How to Read Chinese Poetry: A Guided Anthology

Long Song Lyrics on Objects (Yongwu Ci)

By the end of the Northern Song (960–1127), the ci, or song lyric, had evolved from its origin as a popular song in the ninth century to an established genre for literati poets, one fully accepted into the mainstream of the Chinese literary tradition, which viewed poetry essentially as a medium of self-expression. In contrast with shi poetry, whose lines are usually of uniform length, the song lyric is usually composed of lines of varying lengths. This irregular shape allows poets to depict the natural and spontaneous processes of human feeling more effectively. Thus since Northern Song times, poets have been using the song lyric to express the more tender and subtle states of feeling and awareness.

The song lyric continued to evolve in significant ways during the Southern Song (1127–1279). The Qing poet and scholar of the song lyric Zhu Yizun (1629–1709) once noted that “whenever people talk about the song lyric, they always hold in esteem that of the Northern Song. But only in the Southern Song did it attain [technical] perfection, and only at the end of the Song did it reach the full extent of its transformations. [The song lyrics by] Jiang Kui were most extraordinary [in this evolution].”¹ Like much of traditional Chinese poetry criticism, this comment is cryptic and without detail. Zhu Yizun made an insightful observation on the development of the song lyric during the Southern Song. Whether we agree with his assertion that Jiang Kui (ca. 1155–1221) was the most extraordinary ci writer, Zhu Yizun pinpointed him as a poet whose works exemplified the refinement for which the song lyric of the Southern Song became justly famous.

There are many aspects of the late Song poets’ development of the song lyric, but two are especially important: the creation of what may be called a spatial design in the poems and the transformation of the direct self-expressive mode heretofore dominant in traditional Chinese poetry. As Kao Yu-kung has pointed out, “In its perfect manifestation, a ‘long song lyric’ (manci or changdiao ci) uses the language of symbolization to depict the complex inner state of the poet, and this manifestation was first seen in the Southern Song period.”² He contrasts the spatial design—spreading many ideas and emotions across a page “plane”—with the “temporal rhythm” commonly found in shi poetry as well as in xiaoling and many examples of manci.³ While the temporal rhythm relies on a linear, sequential order of time, the spatial design depends on the principles of parallelism, juxtaposition, and correspondence. The transformation of the self-expressive mode took place in the experimentation by a number of poets after Jiang Kui with a subgenre of the song lyric called yongwu ci (song lyrics on objects), which became popular and important during the late Song.

Broadly speaking, the term yongwu ci refers to a song lyric that depicts an object. The word wu, translated as “object” here, is the term for anything that can be apprehended or perceived by the xin (mind). It is opposed to wo (the self) and xin (the mind), which refer to the experiencing subject. Thus wu connotes all concrete entities and phenomena in the material world and in human affairs, as well as abstract ideas and unreal and imaginary things. But the term yongwu ci has been used by poets and critics in a much narrower sense. It refers primarily to song lyrics on small objects in nature—such as flowers, birds, or insects—and never to landscapes and events in the poet’s life or in history. In the thirteenth century, however, the poetic process involved in writing yongwu ci was extended far beyond the confines of lyric composition.

In writing a yongwu song lyric, the poet withdrew from the direct expression of his own experience, which constitutes the core of a poem; rather, he became an observer of his own complex inner state. The yongwu mode that emerged in the late Song represented a significant new development within the lyrical tradition. Although there were thematic links between yongwu ci and the two earlier subgenres, yongwu shi (poems on objects) and yongwu fu (rhapsodies on objects), that flourished in the late fifth century, because of differences in form and in the poetic process, yongwu shi and yongwu fu did not develop along the lines of late Song yongwu song lyrics. As the following examples demonstrate, representative lyrics on objects in the late Song are usually cast in the so-called spatial mode.

Turning now to works that best illustrate the new aesthetics of the song lyric in the Southern Song, the following is a pair of poems on the plum blossom by Jiang Kui, who also wrote the accompanying preface and composed the music for them:

In the winter of the year xinhai [1191], I took a ship through the falling snow to visit Stone Lake [style of Fan Chengda (1126–1193)]. After I had stayed for a month, he handed me paper, requesting poetry and new tunes. I composed these two song lyrics, which Stone Lake held, fondling them in his hands, unwilling to put them down. He ordered a musician and a singing girl to practice them. The melodies were harmonious and graceful, and he entitled them “Anxiang” [Secret Fragrance] and “Shuying” [Dappled Shadows].

C14.1

Secret Fragrance

The moonlight of the old days,

2 How many times has it shone upon me

Playing the flute by the plum trees?

4 I called my jade lady to rise,

Ignoring the chill, to pick blossoms with me.

6 He Xun is now aging,

His pen, once spring wind, is wholly forgotten.

8 He’s only bemused by the few flowers past the bamboos,

Whose cold fragrance enters the banquet hall.

10 The River Country

Is just now lonely and still.

12 I sigh that the road is too long to send a blossom,

And the evening snow begins to pile up.

14 Tears fall freely before the green wine pot;

The red calyxes are speechless, disturbed by reminiscence.

16 Long shall I remember the places where we held hands:

A thousand trees press against West Lake’s cold green.

18 Petal by petal, all blown away,

When shall I see them again?

[JBSCXZ, 280]⁴

C14.2

Dappled Shadows

Mossy branches decked with jade;

2 A pair of little bluebirds

Roost on them together.

4 When wandering we meet—

By the corner of the fence in the dusk,

6 Without a word she leans on slender bamboos.

Unaccustomed to the remote barbarian sands,

8 Zhaojun secretly longed for the Yangtze’s climes.

Surely it is her jade waistband

10 That returns on moonlit nights,

Transformed into this blossom so solitary.

