SUNG DYNASTY: THE MAINSTREAM RENEWED

(c. 1000 to 1225)

 

 

 

THE LAST HALF CENTURY of the T’ang Dynasty produced a generally mediocre and derivative poetry of three distinctive types: highly refined landscape poetry, in the style of Wang Wei; a dense hermetic poetry, written in the style of Li Shang-yin and representing the last flickerings of the experimental tradition; and finally, poetry from the romantic world of courtesans (see the discussion of tz’u below). These preoccupations reflected the political enervation of the T’ang, and they continued through the half century of instability that followed the T’ang’s collapse and into the early decades of the Sung.

As the Sung returned the country to stability, peace, and prosperity, Sung poets reacted against the precious and self-involved poetries of the late T’ang years, returning the art to its mainstream commitment to clarity and empirical immediacy. Critics have wanted to define a distinctive Sung style that can be contrasted decisively to the T’ang, but it is better to see the Sung as an extension of trends already existing in T’ang poetry. And the great Sung poets are of course quite singular, so broad generalities about them are hardly more accurate than they are for T’ang poets. Any attempt to define a period style denies them their individuality and tends to blur them all into one poet, but it is perhaps possible to suggest some orientations that most of the poets share.

Sung poets had little patience for mere poetic effect, be it the pure insights of spiritualized landscape poems or the self-involved ambiguities of Li Shang-yin’s evocative atmospherics. Rather than looking to a carefully constructed realm of artifice for insight, they looked to the workaday world in which we live our actual lives. Their commitment was to reality in all its stuttering imperfections, so their poems often focused on precise physical description and attention to the most ordinary, even unsavory aspects of everyday life. They felt little need to poeticize what we call reality and the Chinese called tzu-jan (see Key Terms), an attitude profoundly informed by Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism. Now fully assimilated, less a posture to be perfected and declared in a poem than the simple fabric of experience for the intelligentsia, Ch’an taught that enlightenment is nothing other than a clear mind’s attention to everyday actuality, an insight that inspired a broad empirical trend not only in Sung arts but also in philosophy and science.

This Ch’an attention to tzu-jan is reflected in the imagistic texture of these realistic poems, but it was also deepened, for Sung poets typically spoke with a kind of calm artlessness, which they considered the essence and most fundamental value of poetry. This artlessness, central to the revitalization that made the Sung poetic era rival even the T’ang, offers an alternative, and perhaps finally more profound engagement with tzu-jan than that found in T’ang poetics. Sage belonging to Lao Tzu’s wilderness cosmology had typically been embodied in the subject matter of the poem, in the poem’s explicit statement. But the major Sung poets enact that belonging in the form of the poem rather than simply portray it in the poem’s subject matter. There is an easygoing, even bland feel to the artless language and relaxed movement of such poems. As with Po Chii-i, this strategy integrates the movements of thought into the movements of tzu-jan. Profoundly influenced by their Ch’an practice, Sung poets had seen through the need to assert a powerful individuality by shaping a singular vision of the world, for such an assertion isolates the individual outside natural process. So Sung poetry traded the singular poetries typical of the T’ang Dynasty for a plainspoken, uncrafted simplicity.

This approach is of course radically antipoetic, for what appears to be an unassuming mediocre poem becomes a great poem, and what seems to be a very original and striking poem becomes a mediocre and uninsightful poem. (This makes it difficult to decide which Sung poems are truly important: the most interesting poems may not represent Sung poetics accurately, and poems that best represent the poetics may not be terribly interesting.) In fact, it may very well be that the greatest poets of the Sung are actually among the least remembered poets of the Sung. In later centuries, this conundrum often led critics to question which is the greater poetry, the intense and virtuosic poetry of the T’ang’s major poets or the plain and mundane poetry of the Sung, for the Sung’s simplicity of voice is actually quite complex: it is the voice of a poet participating in the indifferent process of tzu-jan burgeoning forth from the undifferentiated unity of absence (wu: see Key Terms). This represents a culmination of the poetics developed by T’ao Ch’ien and Po Chü-i, the poetics of an egoless ego, accepting the self with all its delusions and clumsiness as a part of tzu-jan’s unfolding.

