How to Read Chinese Poetry: A Guided Anthology

Mention Tang dynasty guti shi (ancient-style poetry), and you will quickly hear about what it is not. That is, it is not jinti shi (recent-style poetry); in fact, the genre as such came into being only alongside the development of the “recent,” or “regulated,” style. When writing an ancient-style poem, poets (especially in the genre’s early days) meticulously avoided the use of any devices—tonal regulation, prescribed rhyme patterns, central parallel couplets, and the eight-line poem length—that might belie the influence of what they saw as the superficial and ornamental aesthetic that had begun animating the poetic world two centuries earlier. But, despite the avowed hopes of some of its earliest composers, ancient-style poems are not simply continuations of the poetry of long ago. Unlike the general term “ancient poetry,” or gushi, which makes explicit the historical divide stretching between the new reader and the old work, the term guti shi expresses the desire to bridge (or, in some cases, to close) that divide—to write a poem today as though it were written yesterday.

It is now somewhat difficult to imagine that the great poets of the Tang could be nostalgic for the literary writings of times past. Yet, for many of the poets working in this style, the eschewal of the trappings of regulation—whether in individual poems or in their oeuvre as a whole—reflected their adherence to a particular poetic ethos that they deemed to be on the decline: one that valued authentic expression over performance, directness over elusiveness, and substance over design. Perhaps no one has described this aesthetic more succinctly and evocatively than the poet Chen Zi’ang (661–702) when he compared certain admired poems written in this style to the “music of metal and stone.”

Poets writing in the ancient style were, in essence, searching for a “purer” mode of expression, one untainted by ornamental flourishes. The poetry they eventually developed shares certain general characteristics: a vigorous, free-flowing rhythm; direct language; and flexibility in prosodic design and use of poetic devices. As we shall see in the following poems, however, the details of poetic “ancientness,” in practice, varied greatly among individual poets and evolved over time. Some, like Chen Zi’ang, chose a lapidary, prosaic style—one that truly rings with the stark, primordial resonance of metal and stone—often relying on allusion and Daoist terminology to convey his lofty yet passionate concerns about corruption and man’s blindness to the reality of the Dao. On the opposite end of the spectrum, and writing during the period when the regulated style was at its apogee, Li Bai (701–762) reveled in the apparent freedom from rules, showcasing a voice that ranged widely from subtle musicality to outrageous exclamation; for him, true ancientness could best be attained by making frank use of poetic conventions rather than pretending that they were in any way natural. A bit later, Bai Juyi (772–846), interested in founding a poetics that really could transform society, seems to have borrowed a bit of both: in keeping with Chen Zi’ang’s spirit, he espoused language that spurred later readers to note (sometimes disparagingly) his poetry’s similarity to prose; at the same time, like Li Bai, he made poetic genres and conventions work for him in unexpected ways.

In these examples, the artful authenticity that is the hallmark of the guti shi provides a unique window onto the strivings of poets as they sought to blend the necessity of design with the ideal of pure, unmediated expression; ancient values with subjective experience; and the philosophical with the personal.

The first example is a poem written by Chen Zi’ang, author of a group of thirty-eight poems now collectively known as “Ganyu,” most often understood as “Moved by Things Encountered.” Chen Zi’ang is best known—because of both these poems and statements made in his preface to a poem called “Xiuzhu pian” (Tapering Bamboo)—as a prime initiator of an amorphous poetic reform movement that would eventually be known as fugu (return to the ancients), protesting the ornamentation of the recent poetry of the Qi and Liang dynasties. His life as an active and outspoken member of the court of Empress Wu Zetian (r. 690–705) is marked by the highs and lows, the periods of exile and return, that constituted the making of a righteous official of the day; this experience helped secure the ideological legitimacy of his oeuvre and its reformist stance. Guided in his actions and in his writings by a blend of Confucian ethics and Daoist and Buddhist spirituality, he experienced the wanderings of the knight-errant, the trials of the soldier on the frontier, the reclusion of the Daoist adept, and, in the end, the death in prison of the political idealist at the all-too-young age of forty-one.¹

Since as early as the ninth century, there have been many interpretations of the title of these poems, “Ganyu,” with the most common being “Moved by Events I Encounter.”² All interpretations convey that, in contrast to the perceived artificiality of recent-style poetry, these poems are to be read as the “natural” product of spontaneous feelings.