12 The old palace tale still comes to mind:

As the beauty slept,

14 One blossom fluttered to her black moth-eyebrows,

Don’t be like the spring wind,

16 Careless of beauty,

But early prepare a gold chamber for it.

18 If one lets all the petals drift off with the current,

He will resent hearing the sad tune for the Jade Dragon.

20 If one waits till then to pursue that subtle fragrance,

It will have entered a horizontal scroll over some small window.

[JBSCXZ, 316]

Jiang Kui is known to history as an accomplished poet, musician, and literary and art critic.⁵ His original compositions and treatises as well as random notes on music have survived from his time to become invaluable in the study of Song dynasty music. From the limited sources still available, we know that he was regarded by his contemporaries as a talented prose writer and calligrapher as well. Despite all this evidence of an artist and scholar par excellence, Jiang Kui was not one of the particularly prominent figures. Unlike most great Song poets who had double careers as statesmen and scholar-artists, he was never able to participate officially in the important affairs of his age. Successive failures in the civil service examination and other forms of official recruitment left him a buyi, a “man in linen (ordinary) clothes,” or a mere commoner, throughout his life. Jiang Kui was only in his early teens when his scholar-official father died, and his father’s death marked the beginning of the poet’s life of poverty. We know, for instance, that Jiang sold his calligraphy as one means of support. Other, perhaps more substantial, support came through the patronage of prominent friends, who often enjoyed wide acclaim as artists themselves.

Fan Chengda, mentioned in the preface to “Secret Fragrance” and “Dappled Shadows,” was one of Jiang Kui’s most prominent patron-friends. One anecdote concerning their friendship merits mention. When the poet left Fan Chengda’s residence in Suzhou for his own home in Wuxing on the lunar New Year’s Eve, as a parting gesture, Fan Chengda presented him with a maid of talent and beauty by the name of Xiaohong (Little Scarlet). That very same evening, as Jiang Kui and Xiaohong passed by the famous Drooping-Rainbow Bridge on West Lake, the poet wrote a quatrain about his journey:

These songs I newly made, their resonance most lovely,

Xiaohong quietly sings, and I play the flute.

The tune ends, we’ve passed all the pine-covered hills,

Looking back: amid mists and waves, fourteen bridges.

[JBSCXZ, 280]

This lovely quatrain appears in Jiang Kui’s collection of shi poetry. If the anecdote is indeed factual, the “songs” in the first line must allude to “Secret Fragrance” and “Dappled Shadows.”

“Secret Fragrance” and “Dappled Shadows” are among the most quoted and admired works by Jiang Kui. The titles come from a regulated verse on the plum blossom by the poet-recluse Lin Bu (967–1028) of the early Northern Song; they are taken directly from the following couplet: “Dappled shadows hang aslant over clear shallow water; / Secret fragrance wafts in the moonlit dusk.”⁶ “Dappled shadows” and “secret fragrance” thus are two coordinate images for the plum blossom, referring to its shape and smell, respectively.

These two song lyrics exhibit a difficult and obscure style. Through the ages, scholars have offered diverse interpretations, ranging from taking them as a reminiscence about a woman whom Jiang Kui loved, to interpreting them as an expression of sorrow for his life as an unemployed scholar-artist far from home, to reading them as a lament for the capture of the last two Northern Song emperors, Huizong (r. 1100–1125) and Qinzong (r. 1125–1126), and their palace ladies by the Jurchens in 1126.⁷ In fact, it is not feasible to focus on one interpretation to the exclusion of the other possible readings.

Of the two poems, “Secret Fragrance” is written in a comparatively lucid style. Its theme does seem to be the poet’s reminiscence about a woman with whom he used to pick plum blossoms by West Lake. The blossom, mentioned explicitly in line 5, is not used as a metaphor for the woman but as an object that arouses in the poet memories of her. With the inclusion of wo (me) in line 2, Jiang Kui emphasizes the poem’s personal tone, but this indication is personal only in comparison with the other elements in the poem. The allusion in the third strophe to the poet He Xun (d. 518), who loved plum blossoms and wrote poems about them, is meant to be autobiographical.⁸ Jiang Kui sees himself as an aging He Xun, too old to feel any real enthusiasm for flowers anymore. By this use of allusion, Jiang Kui attributes a certain degree of universality to his personal experience. The reference to He Xun also implies that his mind is really not so much on the blossom as on his “jade [that is, beautiful] lady.” The blossom is merely a reminder of her absence. This becomes clear in the beginning of the second stanza, when he says that the distance between them has grown too far for him “to send [her] a blossom.”

Throughout the entire poem, the experiencing subject and the experienced object (the blossoming plum) remain distinct, and the constitutive role of the former is also unmistakably clear. The management of time deserves attention also. “Secret Fragrance” is written in the framework of the lyrical present. It is in this present that the lyric speaker recalls the experience of plucking flowers and holding hands with a beautiful woman on cold moonlit nights by West Lake. This work is thus cast in the traditional self-expressive mode that relies on the lyrical moment of the present for its temporal coherence.

