Po Chü-yi (772–846)
Monarch of Han,1 he doted on beauty, yearned for a bewitching temptress;2
Through the dominions of his sway, for many years he sought but did not find her.
There was in the family of Yang a maiden just then reaching fullness,
4 Raised in the women’s quarters protected, unacquainted yet with others.
Heaven had given her a ravishing form, impossible for her to hide,
And one morning she was chosen for placement at the side of the sovereign king.
When she glanced behind with a single smile, a hundred seductions were quickened;
8 All the powdered and painted ones in the Six Palaces3 now seemed without beauty of face.
In the coolness of springtime, she was permitted to bathe in the Hua-ch’ing4 pools,
Where the slickening waters of the hot springs washed over her firm flesh.
Supported as she rose by a waiting-maid, she was so delicate, listless:
12 This was the moment when first she acceded to His favor and beneficence.
Cloud-swept tresses, flowery features, quivering hair-pendants of gold,
And behind the warmth of lotus-bloom drapings, they passed the springtime nights—
Springtime nights so grievously brief, as the sun rose again high!
16 From this time onward the sovereign king no longer held early court.
Taken with pleasure, she attended on the feasts, continuing without let;
Springtime followed springtime outing, evening after evening she controlled.
Of the comely beauties of the rear palace,5 there were three thousand persons,
20 And preferments and affection for all three thousand were placed on her alone.
In her golden room, with makeup perfect, the Delicate One6 serves for the night;
In a tower of jade, with the feast concluded, drunkenness befits love in spring.
Her sisters and brothers, older or younger, all were enfeoffed with land;7
24 The most enviable brilliance and glory quickened their doorways and gates.
Then it came to pass, throughout the empire, that the hearts of fathers and mothers
No longer valued the birth of a son but valued the birth of daughters.
The high sites of Mount Li’s palace reached into clouds in the blue,
28 And transcendent music, wafted on the wind, was heard there everywhere.
Measured songs, languorous dancing merged with sound of strings and bamboo,
As the sovereign king looked on all day long, never getting enough …
Until, out of Yü-yang,8 horse-borne war-drums came, shaking the earth,
32 To dismay and smash the melody of “Rainbow Skirts and Feathered Vestments.”9
* * *
By the nine-layered walls and watchtowers, dust and smoke arose,
And a thousand chariots, ten thousand riders moved off to the southwest.10
The halcyon-plumed banners jounced and joggled along, moving and stopping again,
36 As they went forth westward from the metropolis’ gates, something more than a hundred tricents.
And then the Six Armies would go no farther—there was no other recourse,
But the fluently curved moth-eyebrows11 must die before the horses.
Floriform filigrees were strewn on the ground, to be retrieved by no one,
40 Halcyon tailfeathers, an aigrette of gold, and hairpins made of jade.
The sovereign king covered his face—he could not save her;
When he looked back, it was with tears of blood that mingled in their flow.
* * *
Yellowish grit spreads and scatters, as the wind blows drear and doleful;
44 Cloudy walkways turn and twist, climbing Saber Gallery’s12 heights.
Below Mount Omei13 there are very few men who pass by;
Lightless now are the pennons and flags in the sun’s dimmer aura.
Waters of Shu’s streams deepest blue, the mountains of Shu are green—
48 For the Paragon, the Ruler, dawn to dawn, night upon night, his feelings:
Seeing the moon from his transient palace—a sight that tears at his heart;
Hearing small bells in the evening rain—a sound that stabs his insides.14
* * *
Heaven revolves, the days roll on, and the dragon carriage was turned around;
52 Having reached the spot, faltering he halted, unable to leave it again.
But amidst that muddy earth, below Ma-wei Slope,
Her jade countenance was not to be seen—just a place of empty death.
Sovereign and servants beheld each other, cloaks wet from weeping;
56 And, looking east, to the metropolis’ gates, let their horses take them homeward.
* * *
Returned home now, and the ponds, the pools, all were as before—
The lotuses of Grand Ichor Pool, the willows by the Night-Is-Young Palace.15
The lotus blossoms resemble her face, the willow branches her eyebrows;
60 Confronted with this, would it be possible that his tears should not fall?
From the day that peach and plum flowers open, in the springtime breezes,
Until the leaves of the “we-together”16 tree are shed in the autumn rain….
The West Palace and the Southern Interior17 were rife with autumn
grasses,
64 And fallen leaves covered the steps, their red not swept away.
The artistes, once young, of the Pear Garden18 have hair gone newly white;
The Pepper Room19 attendants and their budding nymphs are become aged now.