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Shot through with the mystical language of the Daoist adept—indeed, reminiscent of the xuanyan shi (abstruse poetry) of the Eastern Jin (317–420)—this poem may not seem (at least to readers today) a prime example of personal, lyric expression. But it is precisely Chen Zi’ang’s willingness to refer directly to the unfathomable spiritual realm of dragons and the “Obscure” that marks this poem as going against the grain, as the poet’s personal expression of his need to look beyond the surface colors and textures celebrated in the court poetics of the times. Chen Zi’ang—insistently speaking in his own voice (wu guan [I behold])—expresses the anguish of a clear-sighted yet powerless man positioned between the revered ancients, who have attained transcendence and stand side by side with Creation itself, and the foolish men of his day, who content themselves with the intoxicating pleasures of life and mock those who would move beyond.

In this, the sixth poem of the series entitled “Ganyu,” then, Chen Zi’ang draws a clear distinction between those who have apprehended the sense of the “Obscure” (line 7) and those who have not. It is thus fitting that the poem is built on the contrast between two types of perception: guan (to behold or observe [line 1]) and jian (to see [line 9]). In a general sense, he who beholds actively applies his attention to an object or a scene, observing its appearance in order to understand, to “fathom” (ce [line 8]), the essence beneath the surface. But what does guan mean when applied to a world that is not visible in the strict sense of the word, as we find here—a world of dragon transformations and impenetrable darkness? Clearly, the vision to which it refers does not depend on the eyes alone. The closest term in English might then be “to visualize,” reminiscent of the visualization practiced by Buddhists in their meditations before images of Buddhist deities. Visualization involves not just looking at, but also taking in the sculpted or painted image of the deity, such that the viewer ultimately perceives the Buddha essence within.

In line 1 of this poem, when Chen Zi’ang declares that he is beholding the “transformations of the dragon,” he alludes to the first hexagram of the Yijing (Book of Changes), qian, or the “creative”: the hexagram in which all six lines are yang (hence the expression “the essence of yang at its fullest”).⁴ This hexagram indicates situations in which the dragon is hidden, suggesting that the superior man, although present, is still not manifest in the world; one can but watch and wait. As he beholds the dark forests before him, sensing—or visualizing—the presence of the dragon, he does not need, as he might in a recent-style poem, to specify what scene in the world is inspiring this vision. It is visible everywhere to any discerning person who can apply his vision in this way. This mode of seeing realizes the interdependence between the perspicacious seer and the hidden object, and so enacts—if in a limited way—the ideal dissolution of the boundary between self and world.

The contrast between the two types of vision, guan and jian, is echoed throughout the poem in a series of antitheses, all of which resonate with related spiritual and moral connotations: between unimpeded “movement” (xing [line 4])⁵ and “boundedness” (ju [line 9]); between the “ancients” (gu [line 5]) and “worldly people” (shi ren [line 9]); between the alchemical substances (dan) described in mystical texts and mere wine (jiu [line 10]); and between “fathoming” (ce [line 8]) and “laughing” (xiao [line 10]). This web of contrasts, the elements of which all point to the rift between the enlightened ancients and the muddled people of his own time, are never presented in parallel couplets, as they might have been in regulated verse. Rather, these contrasts are dispersed throughout the poem, coming together only in lines 9 and 10, near the end.

The effect is one of flow rather than symmetry, open-endedness rather than containment, qualities that are typically associated with the ancient style. This particular form is also wonderfully appropriate for the object being described, recalling as it does the movement and transformations of the dragon and, even more significantly, the element of change that is at the heart of the hexagrams and the world they are thought to embody. And the form has one other especially apposite effect; apprehension of this pattern in the poem demands of the reader the same discernment as that displayed by the poet when he beholds the ever-changing, now-hidden dragon in the world before his eyes. Chen Zi’ang’s message, then, is clear: to grasp the “Obscure,” the pattern and movement of the Dao, we cannot rely on the images that appear before our fleshly eyes. If one is to ascend to the heights of Kunlun, the mountain of the immortals, and there pluck the blossoms of the “jasper tree” of longevity, one cannot afford to mock the knowledge contained in the alchemical guidebooks.