The strong personal tone of “Secret Fragrance” disappears in the subsequent piece. “Dappled Shadows,” by contrast, opens with an objective description of small jewel-like birds roosting together on mossy plum branches grown thick with jadelike blossoms. According to Fan Chengda’s Meipu (Book of Plum Trees), the Shaoxing and Wuxing areas were known for a kind of plum tree called taimei (moss plum). The tree featured “branches gnarled and twisted in multifarious shapes. Scaly green moss seals up flower stems. There are also moss whiskers hanging among the branches, some of which are several inches long. Whenever the wind comes, green threads flutter in a most pleasing manner.”⁹ There seems little doubt that Jiang Kui is referring in this poem to this special kind of plum, treasured by people living in the region. It is possible that Jiang Kui noticed moss plum trees at Fan Chengda’s home when he visited. “Jade,” in line 1, functions as a metaphor for the flowers; as is usual in such poems and song lyrics, the object written about (the blossoming plum) is not directly named. The beginning strophe of “Dappled Shadows” highlights not only the image of the blossom but also the togetherness symbolized by the little birds sleeping side by side. The image of the “bluebirds” alludes to a story about a certain Zhao Shixiong of the late sixth century who once got drunk and fell asleep beneath a big plum in full bloom.¹⁰ In his dream, Zhao Shixiong encountered a beautiful woman (the plum blossom fairy?) with whom he drank wine and, later, a boy dressed in green who laughed and sang, playing and dancing about. The next morning, Zhao awoke to bluebirds chirping in the plum tree above. The use of this allusion perhaps indicates that Jiang Kui was reminded of Zhao Shixiong’s experience when he saw moss plum trees at his friend’s residence. Although not clearly suggested, it is possible that Jiang Kui means to imply that Zhao Shixiong must have felt disappointed and lonesome when he woke up to see only bluebirds rather than a beautiful woman and a boy. The first strophe can then be seen as pointing to the poet’s inner state (that of solitude).

In the second strophe, it is not said who meets whom, but from the context we can speculate that it is the lyric speaker who encounters the blossoming plum. These first two strophes form a sequence depicting perhaps what Jiang Kui, as a visitor, had seen at Fan Chengda’s house, although he has indicated nothing about this in the preface. There also exists a surface contrast between the two strophes. Ke li xiang feng (meeting each other away from home or when one is visiting somebody else) suggests the idea of wandering; hence the encounter is entirely different from that of the bluebirds’ roosting together on the branch. The blossoming plum is personified, described as leaning, speechless and alone, against the slender bamboo in the dusk. The dominant feeling of solitude here contrasts with the preceding surface atmosphere of togetherness. Just as togetherness belongs to the bluebirds, the sense of solitude refers to the plum tree and to the lyric speaker, who is away from home (ke li).

Another level of equation is found in the second strophe, which contains an allusion to a couplet from the poem “Beautiful Lady” (Jiaren), by Du Fu (712–770): “The day is cold, her green sleeves thin; / The sun sets as she leans on slender bamboos.”¹¹ Du Fu’s “Beautiful Lady” depicts a highbred woman who has become a wanderer after having lost her brothers and been abandoned by her husband in a time of chaos and disorder. To preserve her integrity and purity, she lives in seclusion and solitude. This comparison of the blossoming plum and the beautiful lady provides the background for the subsequent strophes.

The second half of the first stanza, consisting of the third and fourth strophes, contains an allusion to Wang Zhaojun, a concubine of the emperor Han Yuandi (r. 48–33 B.C.E.) who was married to a chieftain of the Xiongnu tribes on the northern border of the Han territory in 33 B.C.E. A story about Wang Zhaojun in the Xijing zaji (Miscellaneous Notes of the Western Capital) relates that Han Yuandi kept so many concubines that, in order to select which ones he would favor, he ordered court artisans to paint a portrait of each.¹² Wishing to capture the emperor’s attention, all the concubines but one bribed the artists. Wang Zhaojun, confident of her own beauty, did not offer a bribe and in consequence was represented as the ugliest. Later, when the Xiongnu chieftain demanded marriage to one of the Han emperor’s concubines, Wang Zhaojun was chosen. When Han Yuandi summoned her to an audience before her departure, he discovered that, to his regret, she was in fact the most beautiful woman in his palace. Wang Zhaojun became a popular subject in later Chinese poetry, which focuses not on her beauty but on her resentment at having had to leave her homeland for the cold and desolate barbarian territory, and on her homesickness. Du Fu’s regulated verse “Thoughts on Historical Sites, No. 3,” laments her grievance, solitude, and homesickness; it includes the couplet from which Jiang Kui derived his fourth strophe: “Her spring-wind face was judged from a painting; / Her spirit in vain returned with her jeweled waistband on moonlit nights.”¹³ The second strophe of the first stanza in “Dappled Shadows” makes explicit the equation between the blossoming plum and a beauty by an allusion to the other Du Fu poem, “Beautiful Lady.” The third strophe shifts to Wang Zhaojun’s homesickness while living in the barbarian desert. In the concluding strophe, Jiang Kui imagines that it must be Wang Zhaojun’s spirit that has come back to the south and transformed itself into the solitary plum blossom. This equation greatly increases the feelings of solitude and homesickness that have already been set forth in the third strophe.

Taking the first stanza as a whole, we can say that, on one level, the allusions to Wang Zhaojun and Du Fu’s “Beautiful Lady” may be metaphorical of Jiang Kui’s sadness about his own life as a wandering scholar-artist and perhaps point to his reminiscence about a woman he had been in love with. On another level, the image of husha (barbarian sands) cannot adequately be interpreted as a mere metaphor for the poet’s unhappiness. Husha is most often associated in Chinese literature with the tribal people in the north, who had been a constant threat to the Chinese throughout history. In the poetry of Tang poets, notably Li Bai (701–762) and Wang Jian (ca. 767–830), plum blossoms sometimes carry associations with exile, displacement, and the frontier.¹⁴ More immediately relevant to “Dappled Shadows” is a section from the song lyric “Yan’er mei” (Charming Eyes), composed by the Northern Song emperor Huizong on his way north as a captive of the Jurchens:

With people gone, the flower city is desolate;

My spring dreams go around the Tartar sands.

