The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry (32 page)

After combing and washing,
she leans alone on the River Gazing Tower.
A thousand boats sail by, but none are his.
Slant sunlight lingers like passion on the unhurried water
passing an islet of white duckweed.
¹
She is broken inside.

To the Tune of “Beautiful Barbarian”
Tiny mountains upon mountains gleam darkly gold on the folding    
screen.
Her hair is a perfumed cloud sweeping the snowfield of her cheek.
She rises late and draws winged eyebrows like moths,
washes, combs, lazily puts on her face.
Mirrors on either side reflect a flower.
Her face and the blossom illuminate each other.
On her freshly embroidered silk jacket
are golden partridges flying wing to wing.

Li Shangyin, also known as “Jade Stream Scholar,” was born in Huojia (in modern-day Henan province). His father, a magistrate, died when he was nine, and his early life was unsettled and transient. Yet he was a diligent student, and in 837 he passed the imperial examinations. An early patron was an enemy of his father-in-law, and so he found himself attacked and held back in his career. He remained a minor official for most of his life, working in the capital and for provincial military governors. About six hundred of his poems survive. His poetry is noted for its difficulty, denseness, allusiveness, symbolism, and obscurity. He wrote a number of untitled poems that are most probably erotic poems about secret love affairs (the lover in the poems could have been a concubine or the Daoist nun with whom he had an affair), but he also wrote poems about his friends and family, poems on historical and current events, and poems on objects. Despite his undistinguished official career, he was a major poet, an original voice in Chinese poetry, and a major influence on succeeding generations of writers.

So hard to reunite, so hard to part
as the east wind slackens and the flowers all wither.
A spring silkworm spits silk till the moment it dies.
A candle weeps till it's a charred nub.
In the morning mirror I worry my hair is changing color;
at night when chanting poems I feel cold moonlight.
It is not far from here to the Island of Fairies.
Bluebird, please help me find my way.

You ask, “When will you return?” and I can't say.
On Ba Mountain night rain swells the autumn ponds.
When will we trim candles by the west window
and recollect tonight and the Ba Mountain rain?

Wei Zhuang came from Duling, near the Tang capital of Changan (present-day Xian, Shanxi province), and despite coming from a distinguished family, had a troubled life. His parents died when he was young, and the family declined, but despite financial hardship he found himself an education and eventually became a high official. When he was a young man, the country fell into warfare between warlords, and in these times of agitation his life was displaced and transient. He tried several times to take the highest imperial examinations but failed, succeeding only in 894. He was given a minor post in the capital, and then was posted to Sichuan, where he came to know Wang Jian. After the fall of the Tang dynasty in 907, he worked for Wang Jian, who had proclaimed himself the new emperor of Shu. He helped to form the new state and became grand councilor to the emperor. He lived in Chengdu
and, being a great fan of Du Fu's poetry, bought his old home to renovate and live in. He is well known for his lyric poems (
ci-
form poems), fifty-three of which survive, and for a long narrative poem titled
The Lament of the Lady of Chin
, which depicts the fall of Changan to rebel forces in 881. He later suppressed this poem, striking it from his collected poems, and it disappeared for more than a thousand years, only to be discovered in 1899 in a cache of manuscripts in the caves of Dunhuang. With Li Yu, Wen Tingyun, and Feng Yansi, Wei Zhuang is considered one of the four early masters of lyric-form verse. He often wrote erotically charged or lovelorn boudoir-theme poems, and he compiled an important anthology of Tang dynasty poetry.

Sikong Tu was the author of “The Twenty-four Styles of Poetry,” an influential Tang dynasty
ars poetica
that categorized classical Chinese poetry into twenty-four genres while embodying the essence of each style within a poem. Despite its stated purpose— to bring clarity and definition to poetic practice—this series of poems is notoriously difficult and opaque. Much of its difficulty derives from Sikong Tu's somewhat ill-defined Daoism (blended with Buddhist and Confucian elements), which permeates these
poems and converts many lines into gnomic, mystical riddles that tie commentators and translators into fantastic knots. Yet the conjunction of inspiration and mysticism can be auspicious. The imagination
is
sublimely indefinite and slippery, and it does resist being chopped up and constrained into little boxes, so a nomenclature that has a spiritual cast to it may express more about the murky sources of poetry than a rigorously precise one.

In fact, a Daoist changeability and lack of differentiation is the point of many of these poems, as in “The Implicit Style”:

“The Dao,” writes Sikong Tu, “isn't confined by shape, it's round at times or square.” The same goes for the inspirational essence that gives a poem its charge. For Sikong Tu, these two essences are not differentiated, either. Thus, poets are practitioners of a divine craft who must perfect themselves internally to achieve perfection in what they write: “If you free your nature/you'll have this style.” Such perfection, like spiritual perfection, can only be alluded to, never actually defined: “It is beyond words/and these are clumsy metaphors.” It is extraordinarily hard to find, yet it will come to you by itself. It must be achieved through
lack of desire
and through
lack of effort
, since in both Daoism and Buddhism, grasping desire, effort, and attachment to the world are precisely what chain us to our mundane state.

Sikong Tu came from Shanxi province, from a distinguished family of government servants, but he himself had an official career marked by banishments and political instability. Nevertheless he was celebrated in his time for both his poems and his criticism. He was powerfully influenced by the Confucian tradition and later turned to Daoism and Buddhism. It is said that when the Tang dynasty was overthrown and the last Tang emperor was murdered, Sikong Tu starved himself to death in protest.