This poem’s theme is perfectly suited to the ancient style, a style that favors discursive language and downplays perception as a mode of understanding. In keeping with his strong preference for direct assertions, Chen Zi’ang couches his observations in a language of plainspoken elegance, which complements the abstruseness of his imagery. The syntax is straightforward throughout, and the use of intensifiers such as naishi (line 2) and xin (line 6), along with the rhetorical questions posed in lines 8 and 12, draw attention to the poet’s presence both as a witness to this invisible scene and as a speaker to his readers. His “I” is there, in the first line, beseeching us to share in his vision, speaking to us in five-character lines that, while classic and balanced (commanding the authority of early shi poetry), are enlivened by enjambment and lack of symmetry.

As for his use of tones, Chen Zi’ang not only avoids any semblance of tonal regulation in this couplet but also thwarts the normative preference for contrasting tones, choosing the third and fourth characters of both lines from the rising-tone category. This choice, imposed on what practitioners of regulated poetry viewed as the key positions of five-character verses, is powerful; and it is rendered all the more so by the fact that line 3 is composed of four rising tones in a row. This slows the reader down, as rising tones are musically interpreted as longer than falling ones. The overall effect is one of spontaneity and idiosyncrasy, an effect that helps convey the poet’s sense of solitude in a world in decline.

Like Qu Yuan (340?–278 B.C.E.), and like Chen Zi’ang’s more direct model, Ruan Ji (210–263), Chen Zi’ang’s sense of solitude was endemic. It may not be too simplistic to attribute his rebellious stance to his exile and to the many disappointments he encountered in pursuing his lifelong goal to serve the court. But his loneliness was far-reaching indeed, encompassing his sense of his place in time as well as in space. Chen Zi’ang was a man who felt himself to be of the ancients, but not among them. Perhaps nowhere did he express this with more vigor and directness than in the justifiably famous quatrain “A Song on Ascending Youzhou Terrace”:

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This poem leaves no doubt about the kind of language that Chen Zi’ang associates with the value of ancient authenticity. Plain and pellucid, it appears to adhere to no poetic rule but that dictating the spontaneous, untrammeled expression of spontaneous, untrammeled feeling. This is not to say that it lacks pattern or poetry. Chen Zi’ang takes full advantage of the ancient style in three important areas: (1) simple syntactic parallelism in the opening couplet, (2) varied line length (including the presence of two six-character lines), and (3) falling tone in the end rhymes (which contributes to the feeling of an uncompromising, “metal-and-stone” musicality). Combined, these three features frame his simple language in the prosody of ancient poetry.

The presentation of emotion, too, is handled with the ancient aesthetic in mind. Until the last line, feelings are conveyed only indirectly, through the evocation of his absolute solitude. But the effectiveness of this short piece derives primarily from its ability to make the invisible visible—much as we saw in “Moved by Events I Encounter, No. 6.” Once again, seeing, which is given such prominence in the first couplet, reveals itself as an impotent act, because what he is seeking is not visible to the eye. This “blindness” is especially powerful when we consider the title, “Ascending Youzhou Terrace,” which places this poem within a thematic category that usually develops the lyric from an initial viewing of a landscape.⁷

Line 3 plays on these thwarted visual expectations. The “heaven and earth” named here are, at least in part, spatial entities that one can behold from a point on high. The spatial aspect of youyou, a reduplicative descriptive that connotes both a great expanse and a deep, ineffable sadness, can also be seen. But whatever visible attributes this scene might have, they are negated by the realization that, for the particular eyes beholding it here, the essence of this “mournful breadth” lies in its emptiness. The heaven-and-earth that stretches out before him is bare of companions and, for that matter, of anything one can truly behold. And the poet has, in fact, indicated as much in the very first word of this line. He does not gaze at the terrain or even behold it. Rather, this vast expanse is something that exists in his inner world; it is something he is reminded of or “thinks of” (nian), something he knows and can contemplate.

As in the previous poem, Chen Zi’ang uses vision to negate the importance of mere sight. Having sketched out this portrait of his all-encompassing solitude, and erased the boundary between the seer and the seen, he allows himself, in the last line, to notice and record his own emotions, in the same unadorned language that he has been using throughout. He plainly names his feeling of grief (chuangran) and notes that his “tears fall.” This closing image of falling tears is already well worn by his time, and it is hard to tell whether its poignancy in this context results from—or despite—its nostalgic familiarity. The abrupt shift from unnameable immensity to unnameable intimacy, not unusual in Chinese poetic practice, still seems to bestow a certain power on this age-old gesture, placing both unnameables on an equal footing within the scheme of things to be beheld but not seen.