Where is my homeland?

How can I bear to listen to the barbarian flute

Playing to the end of “The Plum Blossom”?

[JBSCXZ, 348]

These lines summon the same chain of connections (the barbarian flute, plum blossoms, the loss of home and country) as found in the poems by Li Bai and Wang Jian. It seems probable that Jiang Kui also had Emperor Huizong’s song lyric in mind when he incorporated textual allusions from Du Fu’s poem on Wang Zhaojun. Although Jiang Kui wrote “Secret Fragrance” and “Dappled Shadows” sixty-five years after Emperor Huizong, Emperor Qinzong, and their palace ladies were taken prisoner by the invading Jurchens, the Southern Song government’s policy of buying peace from the invaders prevented poets from writing about this humiliating national tragedy in any explicit manner. If this line of interpretation is valid, the inner state that Jiang Kui points to in the first half of “Dappled Shadows” involves not just his personal unhappiness but also a political lament symbolized in the suffering of such famous people as Wang Zhaojun and Emperors Huizong and Qinzong.

What is peculiar about the use of textual allusions in the first stanza is the swift shift from one expression of time to another. On the surface, the first two strophes depict what the poet sees in the present moment, although the allusions to the Zhao Shixiong story and to Du Fu’s “Beautiful Lady” have infused a sense of the past into this beginning section of the song lyric. The third strophe explicitly plunges the reader into a thoroughly different mode of past time. The link between the plum blossom and Wang Zhaojun is not made clear until the fourth strophe (and the possible relevance of the story about the last two emperors of the Northern Song is left totally ambiguous). Since here it is not Wang Zhaojun herself but her spirit who returns to become the blossom, the third strophe presents that “other” and past time coexisting with the images of the present. Although there is mention of “dusk” in the second strophe and “moonlit nights” in the fourth, these references to specific moments do not form an integrative temporal rhythm for the entire first stanza. The coherence of the first half of “Dappled Shadows” relies on the parallelism, juxtaposition, and correspondence of the strophes and their association with the themes of loneliness, separation, and homesickness. Thus the first stanza operates as a spatial design.

The second stanza sheds more light on this structural strategy. It opens with an allusion to the following story:

The daughter of Song Wudi (r. 420–423), Princess Shouyang, lay down under the eaves of Hanzhang Palace on the Seventh Day of the First Moon. A plum blossom fell onto her forehead and became a five-petaled flower. She brushed at it but it would not come off.… Three days later, she washed [her face] and the flower then fell off. The palace ladies marveled at this and began to imitate her. It became what is called today a “plum blossom ornament.”¹⁵

The opening strophe of the second stanza continues the association of a plum blossom and a woman made in the first stanza. As the story indicates, the blossom became firmly attached to Princess Shouyang’s forehead; thus the blossom and the woman merged into one entity. By alluding to Princess Shouyang, Jiang Kui is perhaps suggesting that the blossom reminds him of the ornament on the forehead of some woman in his private life. So there may be a remote metaphorical relation between this strophe and a private experience of the poet’s. But as it stands in the song lyric, the textual allusion works more like a remembered historical experience, resembling the allusion to Wang Zhaojun in the third strophe of the first stanza.

Apart from suggesting the idea of a life of frivolity in the palace, the allusion to Princess Shouyang also introduces the image of a falling plum blossom, which is immediately taken up by the next strophe, where “But early prepare a gold chamber for it” alludes to another palace tale. When Han Wudi (r. 140–87 B.C.E.) was a child, an aunt asked him how he felt about having his cousin A Jiao become his wife. He replied, “If I had A Jiao, I would keep her in a golden chamber.”¹⁶ This story and the accounts of Princess Shouyang, Wang Zhaojun, and Emperor Huizong are “old palace tales” (shen’gong jiushi). The upshot of the allusion here is that a person in a position of power should always carefully protect the blossom—his beautiful lady—so that she will not be left to suffer. Indeed, if he allows the petals to drift off, he will surely have cause for regret, captured in the painful recognition of a sad melody (“Jade Dragon” is the name of a flute, and the old tune “Plum Blossoms Are Falling” was composed especially for this instrument).¹⁷ Moreover, as the very last strophe suggests, he will be left to look for the blossom’s subtle fragrance not in the real object but in a facsimile, a painting hung above a window. What the ending strophes of “Dappled Shadows” suggest is what happened to Wang Zhaojun: Emperor Han Yuandi’s failure to protect her, the most beautiful woman in his palace, became the source of her everlasting grief, solitude, homesickness, and suffering.

A number of images are common to both “Secret Fragrance” and “Dappled Shadows”: the blossoming plum, bamboos, beautiful women, the moon, the Yangtze River, and the spring wind that blows away the petals of the plum blossoms. These images certainly enhance the complementarity of the pieces. Obviously, the “moonlight of the old days,” which begins “Secret Fragrance,” includes the moonlight on the nights in which Wang Zhaojun’s spirit returns to the south. And the image of the plum blossoms’ being blown away that ends “Secret Fragrance” makes the picture of the petals carried off by the current toward the end of “Dappled Shadows” more poignant. But these two pieces, however complementary, also display two very different artistic modes.

