by Livia Kohn
in a decorated boat propelled by both sails and oars:
Willows brush my orchid oars, flowers fill their branches; Beneath the city walls at Stone City (Shicheng), at sunset our sails slow down.
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On top of Broken Stele Peak (Zhanbei feng): the tomb of the Minister of the Three Lü clans (San Lüshi);
At the Head of Distant Fire Mountain: a five-horse prefect’s flag.
“White Snow” tunes are lofty, composed about old temples;
“Sunny Spring” songs remain, changed to new lyrics.
Mo Chou’s cloud-soul has departed, following the clear Yangzi River,
Emptily causing travelers to write a myriad poems. ( QTS 9053) Ezhou includes modern Wuchang in Hubei. Stone City is up the Han River from Ezhou. The “Three Lü clans” are the three royal clans of the Chu kingdom (Zhao, Chu, and Jing) during the Warring States period. The minister of the Three Lü clans is Qu Yuan, the great Chu poet, statesman, and suicide. His poetry had a great influence on Yu Xuanji, as is evident here with the image of orchid oars. This is one of several sites associated with his tomb. As in the cases of the Han lady Wang Zhaojun and Yu the Great, many places claim the honor of being Qu Yuan’s final resting place. (Since Qu Yuan drowned himself, the actual disposition of his body may never be known.) The mountains named must be visible from the Han River. A prefect who merits five horses resides at Distant Fire Mountain, his presence indicated by his flags. “White Snow” tunes are traditional old songs, known for being too high for most people to manage. (An alternative reading of lou for diao would make this line begin “The White Snow Storied Building is lofty.” The White Snow Storied Building, west of Stone City, was poised above the Han River.) “Sunny Springs” songs, in contrast, were modern. Mo Chou was a singer from Stone City, according to the Music Bureau (Yuefu) ballads. Although Mo Chou is long departed, Yu Xuanji blames her lingering spirit for infecting travelers with the urge to write occasional verse, most of which is drivel.
Now she has added one more herself. The poet uses a conventional type of writing masterfully and irreverently, poking fun at the genre while enjoying her ability to perform it. Here the boat seems to be merely a pleasant vehicle ferrying the traveler from one place to another.
However, her boat signifies more than just a means of transport. It represents the poet herself. Hers is a “stranger’s boat” ( kechuan) that belongs nowhere. For example, in “Composition Capturing Willows by the Riverside,” Yu Xuanji inserts the stranger’s boat in a riddling poem on willows. Willows by the riverside are conventional signs of parting and of fragile female beauty:
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Kingfisher blue forms joining on uncultivated riverbanks, Their misty shapes entering distant buildings,
Reflections spreading out across the autumn river’s surface, Flowers falling on the fisherman’s head,
Roots aged, hiding fish caves,
Branches reaching down to fasten the stranger’s boat,
Sighing and soughing on a windy, rainy night,
They startle my dreams and increase my depression. ( QTS 9047) Here the willows, ghostly in the autumn mist, their almost undifferentiated shapes the iridescent blue-green of kingfisher feathers, catch the stranger’s boat and add to her melancholy. This poem on a conventional subject has a personal and poignant meaning at its heart.
The wayfaring stranger’s boat appears again, in a poem addressed to Li Zi’an entitled simply “Sent to Zi’an”:
At our drunken parting feast, a thousand goblets could not dispel my sorrow;
Pain at separating: a hundred knots with no place to start untying them.
Tender orchids dispersed and done, you return home to your spring orchard;
Willows to the east and west moor the stranger’s boat.
In our gathering and scattering, I lament that we, like clouds, do not settle;
In my compassion and passions, I must imitate the water which constantly flows.
At the season of flowers, I know it’s hard to meet,
But I cannot bear to get drunk quietly and calmly in my jade storied building. ( QTS 9054)
Yu Xuanji and Zi’an have separated; pain (literally, [pain from severed] intestines caused by separating [ li chang ]) ties her in knots. “Tender Orchid,” Huilan, is one of her names; he leaves her to return to his first wife, his home orchard. The speaker is a wayfaring stranger, a wandering boat moored insecurely by willows (signs themselves of parting). If he is inconstant as a cloud, she will study the water that always moves and changes. Water is also a metaphor for the Dao. Although she cannot meet him in the spring, she refuses to follow the passive example of the deserted woman in conventional literature and weep demurely in her secluded women’s quarters.