Another poet whose name is associated with ancient-style poetry is Li Bai, often referred to as the “banished immortal.” Traditionally paired with Du Fu as one of China’s two greatest poets, his outsize legend has long since overshadowed his biography as a context for understanding his contribution to Chinese poetry. Unlike Chen Zi’ang, who arrived at court by way of the official path of the examination system, Li Bai acquired his post in the Hanlin Academy thanks to the favor of the prominent minister He Zhizhang (659–744), a poet in his own right who was impressed by the verve and originality of Li Bai’s poetry. As legend has it, Li Bai soon lost his position, not because of his outspoken political ideas but because of what might be called bad behavior; amusing anecdotal tales of his arrogance abound. He spent much of his life on the road, now as a supporter of one of the revolts associated with the An Lushan Rebellion (755–763), now as a Daoist adept living in reclusion. Although his fame as a poet was already secured during his lifetime, his penchant for fantasy and playing with the rules ensured that the question of his merit would be raised by critics throughout the ensuing centuries.

Writing at the apex of the period known as the High Tang, Li Bai, like Chen Zi’ang, strove to write in a language of ancient authenticity, although his version of ancientness stands at the far end of the spectrum in relation to Chen Zi’ang. In the opinion of many traditional critics, who placed him on a par with Du Fu, he succeeded. Others, however, found his writing ostentatious, undisciplined, and altogether too full of fantastic imagery to be considered authentic at all, let alone ancient. Although he wrote many poems in the regulated style, a common refrain among critics is that his nature was too unrestrained and unfettered to conform to the strict requirements of regulated verse. In a word, he is not usually one to depict himself weeping; but, as declared by one of his contemporaries, his poetry could “make the spirits weep and the ghosts shed tears.” “A Lu Mountain Tune: Sent to Minister Lu Xuzhou,” inspired by a site that has always carried the traces of the spirits, is precisely the type of poem that earned him his reputation. It richly rewards the reader who is willing to penetrate past its dazzling surface and attend to its subtler details.

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There is, from the outset, something outrageous about this poem. With its wild, unpredictable blend of role-playing, celestial voyage, vivid nature imagery, Daoist fantasy, and direct speech, it mocks the very idea of form and genre; “Lu Mountain Tune,” like the mountain that inspired it,¹⁵ seems to hail from a time beyond the strictures and periodization of literary history and defies the distinctions commonly drawn among the Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian traditions. Elements of yuefu, recent-style regulated poems, fu (rhapsody), and sao all make their appearance here, and it would be easy to simply echo what so many critics have said: that Li Bai is too spontaneous and natural (or, too coarse and undisciplined, depending on their particular viewpoint) to adhere to the rules and regulations of accepted poetic practice. But to take the easy way would be to deprive ourselves of the ability to appreciate the particular way in which Li Bai pursued that ancient authenticity that was also the goal of Chen Zi’ang. More fruitful would be to notice how the idea of alchemical metamorphosis, explicitly alluded to toward the end of the poem (lines 24–25), provides the aesthetic and structural foundation of the whole.

To begin, who is the “madman of Chu,” and what does Li Bai mean by opening his poem by claiming to be—or to have been—him? As recorded in both the Analects (18.5) and the Zhuangzi, one day the madman was passing by Confucius and began wildly singing what has come to be known as the “Phoenix Song”:

Phoenix, phoenix, how has virtue failed!

The future you cannot wait for; the past you cannot pursue.

When the world has the Way, the sage succeeds;

When the world is without the Way, the sage survives…¹⁶

The madman’s act of mocking the Sage for his idealistic efforts to restore the Way in a declining age would have been well known to Li Bai’s readers. For those familiar with the poet’s occasional assertions of his position as the savior-poet, here to restore poetic writing to its long-lost golden days—not to mention his own ambitions to serve in the court—the irony of this declaration might be so strong as to inspire them to laugh out loud.

But it is unlikely that he was engaging in self-mockery in this poem, and, even if he were, the opening couplet offers much more; layers of meaning adhere to the first two characters, wo ben (literally, I-original). The mere presence of the pronoun “I” in the first position of line 1 of any poem, even of the ancient style, while not unheard of, is a bit startling. Had this been a yuefu, in which first-person speech uttered by a particular character is frequent, this would not necessarily be especially significant. Here, in a lyric poem, it makes a point of the poet’s spontaneity, his lack of inhibition in directly addressing his readers and confronting them with his existence, not as a cool, detached contemplator but as an actor in his (and our) own world. He proclaims himself an actor, not merely in the sense of an agent, an independent subject acting in the world. It seems that his freedom to act includes the possibility of assuming roles, of changing his costume before the eyes of his audience. What is interesting, though, is that he draws his readers’ attention not just to the legendary figure of the madman, but also to their shared acquaintance, as readers of history, with his story; the pleasure of partaking of shared allusions is part of the function of the second word, ben.