Let us now examine a song lyric from the late Song whose subject is not an object but that nevertheless is composed in the new aesthetic mode of yongwu ci. It is set to the tune of “Yingti xu” (Prelude to the Oriole’s Song), written and composed by Wu Wenying (ca. 1200–1260):

C14.3

Prelude to the Oriole’s Song

Just now the lingering chill plagues me, sick from wine—

2 I close the finely wrought door of aloewood.

Swallows come late, flying into the west of the city,

4 As if to tell us matters of spring are almost over.

Borne on painted boats, the Qingming festival has slipped away,

6 In the clearing mist, trailing are the Wu Palace trees.

I muse over how a traveler’s thoughts drift in the wind,

8 Changing into weightless catkins.

Ten years at West Lake,

10 Tying my horse by the willows,

Chasing after charming dust and yielding vapor.

12 Following red petals upstream, I was summoned to Fairy Creek,

And Brocade Maid secretly conveyed your deep feelings.

14 You leaned on the silver screen—spring was expansive, our dream limited;

Rouged tears falling soaked your singing fan and gold-thread gown.

16 At dusk the dike was empty;

Lightly we took the slanting sun’s rays

18 And returned them all to the gulls and egrets.

Hidden orchids grew old quickly,

20 And pollias live again,

While I still sojourn in the river country.

22 Since parting I’ve revisited the Six Bridges—no news;

Our affair’s in the past—flowers have withered,

24 Jade has been interred, fragrance buried,

Through how many bouts of wind and rain?

26 Long waves envied your glances,

Distant hills were shamed by your brows;

28 Fishermen’s lamps scattered reflections in the spring river where we spent the night—

I recall how, with small oars, my Peach Root crossed over.

30 The green mansion seems a mirage

Where I inscribed parting poems on the by-now ruined wall,

32 Tear-laden ink is gray and dull with dust.

From a high pavilion I gaze into the distance

34 At the color of grass at heaven’s edge

And sigh that coarse white ramie has half overtaken my locks.

36 Silently I mull over the traces—tears of parting, playful spit¹⁸—

Still staining your silk handkerchief;

38 The phoenix, wings drooping, has lost its way,

The simurgh no longer dances on the broken mirror.

40 Fervently I want to inscribe

My everlasting sorrow in a letter,

42 But passing wild geese sink into blue mists over far seas.

In vain I play my love longing into the mournful zither’s strings;

44 Grieving from a thousand li away in the southland,

With the bitter melody I summon you again,

46 Is your sundered soul still there?

[WMCCJS, 191–193]¹⁹

Wu Wenying was one of the best ci poets of the Southern Song. Just like Jiang Kui, Wu Wenying never entered officialdom and remained a commoner all his life. He worked for a period in the clerical staff of prominent officials. He appears to have lived all his life in present-day Jiangsu and Zhejiang Provinces and stayed for the longest period of time in the cultural centers of Suzhou and Hangzhou, enjoying the patronage of certain prominent people in the region.²⁰ He was one of just a small number of ci writers who had dual competence in poetry and music. Divided into four stanzas and containing 240 characters, Wu Wenying’s “Prelude to the Oriole’s Song” is the longest in the entire repertory of song lyric works still in existence.

Wu Wenying’s collected works include many passionate song lyrics devoted to the memory of a woman (or women); all are cast in similar language and images.²¹ This has prompted a few modern Chinese scholars to speculate about the romances in Wu Wenying’s life. Unfortunately, these scholars have derived their speculations solely from the poet’s lyrics, without any corroboration from other, more reliable materials. One can at best say that on the basis of their shared language, images, and mood, these many song lyrics, including “Prelude to the Oriole’s Song,” are powerful expressions of Wu Wenying’s remembrance of lost love.

The modern scholar Liu Yongji suggests that the poem may have been written late in Wu Wenying’s life when the poet revisited alone the places where he had lived with his beloved.²² Some of the phrases and events depicted in this poem can be found in many of his works about love, presumably written at different times in his life. It is conceivable that “Prelude to the Oriole’s Song” is an attempt by Wu Wenying late in his life to integrate into a grander artistic design the images and expressions referring to his most memorable experiences.

This great long poem consists of a series of recollections arranged in accordance with the logic of a spatial design. Its four stanzas focus on the following four themes, respectively: (1) lament for spring’s passing, (2) joy of union, (3) pain of separation, and (4) mourning for the dead.²³ It moves from the beginning to its end by way of a tortuous path, revealing the poet’s complex inner state.

The time at the opening is late spring. Already “sick from wine,” the lyric speaker suffers from the “lingering chill” and shuts his door. This image of a person suffering from the effects of wine and a spring chill can be found in a poem set to the tune “Feng ru song” (The Wind Comes Through the Pines) that begins with the line “Listening to the wind and rain as I pass this Qingming Festival.”²⁴ The idea of staying indoors to reminisce about the past in the opening strophe is also a theme in “Feng ru song,” in “Xi qiuhua” (Lamenting Autumn’s Glory), which begins, “The delicate noise of the remaining crickets,”²⁵ and in another poem, also set to “Prelude to the Oriole’s Song,” that begins, “Across the pond, the boat penetrates a lavish brocade.”²⁶ The first strophe thus presents images depicting recurrent behavior rather than a unique event.

