The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry

by Tony Barnstone

  WEN TINGYUN

  (812–870)

  Wen Tingyun was a native of Taiyuan, in Shanxi province. Known for his wit, intelligence, and handsome looks, he was a failure as an official (he failed the exams many times) and lived the dissolute life of a drunkard and frequenter of brothels. He was a friend of the important late Tang dynasty poet Li Shangyin, and the two of them were poetic innovators and among the first important writers in the lyric (ci) form, in which poetry is written to the meter of popular songs. Lyric poetry has a variable number of words per line, and so is called “long and short” poetry. It is rhymed and has a strict pattern of verse and tones and thus requires a quick imagination and exceptional skill for it to be used effectively. Like the sonnet in the European tradition, the poems were exhilaratingly complex and difficult. Although lyric poems were originally written to music that came from Western China, or from beyond, the scores have now been lost.

  In contrast to the pure and deceptively simple poetry of the high Tang, Wen Tingyun's poetry is ornate, allusive, and typically concerned with love, loss, and sensuality. As Wen Tingyun was known for consorting with courtesans, his work is often set in the boudoir of a lady, in the entertainment world, or in the glamour of the court. Like the work of other important early lyric poets, his poems anticipated the overwhelming importance of the lyric form in the Song dynasty.

  from To the Tune of “The Water Clock Sings at Night”

  1

  The willow weeps long silk,

  a slender spring rain.

  Past the flowers a water clock sings forever,

  startling frontier geese,

  crows on the city wall,

  even gilded partridges on the painted screen.

  A thin perfumed mist

  seeps through the curtain

  and grief fills the ponds and pavilions of Lady Xie.1

  One red candle

  behind the drooping embroidered curtain.

  She dreams on forever of things he won't understand.

  3

  The jade incense burner smokes

  and a red candle sheds tears,

  casting slant light on the hall of paintings and an autumn sorrow.

  Her painted eyebrows are fading

  and her hair is tangled clouds.

  The night is forever, the quilt and pillow cold.

  On the parasol trees

  rain falls at the time of the midnight drum

  unaware of the pain of separation, this intense bitterness;

  leaf by leaf,

  plink, plunk,

  it drips on the empty steps till dawn.

  To the Tune of “Dreaming of the

  South Side of the River”

  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.1She 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.

  1 Lady Xie was a concubine said to have been kept against her will in the luxurious mansion of Li Teyu.

  1 “Islet of white duckweed” is a traditional Chinese coded phrase for the place of departure and separation.

  LI SHANGYIN

  (813–858)

  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.

  The Patterned Zither

  There's no reason for the patterned zither to have fifty strings;

  each string and fret evokes my younger years.

  Dreaming at dawn, Zhuangzi confused himself with a butterfly.1

  King Wang's spring heart entered into the cuckoo.2

  Dark ocean, bright moon, teardrops on a pearl.

  Jade smokes on Blue Field Mountain when the sun is warm.

  This emotion could mellow into memory

  but in the instant it just perplexes.

  Visiting Leyou Park**

  Toward evening I feel upset,

  driving my wagon up this ancient field.

  The late sun's beauty seems boundless.

  But dusk is close.

  Untitled

  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.

  Poem Sent as a Letter to the North on a Rainy Night

  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?

  1 The Daoist sage Zhuangzi dreamed one night that he was a butterfly. When he woke up he was uncertain whether he was a man who had dreamed of being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was a man.

  2 In the Zhou dynasty, the emperor of the Shu, Wang Di, was supposed to have turned into a cuckoo upon his death and to have appeared every spring to sing “return” to his people, reminding them to plant their crops.

  * See the note on Du Mu's poem “Visiting Leyou Park.”

  WEI ZHUANG

  (836–910)

  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.

  To the Tune of “Silk-Washing Brook”

  Sorrow is dream's aftertaste. A slant mountain moon.

  A lone lamp lights the wall and she turns her back to the window.

  In this high attic of a small mansion lives Lady Xie.1

  Imagine her white jade complexion,

  frozen plum flowers on a branch of spring snow,

  a body of fragrant mist against the morning glow.

  To the Tune of “The River City”

  He coddles her, she acts naïve, their feelings fragile.

  The hour is late.

  She unfastens the mandarin-duck-embroidered robe

  and before her red lips move

  he tastes her sweet lip paint.

  Slowly she pulls up the embroidered quilt and with one white wrist

  pushes off the phoenix pillow

  and pillows her handsome man.