Ben means “at the root,” hence “originally” or “inherently.” But there are at least three valid, if slightly overlapping, ways to read it in this context. First, the line might read as Li Bai’s explanation of who he is at heart, as in “I descend from the madman of Chu.” Second, with a slight shift of nuance, ben can suggest change from a former state: “I was, originally, the madman of Chu.” And finally, a slightly different reading, in which ben connotes the essence of something and thus yields something like “I am, at heart, the madman of Chu!”

No single one of these is really adequate to the sense intended here, but a consideration of their conjoined range of meaning is. Together, these readings of ben suggest that we have just witnessed a revelation of the true, fundamental identity of the poet behind the mask. But, interestingly, and in his typically playful fashion, Li Bai executes this revelation not by removing a mask but by putting one on—as though the “I” that is Li Bai is somehow false, and the madman constitutes his true essence. The subtle ambiguity between the two interpretations conflates—or even confounds—the pedestrian distinctions between past and present, replacing those distinctions with the promise of mutability.

As it happens, this promise is fulfilled in the very next couplet. In lines 3 and 4, the poet transforms himself into the famous immortal Zi An, who left the tower on the back of a yellow crane, never to return. This mutation is amusing, but Li Bai has never been one to blend allusions lightly. Here, the madman and Zi An dovetail rather neatly: first, in their success in avoiding engagement in worldly affairs and, second, more subtly, in their respective associations with time’s passage (with each contravening it in a different way).

The transformation of the madman into Zi An is formally rounded out and completed by Li Bai’s use of a unified rhyme scheme, which aurally confirms the presence of a single, unified subject behind this series of actions. The momentum of this narrative then carries over into the next couplet, aided by the continuation of the same end rhyme. Here, the line length changes from five to seven characters, in an expansion that breathes life into the poet-immortal’s ascent into the heavens. This change marks more than just a shift in the action; it seems to reflect yet another change in subject—or, to be more consistent, another transformation. Yes, the subject is still the “I” who put on the mask of the madman-turned-immortal (to reveal the true Li Bai), but now he appears to have assumed a third identity—which, at least for the moment, seems like it could be the real one. Suddenly, no longer an immortal himself, he is a seeker of the immortals among whom he loved to roam (inasmuch as Chinese mountains are thought of as being the dwellings of the immortals), and seeker, most importantly, of the state of immortality.

Abruptly, in line 7, however present the poet has been up to this point—singing, teasing, flying—is as hidden as he is now. Still in the expansive seven-character mode, the poem’s rhyme shifts, and the poet disappears behind views of his beloved mountains. They are set forth in successive, highly impressionistic vistas that say as much about his personal vision as they do about the peaks themselves. The reader is transported from mountain to mountain, not in a series of well-balanced couplets but in a unique triad (lines 7–9) of rhyming, seven-character lines. This rapid-fire succession rushes us forward breathlessly as we are presented not so much with objects as with perception itself—as experienced through the qualities of height, texture, and light. Such are the pure elements that mountains make visible to those with the wherewithal to “fly” there. This is no map of Lu Mountain; it is a map of the poet’s traveling gaze, more reminiscent of the vibrant and fantastic Chuci (Lyrics of Chu) than of other Tang examples of landscape poetry. The primacy of perception over landscape emerges even more clearly in lines 10–13. These balanced couplets do little to dispel the sensation of a crush of images taken in by an unfettered, wandering eye, a sensation that is sustained by the continued concentration of the rhyme, repeated in every line.

This section of the poem closes with one last couplet, which, while maintaining the same rhyme pattern, seems less hurried, as its first line falls outside the rhyme category. The frenzied succession of images has quietly drawn to a close, ending with a negative declaration that subtly concedes the impossibility of anyone really spanning this vast space: “Even birds cannot fly the length of the sky of Wu.”