This stranger’s boat is often untied. In poems to Li Zi’an, the untied boat seems lost and at loose ends. In poems with Daoist themes,
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the untied boat is unfettered and free to follow the Dao. Yu Xuanji’s
“Late Spring Sketch” (see page 108) closes with the line “My ten thousand li body is like an untied boat.”
Two poems entitled “Going Along the Yangzi River” depict an aim-lessly drifting little boat, with implications both erotic and Daoist. The first one runs:
The great river slants across to embrace Wuchang;
Before Parrot Island (Yingwu zhou): doors of a myriad households.
Sleeping in spring in my painted boat; at dawn I haven’t had enough,
Dreaming I was a butterfly seeking flowers. ( QTS 9051) Wuchang is a city in Hubei at the meeting of the Han and Yangzi Rivers. Parrot Island is located in the Yangzi River across from Wuchang. Yu Xuanji lived around there for a time. Her “painted boat”
could be a courtesan’s trysting place, common in Song-dynasty literature, or simply a decorated vehicle. Spring sleep, as in her poem to the Refined Master, has sexual overtones. The last line contains a double meaning. “Dreaming of a butterfly” recalls the famous story of Zhuangzi’s dreaming he was a butterfly (chapter 2), which asks us to question the nature of perceived reality. The butterfly seeking flowers, on the other hand, is an erotic image of a man pursuing a woman (see Chuci and the works of Song Yu). Here Yu Xuanji uses a man’s voice, adopting a conventional expression usually used by males. The object of her desire might be male or female. Several of her poems are ambiguous about the gender of the erotic object. The boat, wend-ing its way between sites along the river, between the Dao and sexual desire, represents the rider, Yu Xuanji.
She again compares herself to a small painted boat in the second poem:
When misty flowers entered Cormorant Harbor (Luci gang), In my painted boat I was still making up poems about Parrot Island.
I went to bed drunk and woke up chanting poetry, not feeling a thing;
This morning I am startled to find myself at the head of the Han River. ( QTS 9051)
Cormorant Harbor is in Hubei near Hanyang, up the Han River from Parrot Island and Wuchang. (The Quan Tangshi, for the second line, prefers yan to ti, producing the alternate reading: “My painted boat was still skirting Parrot Island.”) Yu Xuanji presents herself again as a
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drifting boat. She floats along in a drunken reverie, unaware of her surroundings as she composes poems. Drunkenness in poetry provides a way of talking about altered states of consciousness associated with Daoism and Daoist eccentrics. The speaker wakes up to find herself in an unexpected but familiar place, surprised she has gone so far. In a negative sense, the image of the drunken boat implies she has no control over her life; in a positive sense, it implies she attaches herself to the Dao and goes with the flow.
Another of her poems joins boats and drinking with two of the author’s great themes: solitude and communication. Entitled “Handing Over My Feelings,” this work idealizes seclusion while it
records an attempt to express herself:
At leisure and retired, with nothing to do,
I wander alone through the passing scene:
The moon seen through severed clouds over the Yangzi River, A boat with loosened ropes in the middle of the sea.
My zither I play at Xiaoliang Temple;
My poems I chant from Yu Liang’s tower.
Thickets of bamboo make do for comrades;
And pieces of stone are fine for mates.
Swallows and sparrows I simply treat as nobles;
Gold and silver I willingly forsake.
The spring wine filling my cup is green;
At night the window facing the moon is dark.
I circle stepping stones around the clean, clear pool,
Pluck out my hairpin to shine in slender currents.
I lie in bed, texts and fascicles all around me,
Then half drunk, get up to comb my hair. ( QTS 9052) At ease and unemployed, the speaker compares herself to the moon in a cloudy sky and to a boat drifting freely. She visits sites along the Yangzi River, playing music at an unidentified Buddhist temple. Many temples were named Xiaoliang after the devout Buddhist emperor Liang Wudi (464–549), whose name was Xiao Yan. She chants poems from a tower named after its builder who died around 340 c.e. Her only companions are bamboo and stones; she honors swallows and sparrows as noble guests. Material wealth is not her aim: she finds riches enough in wine, her setting, and her books. Removing her golden hairpin, she sticks it into the stream and combs the current, enjoying the moon’s reflection shining off the ornament into the water. The hair in Tang poetry is the woman: letting her hair down,
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she lets down her own formality and reserve. She does as she pleases, lying in bed surrounded by disorderly books. She romanticizes drunkenness as did Tao Qian (365–427) and Li Bo before her. She is free and easy as a Daoist immortal or “a boat with loosened ropes.” This accords with her use of the painted boat in “Dwelling in the Mountains on a Summer’s Day” (see pages 110–111), which closes with the speaker riding home on her boat:
In leisure riding my painted boat, I chant to the bright moon; Trusting the light wind to blow me home again. ( QTS 9053) She is that unmoored boat drifting along with the Dao, going home to the Dao.