  To the Tune of “Missing the Emperor's Hometown”

  A spring outing,

  apricot petals blown all over his head,

  who is that young man in the street?

  So handsome,

  I want to marry him

  for all my life

  and even if he leaves me

  I won't feel ashamed.

  To the Tune of “Daoist Priestess”

  It was the seventeenth of April,

  this day last year

  when you were leaving,

  I lowered my head to veil my tears

  and knit my brow to hide my shyness.

  I didn't know I'd lose my soul

  and chase after you in dream.

  Except the moon on the sky's brink,

  no one else knows this.

  1 Lady Xie is Xie Daowen, the wife of Wang Ni, who was considered a great literary talent. By referring to her, Wei Zhuang implies that the woman in the poem is learned and talented.

  SIKONG TU

  (837–908)

  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”:

  It is dust in timeless open space,

  is flowing, foaming sea spume,

  shallow or deep, cohering, dispersing.

  One out of a thousand contains all thousand.

  “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.

  from The Twenty-four Styles of Poetry

  The Placid Style

  Dwell plainly in calm silence,

  a delicate heart sensitive to small things.

  Drink from the harmony of yin and yang,

  wing off with a solitary crane,1

  and like a soft breeze

  trembling in your gown,

  a rustle of slender bamboo,

  its beauty will stay with you.

  You meet it by not trying deeply.

  It thins to nothing if you approach,

  and even when its shape seems near

  it will turn all wrong inside your hand.

  The Potent Style

  Green woods, a wild hut.

  Setting sun in the transparent air.

  I take off my head cloth, walk alone,

  often hearing the calls of birds.

  No flying swan brings me messages

  from my friend traveling so far.

  Yet the one I miss isn't far.

  In my heart we are together.

  Ocean wind through emerald clouds.

  Night islets and the moon, bright.

  After one good line, stop.

  A great river spreads across your path.2

  The Natural Style

  Bend over anywhere and pick it up

  but you can't take it from your neighbors.

  Go with the Dao

  and what you write is fine as spring.

  It's like meeting flowers in bloom,

  like seeing the year renew.

  Once given to you it can't be taken

  but gain it by force and soon you're poor again.

  A hermit in the empty mountain

  after rain collects duckweed

  and gains this calm inspiration,

  moving about unhurried as heaven's potter's wheel.

  The Implicit Style

  Without a single word

  the essence is conveyed.

  Without speaking of misery

  a passionate sadness comes through.

  It's true, someone hidden controls the world;

  with that being you sink or float.

  This style's like straining full-bodied wine

  or like a flower near bloom retreating into bud.

  It is dust in timeless open space,

  is flowing, foaming sea spume,

  shallow or deep, cohering, dispersing.

  One out of a thousand contains all thousand.

  The Carefree and Wild Style

  Abide by your nature,

  honestly and unrestrained.

  Whatever you pick up makes you rich

  when candor is your friend.

  Build your hut below a pine,

  toss off your hat and read a poem.

  You know if it's morning or evening

  but have no idea what dynasty it is.

  Do what fits your whim.

  Why bother to achieve?

  If you free your nature

  you'll have this style.

  The Bighearted and Expansive Style

  We live no more than a hundred years,

  not too long before we depart.

  Happiness is bitterly short,

  gloom and fretting aboun
d.

  Why not take a jar of wine

  and each day visit the misty wisteria?

  Let flowers cover the straw-thatched roof.

  Let mountain showers pass over.

  When wine is finished

  take a vine stick and sing out loud.

  What life doesn't end in death?

  Only South Mountain can last.3

  The Flowing Style

  It takes in like a watermill

  and turns like a pearl marble.

  It is beyond words

  and these are clumsy metaphors.

  Earth spins on a hidden axis

  and the universe rolls slowly around its hub.

  If you search out the origin

  you'll find a corresponding motion.

  Climb high into spiritual light.

  Then dive deep into dark nothing.

  All things for thousands of years

  are caught up in the flow.

  1 An allusion to a number of Chinese Daoist tales in which Daoists who become immortal fly off on the back of a crane.

  2 These last lines suggest the dangers of saying too much, of overwriting. If you go on too long, Sikong Tu warns, you walk right out of the style, whereas a good line stops you like a great river, and echoes profoundly inside of you. This effect can be described by two lines from Tang poetry: “The song is over, the musician gone,/but the river and green mountains keep singing.”