In line 16, when a new rhyme begins, the poet reappears, and we begin what might be thought of as a poem within a poem: a quatrain written on the traditional theme of climbing high—the same thematic subgenre as that invoked in Chen Zi’ang’s poem “A Song on Ascending Youzhou Terrace.” Unlike Chen Zi’ang, however, Li Bai does see and is able to behold (guan) precisely what the genre dictates: the inexorable onward flow of a river.

With this nearly seamless transition from an anticonventional stance to the decisive borrowing of a convention, the poet makes a strong claim to ancient authenticity: both his own, as a poet openly demonstrating his mastery of the genres that constitute poetic writing in his day, and that of the ancients, who sit at the starting point of these generic practices.

It is this personal vision that forms the next couplet:

This is the only truly parallel couplet in the poem—that is, parallel in the intricate way we usually associate with regulated poetry of the Tang—and it closes the quatrain within the poem. The crux of this couplet lies not in the obvious parallel imagery but in the ambiguity arising from the parallel positioning of the two verbs dong (to stir, to move) and liu (to flow). By playing with these two verbs—the possibility of their being either transitive or intransitive, or of being either verbs or modifiers—one arrives at (at least) two other possible interpretations:

The difficulty of deciding from among these interpretations is not a sign that the poem is somehow flawed, or that the reader does not know how to choose the best reading. The convergence of these multiple readings is precisely what yields the intoxicating sense of the impossibility of discerning, with our eyes, the causes of the events that unfurl before us, or of grasping the true, quixotic nature of the relationships among things.¹⁷

Abruptly, the poet returns in lines 20 and 21 and offers two unadorned five-character lines that rhyme with neither the preceding nor the following section. In direct, declarative language, they assert that he loves these mountains and loves writing songs about them. As when he asserted that he was climbing high (line 16), Li Bai reminds us again that he is a poet, the author of the very poem we are reading. The poet next glances at the site where another poet and lover of mountains, Xie Lingyun (385–433), had also trod and been moved to write poetry: the Stone Mirror. Xie Lingyun stands as an inspiration for Li Bai, as a poet famous for regularly abandoning his official responsibilities to climb the heights. Xie Lingyun also stands for Li Bai, who now stands in his place and sees only the moss that has overgrown Xie Lingyun’s traces: an unambiguous reminder of the pastness of the past, the inevitability of his own disappearance—and, perhaps, his own greatness.

These are the thoughts that trigger, in the final four lines of the poem, a retreat from the temporal: a simultaneous return to the timeless world of the immortals and to the (equally timeless) poetic language of the ancients. Assuming again, once and for all, the role of the seeker of transcendents, Li Bai’s long metamorphosis appropriately culminates inconclusively, atop a mountain that exists beyond time or place, in the in-between state of desire.

Born just ten years after Li Bai’s death, Bai Juyi, too, was animated by certain yearnings. Writing soon after the An Lushan Rebellion, a period characterized by one scholar as one of “disillusionment,”¹⁸ Bai Juyi was an outspoken political and social critic and placed his hopes not in going off to play among the immortals but in reviving Confucian ideals and thus restoring society to its proper state; and, very much in keeping with long-held beliefs about the power of poetry, he believed that the poetic expression of Confucian values would facilitate the achievement of that goal. While these aspirations are most vividly embodied in Bai Juyi’s development of xin yuefu (new Music Bureau poetry),¹⁹ his conviction that poetry could and should be used to transform society permeates his corpus as a whole, in a language that is even more plainspoken than Chen Zi’ang’s “music of metal and stone” and yet displays a sensitivity to the value of images familiar to us from the court poetry tradition.

The following two-poem cycle, “Planting Flowers on the Eastern Slope,” was written during a period of exile from the capital and is a wonderful example of this blend. Indeed, not only does it evince the influence of earlier, highly diverse poets such as Chen Zi’ang, Li Bai, and Tao Qian (Tao Yuanming, 365?–427), but it is also said to be among the poems that inspired the great poet Su Shi (1037–1101) to choose Dongpo (Eastern Slope) as his pen name. More personal than a parable, yet more obviously allegorical than the ancient-style poems of the day, Bai Juyi’s poem blends the lyrical and the political in a way that would become his signature style.