The second strophe speaks of the late-coming swallows, as though to announce that spring is almost over. On the surface, this may be a description of what the lyric speaker sees outside his house after he has shut the door. But there is perhaps a deeper level of meaning here. Wu Wenying has used the word “swallow” elsewhere to symbolize the woman he loved; for instance, in the preface to a poem written to the tune “Jiangdu chun” (Spring in the Crimson City) is the line “The swallow has been dead for a long time,” and the poem itself begins, “The swallow falls from the south mansion.”²⁷ The strophe may also mean that, in recalling his first meeting with the woman, the poet laments that he had not met her earlier, and, as a result, their romantic affair (“matters of spring”) was over all too soon. In fact, without this deeper meaning, the lament for spring seems quite pointless. Similarly, the third strophe also carries two levels of meaning. To be sure, these lines can probably be read as descriptive of the immediate experience of boating on West Lake, but this interpretation alone ignores their depth. Wu Wenying may be remembering his probably numerous journeys in a boat from Hangzhou to Suzhou with his beloved. In any case, the line “In the clearing mist, trailing are the Wu Palace trees” does not seem to describe the scenery on West Lake. Rather, it is reminiscent of the following lines from a song lyric set to the tune “Ruihe xian” (The Immortal of the Auspicious Crane):

…clear-weather threads pull on my chaotic feelings;

Facing the setting sun over the Cang River,

blossoms fly and my love is far away;

Drooping willows darken the Wu Palace.

[WMCCJS, 10–11]

As the last strophe moves from the “clearing mist” to comparing the traveler’s thoughts to trailing willow catkins, such thoughts naturally embody feelings of separation, and the idea of lament is implied in the passing of spring, the general theme of the first stanza. It should be clear by now that to fully understand the stanza’s richness, we cannot simply progress from strophe to strophe as they unfold in the sequence of the song lyric. Rather, we must understand that the lines externalize the poet’s inner state through parallels between the surface significance of the images and the allusive meaning of phrases and expressions derived from Wu Wenying’s other works. And the poet’s lament, like his reminiscing about the past and his travels with a woman he loved, is itself a recurring mental activity.

Also divided into four strophes, the second stanza describes, by focusing on four focal points, the joy of meeting. In the first stanza, although the images are associated with past experiences, the present moment is clearly its starting point. By contrast, the second stanza consists of flashbacks only. The first three lines present a summary of the poet’s romantic life in Hangzhou: “charming dust and yielding vapor” present a beautiful image of the lovely misty scenes around West Lake and the dust stirred up by carriages carrying revelers (especially ladies). In another song lyric, set to the tune “Yi jiuyou” (Remembering Old Journeys), Wu Wenying wrote about the same kind of activity:

On the road over Broken Bridge by West Lake,

I reckon, the drooping willows where I tied my horse

Must still be leaning.

[WMCCJS, 336]

In the second strophe, Wu Wenying devotes his attention to one unforgettable encounter with a woman on a river near West Lake. As in another poem, set to the tune “Du jiangyun sanfan” (Three Shifts of the Mode of “River-Crossing Clouds”), the lyric speaker abandons his horse, gets into a boat, and is summoned into a fairyland-like residence. In that poem, there are the following lines:

Where the old dike forks like the tail of a swallow,

Laurel oars move with the hovering terns—

My horse’s halter leans against broken clouds.

[WMCCJS, 4–6]

In “Prelude to the Oriole’s Song,” Wu Wenying compares his romantic encounter with those in other well-known stories: the first, of two young men—Liu Chen and Ruan Zhao—who fall in love with two fairy maidens on Mount Tiantai, and the second, the love affair between Zhang Cheng and a courtesan named Yang Aiai. Brocade Maid is Yang Aiai’s maidservant, who acts as secret go-between for her mistress.²⁸ As with the textual and historical allusions that Jiang Kui uses in “Dappled Shadows,” there is no explicit comparison in “Prelude to the Oriole’s Song” of these figures with the poet’s own experience. The next two lines succinctly describe the love as experienced by Wu Wenying and his beloved after their encounter. Although the “spring” symbolizing their love and passion was vast, their shared “dream”—their actual time together—was all too limited. The line “Rouged tears falling soaked your singing fan and gold-thread gown” can, but does not necessarily, refer to the lovers’ final parting. It likely alludes to the song “Gold-Thread Gown,” during whose performance the courtesan deeply understands that, since time passes quickly, their dreamlike existence together will soon be over, and so she sheds tears. In this way, the line anticipates the theme of separation in the third stanza. Wu Wenying concludes the second stanza with a strophe that subtly describes the joy of being together. As the lovers enjoy each other’s company, they turn over the beautiful sunset to the “gulls and egrets,” since they are too absorbed to enjoy it. With the exception of the first line, “Ten years at West Lake,” the whole of the second stanza is made up of fragments of experience from the poet’s own life and from legend. These juxtaposed fragments, while they belong to the past, have in fact lost their pastness and appear immediate and timeless, expressing the poet’s inner state.

The third stanza describes the pang of separation from four angles. It begins with a vignette of the place—possibly Suzhou—where the poet stayed as a sojourner after separating from his beloved. “The river country” must refer to Suzhou rather than to Hangzhou because the latter was a bustling capital city in the Southern Song, and thus the word “country” would not have been appropriate. This opening corresponds to “Ten years at West Lake,” which begins the second stanza and at the same time echoes the feelings of lament for spring, for time passing and separation, and for living the life of a wanderer. In the next four lines, Wu Wenying uses a series of flashbacks to recall his revisits to haunts of former days and the death of his beloved. This is followed by an abrupt shift to a beautiful recitation of his beloved’s enchantments and the night spent together on the spring river. On one level, this third strophe is a supplement to the section in the previous stanza about the summons to Fairy Creek. His arrival at her place, his first impressions of her, and their first night together must remain memorable images. It should be noted that wavelike glances and hill-like eyebrows must not be taken as clichés, because they hold a special significance for Wu Wenying. In the song lyric “Suochuang han” (The Carved Lattice Window Is Cold), which describes in some detail the poet’s first meeting with and final parting from this important woman, there is the line “One glance, good enough to exchange for a thousand pieces of gold.”²⁹ Further, in another song lyric, set to the tune “Jiangdu chun,” describing the experience of encountering a woman who looks like his beloved, Wu writes:

At the inn,

Suddenly I meet a courtesan

Who looks so much like my love—

Especially her wavelike glance!