Fireflies flit through the hall-room at dusk, as he yearns in desolation;
68 When all the wick of his lone lamp is used, sleep still fails to come.
Ever later, more dilatory, sound the watch-drum and bell in the lengthening nights;
Fitfully sparkling, the River of Stars20 streams onward to the dawn-flushed sky.
The roof-tiles, paired as love-ducks, grow chilled, and flowers of frost grow thick;
72 The halcyon-plumed coverlet is cold—whom would he share it with?
Dim-distanced, far-faded, are the living from the dead, parted more than a year ago;
Neither her soul nor her spirit have ever yet come into his dreams.
* * *
A Taoist adept from Lin-ch’iung,21 a visitor to the Hung-tu Gate,22
76 Could use the perfection of his essential being to contact souls and spirits.
Because of his broodings the sovereign king, tossing and turning, still yearned;
So he set to task this adept of formulas, to search for her sedulously.
Cleaving the clouds, driving the ethers, fleeting as a lightning-flash,
80 Ascending the heavens, entering into the earth, he sought her out everywhere.
On high he traversed the sky’s cyan drop-off,23 and below to the Yellow Springs;24
In both places, to the limits of vision, she was nowhere to be seen.
Of a sudden he heard rumor then of a transcendent mountain in the sea,
84 A mountain resting in void and nullity, amidst the vaporous seemings.
High buildings and galleries shimmer there brightly, and five-colored clouds mount up;
In the midst of this, relaxed and unhurried, were hosts of tender sylphs.
And in their midst was one, known as Greatest Perfection,25
88 Whose snow-white skin and flower-like features appeared to resemble hers.
In the western wing of the gatehouse of gold, he knocked at the jade bolting,
In turn setting in motion Little Jade who made report to Doubly Completed.26
When word was told of the Son of Heaven’s envoy, from the House of Han,
92 Then, within the nine-flowered drapings, her dreaming spirit startled.
She searched for her cloak, pushed pillow aside, arose, walked forth distractedly;
Door-screens of pearl, partitions of silver, she opened out one after another.
With her cloud-chignon half-mussed to one side, newly awakened from sleep,
96 With flowered cap27 set awry, down she came to the ceremonial hall.
Her sylphine sleeves, puffed by a breeze, were lifted, flared and fluttering,
Just the same as in the dance of “Rainbow Skirts and Feathered Vestments.”
But her jade countenance looked bleak, forlorn, crisscrossed with tears—
100 A single branch of pear blossom, in springtime laden with rain.
Restraining her feelings, focusing her gaze, she asked her sovereign king’s indulgence:
“Once we were parted, both voice and face were lost to limitless vagueness.
There, within Chao-yang Basilica,28 affection and favor were cut short,
104 While here in P’eng-lai’s29 palaces, the days and months have lengthened.
“Turning my head and looking down to the sites of the mortal sphere,
I can no longer see Ch’ang-an, what I see is dust and fog.
Let me take up these familiar old objects to attest to my deep love:
108 The filigree case, the two-pronged hairpin of gold, I entrust to you to take back.
“Of the hairpin but one leg remains, and one leaf-fold of the case;
The hairpin is broken in its yellow gold, and the case’s filigree halved.
But if only his heart is as enduring as the filigree and the gold,
112 Above in heaven, or amidst men, we shall surely see each other.”
As the envoy was to depart, she entrusted poignantly to him words as well,
Words in which there was a vow that only two hearts would know:
“On the seventh day of the seventh month, in the Hall of Protracted Life,30
116 At the night’s mid-point, when we spoke alone, with no one else around—
’In heaven, would that we might become birds of coupled wings!
On earth, would that we might be trees of intertwining limbs! …’”
Heaven is lasting, earth long-standing, but there is a season for their end;
120 This regret stretches on and farther, with no ending time.
Translated by Paul W. Kroll
“The Song of Lasting Regret” is the romanticized retelling of the love affair between the great Emperor Li Lung-chi (reigned 712–756, posthumously known as Hsüan Tsung) and Yang Yü-huan, the lady raised by him in 742 to the high rank of “Precious Consort” (kuei-fei).
