Ladies and Rain Maidens in T’ang Literature. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1980.
CHINESE
Feng Zhi 馮至. Du Fu shi xuan 杜甫詩選 (Selected Poetry of Du Fu). Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 1956.
Liu Xuekai 劉學鍇. Li Shangyin zhuan lun 李商隱傳論 (Comments on the Biography of Li Shangyin). Hefei: Anhui University Press, 2002.
Wang Li 王力. Shi ci gelü 詩詞格律 (Prosody of Shi and Ci Poetry). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1977.
Ye Jiaying 葉嘉瑩. Du Fu Qiu xing ba shou ji shuo 杜甫“秋興八首”集說 (Collected Comments on Du Fu’s Eight “Autumn Meditations”). Shijiazhuang: Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe, 1997.
Zhou Zhenfu 周振甫. Li Shangyin xuan ji 李商隱選集 (Selected Works of Li Shangyin). Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1986.