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The first poem casually—almost convivially—begins in what might be called a confessional mode, with Bai Juyi divulging an impulsive moment. Interested only in the (inherently short-lived) aesthetic pleasure provided by flowers, unconcerned with the type of fruit that flowering trees will inevitably bear, he has used his money to buy a few trees: we cannot know how many. Then, in the very next stanza, as if to underline the spontaneity and the magnitude of the gesture, the trees stand before us in greater profusion than the eye can possibly take in, already planted and flourishing in a riot of spring beauty. The “hundred kinds” and “thousands of branches” threaten to overwhelm vision, transporting the beholder from the countable world of commerce to the unaccountable world of myth. Similarly, the shift from the narrative moment in the first stanza to the eternal cyclical unfolding in the second points away from the poet’s deceptively ordinary (if idiosyncratic) act to a scene of more far-reaching significance. That scene now reveals itself as unabashedly allegorical: the picture of the perfectly just society that animates Bai Juyi’s dreams, where, even though time may take its toll, all members enjoy equal opportunities to grow and thrive.

Once Bai Juyi has entered the realm of allegory, he does not leave it; but neither does he abandon the persuasively vivid and personal picture of the trees themselves, the surrounding scene, and his presence there:

The color of the flowers, thriving under these ideal conditions, is a study in purity, naturally attracting the most desirable inhabitants. “Fine birds” and “roaming bees” have populated ideal poetic gardens since the Han dynasty, and so here, as in the preceding stanzas, we find images entrenched in tradition even as they appeal strongly to the senses.

Continuing to blend the immediate with the ideal, the personal with the traditional, the poet has here inserted his solitary self into the scene, establishing his own place within the rhythm of things—even as he strikes a pose that invites readers to picture, almost as if they were sitting at his side, Tao Qian and Li Bai.

Finally, in the concluding stanza of this first poem of two, Bai Juyi develops his similarity to Tao Qian and Li Bai, depicting himself as more than a mere lover of nature and, implicitly, more than just another gentleman who likes his wine. His references to Ba, so remote from the capital, and to his official position remind us of his status as both an exile and a wenren (literatus). Yet these reminders highlight rather than explain his solitude and uniqueness; his isolation is not merely circumstantial but a matter of character. His idiosyncratic nature, displayed in many of his other poems, is established in the impulsive gesture with which he opens the poem and is confirmed at the end. Like both Tao Qian and Li Bai—and like the truest of the ancients—Bai Juyi cannot but heed the urgings of his innermost spirit.

The mood of drunken dreaminess, which poetic practice has rendered almost de rigueur in this setting, momentarily overrides the social critique hinted at in earlier lines. But the poem cycle does not end here, and the second poem finds the poet in a sober, even analytical state. Far from being unaware of time’s passage, he makes it the focus of his attention:

Planting Flowers on the Eastern Slope, No. 2

At this point in the poem, the contrast with the first poem could hardly be more striking. Subjective time has been replaced with the seasonal rhythm that had merely been suggested (poem 1, line 7), and the impetuosity leading to the purchase of the trees is here supplanted by the determined action necessary to sustain their lives. Too, the rustic, almost folksy diction and syntax—the primitive parallel between the “smallest” and “tallest” trees (lines 9–10)—move the reader from one type of garden to another: from the private realm of the literatus to the communal world of the planter. Now, in the third stanza, these two worlds are bridged, as human action imitates the undiscriminating bounty of the earth, bestowing nurturance on all, regardless of position.

And, with this, the poem closes in on its true theme:

[BJYJJJ 2:599–601]

Perhaps the clearest evidence of Bai Juyi’s “ancientness” in this poem appears here, in the subtle irony produced by the contrast between the extreme simplicity of the lesson learned and the apparent impossibility of applying it.

For all the allusions to the lyric poets Tao Qian and Li Bai, “Planting Flowers on the Eastern Slope” is, in the end, a parable, rendered effective by the poet’s play across a range of modes and registers: from the lyric to the popular, the personal to the political, nature to man. Always, however, Bai Juyi keeps the language plain and the concerns lofty, remaining well within the parameters of what we have come to recognize as the ancient style. Like all fine poets, however, Bai Juyi does not allow the dictates of the genre—however loose they may be—to determine his composition; instead, he handles that genre to achieve his own best ends.

Paula Varsano

NOTES

1. For further reading on Chen Zi’ang’s life and his contributions to the development of Tang poetry, see Stephen Owen, Poetry of the Early T’ang (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977), 151–223.

2. For a history of interpretations of the title and the overall significance of these poems, see Tim W. Chan, “The ‘Ganyu’ of Chen Zi’ang: Questions on the Formation of a Poetic Genre,” T’oung Pao 87, nos. 1–3 (2001): 14–42.