The emperor’s infatuation with Lady Yang and his virtual abandonment of government affairs (first to the dictatorial Li Lin-fu, who held sway as Minister of State until 752, and then to the equally grasping Yang Kuo-chung, a distant cousin of Lady Yang) have long been regarded in both official and popular history as the main factors leading to the ruin of Hsüan Tsung’s long reign and the near-destruction of the dynasty itself. The effective instrument of overthrow was a Sogdian-Turkic general with the sinicized name An Lu-shan, who, as a personal favorite of both the emperor and his consort, gradually accumulated supreme military power in the northeast border region (near modern-day Peking) and, in December 755, turned his troops against the government. By July 756 the rebel forces were in position to overrun the capital city, Ch’ang-an. In the face of this imminent threat, the emperor and his immediate entourage and military guard fled the capital in the early morning of July 14, intending to take refuge in Shu (present-day Szechwan) in the southwest, where Yang Kuo-chung had built up a private stronghold and sphere of influence. The next day, at the Ma-wei post-station (located some thirty miles west of the capital), the imperial troops killed Yang Kuo-chung and refused to move on unless the emperor put Lady Yang to death as well. Hsüan Tsung was compelled to appease the soldiers, and Lady Yang submitted to being strangled to death with a cord wielded by Kao Li-shih, chief eunuch and the emperor’s oldest confidant. After this event the emperor moved on to sanctuary in Shu, while the heir-apparent Li Heng (posthumously known as Su Tsung, reigned 756–62) broke off from the main party with a contingent of soldiers to progress northwest and organize a base of loyalist resistance to the rebels. Shortly thereafter, Li Heng proclaimed himself emperor; Hsüan Tsung had no choice but to acknowledge his now emeritus status. About a year and a half later, Ch’ang-an was retaken by T’ang forces, and Su Tsung invited the old emperor to return to the capital, where he would live out his remaining years in sad remembrance of earlier glories. But it was not until 763 that the rebellion begun by An Lu-shan would be fully quelled. When the state was finally reunified, and the forty-four-year reign of Hsüan Tsung—unprecedented in its splendor—was but a memory, it seemed to most that a great turning point in history had been passed. Notwithstanding more serious political and military causes for the disaster, that a reign of such magnificence could end with such a crash confirmed most members of the traditionally misogynist mandarinate in the view that the root cause of the debacle was lodged in the emperor’s allegedly shameful relationship with Precious Consort Yang.
This is the view adopted by Po Chü-yi in his poem. But Po is as interested in the sentimental aspects of the tale as he is in its political implications. Indeed, it is primarily, in his telling, a love story—one which he allows himself license to embroider at times with incidents contrary to fact (such as the trampling of Lady Yang under the army’s horses and the emperor’s reduced entourage passing by Mount Omei) as well as the insertion of scenes of pure fantasy (such as the Taoist adept’s visit to Lady Yang’s ethereal essence in the isles of the immortals and his conversation with her there).
The latter part of the poem describes Lady Yang’s visit to Hsüan Tsung as a ghost. Their deeply emotional encounter, as indeed their entire relationship, became the theme of many later poems, stories, and plays (e.g., Ma Chih-yüan’s [see selection 107] popular Yüan drama entitled Autumn in the Han Palace [Han kung ch’iu]).
The poem was written early in 807 C.E. and was originally supplemented with a more historically accurate prose recitation of events, “Tale of the Song of Lasting Regret” by Po’s friend, Ch’en Hung. Composed in 120 heptasyllabic lines, the poem is organized in a series of vignettes set forth in rhyming couplets and in quatrains. These short, lilting units are framed by octets at the beginning and the end of the poem. Rhyme changes in the original are indicated as stanza-breaks in the translation.
Po Chü-yi became a Presented Scholar in 799 but, because of his uncompromising honesty and forthrightness, his official career was not smooth. In his later years, he settled in Loyang where he formed a society with some Buddhist monks of Fragrant Hill temple and styled himself “Lay Buddhist of Fragrant Hill.” Po left behind more than three thousand poetic works, making him the most prolific of all T’ang poets. His language was plain and relatively easy to understand, a cause for scorn by literary critics inclined to more mannered and pretentious styles. A story about Po tells of how he would not consider a poem finished if it could not be understood when read aloud to a washerwoman. Perhaps it is his comprehensibility and naturalness that contribute to making him by far the best-known Chinese poet in Japan.
1. Po Chü-yi here adopts the convention—often used by T’ang poets when writing of contemporary political matters—that he is speaking of the first great Chinese imperium, the Han.
2. “Bewitching temptress” is literally “state-toppler,” i.e., a beauty for whom one would lose everything.