[WMCCJS, 210–211]

We can find descriptions similar to “Fishermen’s lamps scattered reflections in the spring river where we spent the night” in several song lyrics as well. The recurrence of these images in Wu Wenying’s works indicates that they continued to be poignant and important points of reference throughout his life. When a person is in a mood for remembering and mourning, it is natural for such images to arise in his mind. And in such reminiscing, the shifting from one image to another may occur without following any logical or temporal order. Wu Wenying’s intermingling of temporal and spatial dimensions demonstrates his skill at closely rendering his own inner emotional states. The lines in this part of the poem, recounting how the lovers spent the night together on the river, parallel those at the end of the second stanza, telling of their meeting. Toward the end of the third stanza, the poet describes the wretchedness of parting in a straightforward manner. The “ruined wall” (baibi) most likely refers to the present ruined condition of the wall on which he had inscribed a poem on parting from his beloved. This concluding strophe fuses past and present. Just as in the second stanza, this section consists mainly of clusters of images from past experiences. There are three strophes about pain and one about joy; this arrangement stands in precise opposition to that found in the second stanza.

The final stanza focuses on the theme of mourning for the dead and so brings the entire poem to a close. The first strophe of this stanza strongly parallels the beginning of the poem, where the poet has shut his door to recollect the past. Here, he ascends into a pavilion to “gaze [pensively] into the distance.” For Wu Wenying, ascending into a pavilion, leaning against a building, or simply standing still to gaze mournfully at the setting sun or into the distance is a distinct and recurring topos. In the song lyric written to the tune “Sanshu mei” (Three Beautiful Women) are the lines “Standing by the bridge for a long time, / About to leave, tears fill my face in the setting sun.”³⁰ Another lyric, set to the tune “Yehe hua” (Magnolia Pumila) concludes with the lines:

Upstairs in my old friend’s house,

Who can I be with

to look at the wild grass in the setting sun?

[WMCCJS, 286–287]

Again, I would argue that these phrases are not meaningless clichés; rather, they constitute images from life experience that the poet felt compelled to return to again and again.

The second strophe brings in the power of a memento (a handkerchief) to conjure up thoughts of the person associated with it. The traces of “tears of parting” and “playful spit” correspond to the themes of lament at parting and joy of meeting described in the second and third stanzas, respectively. Wu Wenying uses an allusion to Fan Tai’s “Poem on a Simurgh” as a metaphor for his debilitating loneliness.³¹ In the third strophe, the poet writes that he has no way of expressing his “everlasting sorrow in a letter” to his dead beloved, so he channels all his powerful feelings into a zither tune instead. This great song lyric concludes with an allusion to lines in the poem “Summoning the Soul” (Zhao hun), in the Chuci: “The eye travels on a thousand li, and the heart breaks for sorrow. / O soul, come back! Alas for the Southern Land!”³² The allusion expresses the poet’s deep grief over the death of the woman he loved. Since Wu Wenying alludes to “Summoning the Soul” in other works, the allusion here may well refer to both the Chuci and his own works. This simultaneous reference to two sources operates like the allusion to the story of Liu Chen and Ruan Zhao in the second stanza. The early Republican scholar Chen Xun (1870–1942) was perceptive in noting that the last strophe of the fourth stanza parallels the ending of the first stanza.³³ The closing of the song lyric—the poet’s moods, the mournful tune he is playing, and the wandering soul of his dead love—are like “weightless catkins” drifting in the wind. The implied parallel between the conclusions of the first and last stanzas is important because it leaves the reader with a strong sense of tragic helplessness.

We can see from this short analysis that “Prelude to the Oriole’s Song” has a tightly knit structure. It is divided into four large sections, each with a central theme and each, in turn, subdivided into four strophes with their own specific focuses. In the arrangement of the major themes of lament for spring’s passing, joy of meeting, pangs at separation, and mourning for the dead, the work can be said to have a temporal development. It begins with the poet’s present thoughts and actions, continues to depict his recollections of meeting with and parting from his love, and returns to the present moment at the very end. But the image fragments that depict his present actions and thoughts are also found in song lyrics that he wrote about previous occasions. Further, the themes and subthemes are not organized into a chronological whole but are spread out as if across a canvas, and the unity of the work is maintained through the parallelism, juxtaposition, and correspondence among these themes and subthemes. “Prelude to the Oriole’s Song” presents a vast spatial design for Wu Wenying’s remembrance of a woman whom he very much loved. Even though it is not regarded as a bona fide yongwu ci, it is clearly not cast in the traditional mode of direct self-expression but in the artistic mode characterizing Jiang Kui’s “Dappled Shadows.” In terms of its structure, Wu Wenying’s “Prelude to the Oriole’s Song” is a song lyric on a kind of object, the complex processes of remembrance, that constituted his inner state as he wrote this masterpiece.

Shuen-fu Lin

NOTES

1. Zhu Yizun, “Introduction,” in Ci zong (Selected Song Lyrics [from the Tang Through the Yuan Dynasties]) (Shanghai: Guji chubanshe, 1978), 11.