3. An alternative version of this line substitutes meng (muddled) in line 7 with xiang (images), changing the verse to “The sense of the Obscure is not apprehended in images.”

4. For a translation of this section of the Book of Changes, where the dragon figures prominently, see Richard Wilhelm and Cary F. Baynes, trans., The I Ching, or Book of Changes, Bollingen Series 19 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950), 3–10, 369–384.

5. In my translation, I have, in order to avoid redundancy, not rendered the word xing, leaving it implicit in the word “hinder.”

6. The reduplicative binome youyou has been associated with at least two distinct meanings since as early as the Shijing: the feeling of mournfulness, and the spatial property of great breadth or distance. By the time of the High Tang, as we see here, the two meanings were frequently combined.

7. Typically in this category, known as “climbing high” (deng gao), the poet ascends to a high place, atop either a mountain or a tower, looks out on the landscape, and, stimulated by the sight of an onward-flowing river, contemplates the passage of time and his own ephemerality.

8. In this couplet, where the mythical and terrestrial realms continue to merge, the term “Five Mountains” seems to refer to both the Five Sacred Mountains of China and the five mythical Daoist mountains of the immortals.

9. Silver River is the Chinese name for the Milky Way.

10. Incense Burner Waterfall is so named because of the cloudlike mist that rises above it.

11. “Master Xie” refers to the poet Xie Lingyun, who mentions the Stone Mirror—a round stone on the side of one of the mountains that is so smooth it reflects the light—in his poem “Entering Pengli Lake.”

12. The term “reverted cinnabar” refers to the ultimate product of the completed cycle of the Daoist alchemical transformation of cinnabar into an elixir of immortality.

13. The fixed expression “lute-heart plays all three chords,” like “reverted cinnabar,” derives from the vocabulary of Daoist alchemical practices. In this context, a “lute-heart” is one that has attained harmony, and the “three chords” refer to the central, controlling regions (known as “cinnabar fields”) of each of the three divisions of the body: upper, middle, and lower. These divisions correspond to the vertical axis of the world and, within the body, are the respective lodging points of “essence” (jing), “breath” (qi), and “spirit” (shen). The point of this line, then, is that the poet has achieved a perfectly harmonious state both within himself and in relation to the Dao.

14. Lu Ao is a legendary figure who was sent by the First Emperor to seek immortals, never to return. This line alludes to a story about him in the Huainanzi, where, after having wandered beyond this world to almost every corner of the universe—and being convinced that he was alone in having done so—he meets someone who has voyaged even more extensively than he has. As if to prove the point, the stranger declines to tarry any longer, claiming a previous engagement with (we assume) an otherwise unidentified wandering immortal named Han Man, somewhere beyond the Nine Regions (which themselves are located beyond the Nine Heavens!). By the Middle Tang, “Han Man journey” came to mean a journey to far-away places.

15. Lu Mountain, which roughly translates as “Hut Mountain,” is known for its nine folds (with nine being an auspicious number) and supposedly derives its name from the presence, during the Zhou dynasty, of seven brothers who built a hut there and practiced the Daoist arts, eventually becoming transcendents. The mountain was also the site, during the Eastern Jin dynasty, of the monastery founded by the famous Buddhist monk Huiyuan (334–416).

16. The two versions are somewhat different, with the Zhuangzi account offering more detail. This translation is from Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 63. For the Analects version, see Confucius: The Analects, trans. D. C. Lau (New York: Penguin Books, 1979), 149–150.

17. Looking back at this scene, which is the object of Li Bai’s act of guan (beholding), it is interesting to recall Chen Zi’ang’s use of the same verb. For Chen Zi’ang, this type of viewing takes him past the surface appearance of the natural world before him to reveal the invisible, ineffable workings of the Dao. When Li Bai executes the same gesture, at least in this case, his gaze rests on the surface of things; it is there, in the impenetrability and ambiguity of surface perception, that the very same workings of the Dao are to be beheld.

18. Stephen Owen, The End of the Chinese “Middle Ages”: Essays in Mid-Tang Literary Culture (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 10.

19. Bai Juyi was foremost among those who took up the declining balladic tradition of yuefu, reviving it as a medium of social and political critique. One interesting point of comparison between Li Bai and Bai Juyi lies in their common use of the yuefu genre to radically different effects and ends.

20. The Chinese chi is approximately the equivalent of one foot, and there are ten chi in one zhang.