3. The dwellings of the imperial concubines.
4. The Hua-ch’ing (Floriate Clear) Palace on Mount Li, some fifteen miles east of Ch’ang-an, included several hot springs. Hsüan Tsung was particularly fond of this imperial retreat. He had the buildings, grounds, and pools refurbished, and removed there with Lady Yang and necessary court officials at increasingly frequent intervals during the later years of his reign (see also lines 28–29).
5. The women’s quarters, whose numerous maidens are now wholly neglected by the emperor, for whom Lady Yang is the only woman that exists.
6. The “Delicate One” (chiao) figures Lady Yang in the person of Ah-chiao, beloved of Emperor Wu of Han (Han Wu Ti) in his youth and about whom he once said, “If I could have Ah-chiao, I should have a room of gold made in which to treasure her.”
7. Besides Yang Kuo-chung, other relatives of Lady Yang, including most conspicuously three of her sisters, received lavish conferments and marks of favor from the emperor.
8. An Lu-shan’s headquarters, about seventy miles east of present-day Peking.
9. The new name given by Hsüan Tsung to an exotic Indo-Iranian melody that he rescored and to which Lady Yang danced in a costume made to resemble the fairy garments of moon maidens. According to one tradition, the emperor brought the melody back with him from a mystical voyage to the moon.
10. The emperor and his personal retinue are fleeing the capital.
11. Those of Lady Yang.
12. The lofty pass that connects the territory of Ch’in (in which Ch’ang-an is located) with that of Shu.
13. About one hundred miles southwest of Chengtu, this is the most important mountain in Szechwan. It was officially ennobled in T’ang times for its supernatural potency (see selection 183).
14. The sight of the moon pains him because he remembers other nights when he and Lady Yang enjoyed it together, just as he recalls the music she used to play as he hears the plaintive sound of little bells tinkling in the rain under the eaves of a roof.
15. Both were famous Han-time sites. The House of T’ang had its own pool of this name within the grounds of the emperor’s Palace of Great Light.
16. The Wu-t’ung (Sterculia platanifolia). Its name is homophonous with the phrase “we together” (wu t’ung), and the falling of its leaves in the autumn rain suggests to Hsüan Tsung the extinction of the love he once shared with Lady Yang.
17. Referring respectively to the Sweet Springs Hall in the “palace city” and the Palace of Ascendant Felicity near Ch’ang-an’s east market-ward. Both were the residences assigned by Su Tsung to the retired emperor, who was not permitted to live in the grander compound of the Palace of Great Light again.
18. This garden had housed Hsüan Tsung’s group of private musicians in the years of his glory and pleasure.
19. The dwelling of the chief consort.
20. The Milky Way.
21. In modern-day Szechwan.
22. A Han dynasty designation for one of the capital portals.
23. The distant deep-blue reaches of the sky, and more specifically—to Taoist initiates—the region bearing that name in the Heaven of Nascent Azure.
24. The traditional Chinese underworld destination of one’s p’o or carnal (earth-bound) souls.
25. “Greatest Perfection” (T’ai-chen) was the religious name adopted by Lady Yang when she briefly took orders as a Taoist priestess, prior to being recognized with a formal title as sharer of Hsüan Tsung’s bed. Yang Yü-huan had originally been the wife of Hsüan Tsung’s eighteenth son, Li Mao (Prince Shou). Her short period as a Taoist priestess, while not entirely a sham (Hsüan Tsung was intimately interested in Taoist teachings), served to “purify” her for attachment to the emperor.
26. “Little Jade” (Hsiao-yü) and “Doubly Completed” (Shuang-ch’eng) are T’ai-chen’s maids. The latter was known in Taoist tradition as an attendant of the goddess Hsi Wang-mu (“Queen Mother of the West,” see selection 156, note 5); the former was the beautiful daughter of King Fu-ch’ai (reigned 495–473 B.C.E.) of the ancient state of Wu.
27. That worn by Taoist priests and priestesses.
28. The Chao-yang (Splendid Sunshine) Basilica was one of the halls occupied by imperial consorts during the Han.
29. Named after the Taoist isles of immortality in the eastern ocean.
30. The Hall of Protracted Life (Ch’ang-sheng tien) was part of the Hua-ch’ing complex on Mount Li. Its name was used as the title of a famous early Ch’ing drama about the ill-fated love affair between Hsüan Tsung and “Precious Consort” Yang, ten years and three drafts in the writing by Hung Sheng (1650?–1704).