The Sung revitalization represents both a mature stage of Ch’an practice and a return to beginnings, to Lao Tzu and the lazybones understanding of T’ao Ch’ien. Su Tung-p’o described Sung poems as revealing a serene inner richness concealed within a withered exterior. And Huang T’ing-chien, expressing his own poetic values as much as anything, said of T’ao Ch’ien: “When you’ve just come of age, reading these poems seems like gnawing on withered wood. But reading them after long experience in the world, it seems the decisions of your life were all made in ignorance.”

TZ’U

The primary form for serious poetry throughout the written tradition had been the shih, which grew out of the folk tradition in the “Nineteen Ancient-Style Poems” and the Lady Midnight collection (here), but during the Sung a new form came into widespread use: the tz’u, or song-lyric. The tz’u has a looser, more spontaneous feel, as it has lines of varying length, rather than the rigid uniformity of the shih, in which all lines are the same length (either five or seven characters). Another difference is in the titles: while shih employ titles that somehow reflect the subject matter of the poems, tz’u are simply titled after the tunes they were written to accompany. (Rather than use misleading and arbitrary titles, tz’u are left untitled in this translation.)

The tz’u form emerged during the T’ang Dynasty, when a new type of music migrated into China with female entertainers from central Asia. In the folk tradition, tz’u filled the same function as Music-Bureau yüeh-fu poetry (see here), but with a new feel to the music, and it addressed a similar range of peasant themes in a similarly straightforward way. No Chinese music from this period survives, but this exotic foreign music apparently had more emotive force than the indigenous music of China and so was quickly adopted by courtesans for their seductive songs. These courtesans soon began inventing lyrics to fit their purposes—sensuous lyrics they could sing to entertain and entice their male clients.

The new culture of romance that arose with the increasing popularity of courtesans proved very appealing for poets during the late T’ang years, notably Li Ho, Tu Mu, and Li Shang-yin. In a culture governed by propriety and arranged marriages, this courtesan romance offered a new emotional stimulus and a sense of romantic freedom that we now take for granted. With a few early exceptions (here, here, e.g.), the tz’u form entered the establishment male tradition in the mid-eighth century, when male poets began writing tz’u lyrics to be sung by courtesans. Naturally, they were just what the men wanted to hear: suggestive songs about beautiful women languorously longing for men, such as this tz’u by Wen T’ing-yün (812–870), who became the first notable tz’u poet in the male tradition by infusing the form with the sensibility of experimentalists such as Li Ho and Li Shang-yin:

UNTITLED

Willow floss on and on,

delicate spring rain,

and out beyond blossoms, the sound of a waterclock’s drip.

Borderland geese startled,

crows lift off city walls.

Golden partridge gracing painted screens.

Thin mist fragrant

entering bed-curtains,

these ponds and pavilions of passion are all forlorn sorrow.

Embroidered curtains

behind a red candle.

I dream on and on, my love: you won’t know how far.

Tz’u poetry became a significant part of the “decadence” that typified poetry in the later T’ang, and being limited to scenes of courtesan romance, it was not generally considered part of the “high art” tradition. It remained the realm of emotional self-indulgence that many associated with the end of the T’ang in the form of Li Yü (937–978), who was the last significant T’ang poet and the one who opened the tz’u form to topics beyond romance. Li Yü was also the T’ang emperor (actually of the Southern T’ang, last vestige of the destroyed T’ang Dynasty) who lost his nation to the Sung because, rather than attending to the business of his country, he devoted his energies to the beauties of art and romance. As they illustrate this moral interpretation of late T’ang cultural history, Li’s most widely known poems are those he wrote at the end of his life, while imprisoned by the Sung conquerors, and they are filled with intense nostalgia and regret:

UNTITLED

Spring blossoms and autumn moons—when will they end?

Things happened: who knows few or many?

Last night in this little tower, still more spring wind,

I couldn’t bear to turn and look at my old country flooded with moonlight.

 

Carved railings, jade staircases—they must still be there:

the rouged faces will be new, that’s all.

How much grief can there be in a single person?

It’s like a great river swollen with springtime water surging east.

The range of subject matter in tz’u writing continued to expand, and in the Sung Dynasty the tz’u came to be seen as a serious poetic form like the shih, a transformation often attributed to Su Tung-p’o. Virtually all great Sung poets wrote at least some tz’u, thus bringing to fruition in the male “high art” tradition yet another infusion of poetic energy from the folk tradition and, indeed, as in the Lady Midnight poems, from the female folk tradition.