2. Kao Yu-kung, “Xiaoling zai shi chuantong zhong de diwei” (The Place of Xiaoling Lyrics in the Poetic Tradition), Cixue 9 (1992): 20. I have discussed Kao’s idea of spatial design and Joseph Frank’s idea of spatial form relevant to the works of such twentieth-century writers in the West as Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot in “Space-Logic in the Longer Song Lyrics of the Southern Sung: Reading Wu Wen-ying’s Ying-t’i-hsü,” Journal of Sung-Yuan Studies 25 (1995): 169–191. Joseph Frank’s ideas can be found in The Idea of Spatial Form (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991).

3. Kao, “Xiaoling,” 8, 20.

4. Huang Zhaohan has created a rather comprehensive collection of available explanatory notes and interpretations on all of Jiang Kui’s song lyrics in his book Jiang Baishi ci xiangzhu (The Ci Poetry of Jiang Baishi, with Detailed Annotations) (Taipei: Xuesheng shuju, 1998). I use this text as the main source of the texts of Jiang Kui’s two song lyrics and of the information and ideas of previous scholars on them.

5. Some of my discussion on Jiang Kui has been extracted from Shuen-fu Lin, The Transformation of the Chinese Lyrical Tradition: Chiang K’uei and Southern Sung Tz’u Poetry (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978). My views on Jiang Kui’s poetry have changed somewhat in the interim; these changes are reflected or accounted for in the discussion in this chapter.

6. Huang, Jiang Baishi ci xiangzhu, 281.

7. Huang, Jiang Baishi ci xiangzhu, 280–352.

8. Huang, Jiang Baishi ci xiangzhu, 282.

9. Huang, Jiang Baishi ci xiangzhu, 316.

10. Huang, Jiang Baishi ci xiangzhu, 316–317.

11. Huang, Jiang Baishi ci xiangzhu, 317.

12. Wuchao xiaoshuo (Fictions from Five Dynasties), juan 3, Xijing zaji (Miscellaneous Notes of the Western Capital), ab.

13. Huang, Jiang Baishi ci xiangzhu, 317.

14. Liu Wan has discussed this and other issues in her brilliant article on “Dappled Shadows”: “Jiang kui shuying ci de yuyan neibu guanxi ji shidian yiyi” (Jiang Kui’s “Shuying”: The Internal Patterns of Its Language and the Meanings of the Allusions Used Therein), Cixue 9 (1992): 22–30.

15. Huang, Jiang Baishi ci xiangzhu, 317.

16. Huang, Jiang Baishi ci xiangzhu, 317.

17. Huang, Jiang Baishi ci xiangzhu, 318.

18. Huantuo, rendered “playful spit” here, seems to allude to the following lines in the song lyric “Yihu zhu” (A Bushel of Pearls), by Li Yu (937–978):

Charmingly she leans across the embroidered bed,

Chews thoroughly at scraps of red wool,

Laughs, and then spits at her lover.

It seems clear that Wu Wenying uses this allusion to Li Yu’s woman’s dalliance as a symbol of his happy union with his own beloved.

19. This translation is an adaptation of the magnificent translations in Grace S. Fong’s study of the thirteenth-century ci writer, Wu Wenying and the Art of Southern Song Ci Poetry (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), 110–112, and in Stephen Owen, “A Door Finely Wrought: Memory and Art,” in Remembrances: The Experience of the Past in Classical Chinese Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 114–130. In the translation, I have supplied the pronoun “I” throughout, which is absent in the original Chinese text. I hope that the addition of “I” has not spoiled the quality of spatiality in the song lyric.

20. Yang Tiefu, Wu Mengchuang ci jianshi (The Ci Poetry of Wu Wenying, with Notes and Explanations), ed. Chen Bangyan and Zhang Qihui (Guangzhou: Guangdong renmin chubanshe, 1992), 1.

21. Much of my interpretation of Wu Wenying’s “Prelude to the Oriole’s Song” and of other materials related to this great song lyric is drawn from Lin, “Space-Logic in the Longer Song Lyrics of the Southern Sung.”

22. Liu Yongji, Weidishi shuo ci (Discourses on the Song Lyric from the Weidi Studio) (Shanghai: Guji chubanshe, 1987), 58.

23. The first three themes were noted by the late Qing and early Republican scholar Chen Xun in his book Haixiao shuoci (Haixiao’s Discourses on Ci Poetry), in Mengchuang ciji (The Collected Ci Poetry of Mengchuang) (Taipei: Shijie shuju, 1967). Curiously, he did not give a theme to the last section of the song lyric (8b–9a). The modern scholar Wan Yunjun has added pingdiao (mourning for the dead) as the theme of the fourth section, but he has changed the theme for the first section to duyou (journey alone) (“Lun jinren guanyu songci yanjiu yixie pianxiang” [On Some Orientations in the Recent Studies on the Ci Poetry of the Song Dynasty], in Jinian Gu Jiegang xueshu lunwen ji [Collected Essays in Commemoration of Gu Jiegang’s Scholarship] [Chengdu: Bashu shushe, 1990], 802). I think that Chen Xun’s shangchun (lament for spring) is more precise.

24. Yang, Wu Mengchuang ci jianshi, 185–186.

25. Yang, Wu Mengchuang ci jianshi, 213–214,

26. Yang, Wu Mengchuang ci jianshi, 193–195.

27. Yang, Wu Mengchuang ci jianshi, 210–211.

28. Yang, Wu Mengchuang ci jianshi, 191.

29. Yang, Wu Mengchuang ci jianshi, 1–2.

30. Yang, Wu Mengchuang ci jianshi, 266–267.

31. Liu, Weidishi shuo ci, 60.

32. Yang, Wu Mengchuang ci jianshi, 192.

33. Chen, Haixiao shuoci, 9a.