Yu Xuanji’s small boats express transition, passage, metamorphoses, and changes of state in the life of an individual. In the poems translated above she gets drunk, sleeps, dreams, and wakes. Boats and water take her from one place to another, one state of consciousness to another, and one condition of existence to another. She moves from city to country, public to private, courtesan to recluse. She floats along through life and change, entrusting herself to the Dao.
Images of Zithers
The table zither ( qin) is a traditional Chinese stringed instrument favored by Tang literati and courtesans. Many could play it; few could play it well. The zither in Yu Xuanji’s poetry represents her attempts to communicate her deepest feelings and find a real companion. She alludes repeatedly to four stories about the zither that stress genuine communication and love. Two concern same-sex friendships; two concern heterosexual love affairs. A poignant tale involves the famous Warring States musician Bo Ya and his friend Zhong Ziqi. Whenever Bo Ya played his zither, his friend instantly knew what Bo Ya was trying to express, whether it was lofty mountains or clear running water.
When Zhong Ziqi died, Bo Ya smashed his zither, since there was no longer anyone alive who could really understand him. Then there are the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, eccentric literati of the Three Kingdoms period, intimate friends who drank together and conversed in the languages of music and poetry. Another story concerns the famous Han dynasty poets and lovers Sima Xiangru and Zhuo Wenjun. They were supposed to have met when the recently widowed Zhuo heard Sima playing the zither and singing at a banquet. Yu Xuanji also alludes to the mythical emperor Shun, a paragon
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of Confucian virtue and the legendary inventor of the zither, and his two loving wives, goddesses of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers. A song addressed to her neighbor mentions Shun’s consorts and his zither. Responding to his poem, Yu Xuanji wrote “Following the Rhymes of My Western Neighbor Who Newly Settled In, and Begging for Barley Wine”:
One poem comes and I chant it a hundred times;
Renewing my passions: Each word resonates like gold.
Looking west, I already had plans to climb your fence;
Gazing far off, how can my heart not turn to stone?
Appointments by the River Han fade into empty space at the end of my view;
Dreams of Xiao and Xiang Rivers severed, I lay off strumming my zither.
More intense when we encounter the Cold Food Festival: my home-sick thoughts;
As for Shuye’s good wine: don’t ladle it out alone! ( QTS 9050) This is a drinking song, of the type made famous by Tao Qian and Li Bo. It also responds to Yu Xuanji’s neighbor’s poem, using the same rhymes in the same order. Yu Xuanji praises the man, his poem, their old hometown, and his wine. The poem abounds in allusions to lovers. Our speaker casts herself in the role of the eastern neighbor girl, the subject of many earlier male writers (among them Mencius, Song Yu, Sima Xiangru, and Yuan Zhen). While the male writers look east at a beautiful young neighbor girl, Yu Xuanji looks west at a handsome young neighbor man and imagines climbing his fence. Her heart’s turning to stone as she gazes into the distance recalls the story of a mountain in Hubei called Wangfu shi (Gazing Far-off at Husband Rock); it seems a woman longing for her absent husband climbed a high mountain and looked for him for so long that she turned to stone.
Appointments by the Han River refer to the night of Double Seven, the festival of lovers when the Herd Boy and Weaver Girl Stars (Vega and Altair) meet once a year on a bridge of magpies over the Milky Way. The Milky Way, called the Silver, or Starry, Han, is imagined to continue the earthly Han River up into the sky. Such meetings have faded in her memory. Dreams of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers are dreams of water goddesses, patronesses of those southern rivers and subjects of shamanistic hymns attributed to Qu Yuan and collected in the Chuci.
Consorts of Emperor Shun, inventor of the zither, they wept tears that permanently spotted the bamboo by the riverside when he died. They sometimes appeared to worthy scholars in later periods. The Cold Food
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Festival was a late-winter festival of renewal; absent natives of the capital city remembered its celebration in Chang’an with special fondness.
(See the exile poetry of Shen Quanqi, ca. 650–713.) Shuye is Xi Kang (223–262), a poet, drinker, zither player, and member of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove. Here she lays off strumming her zither, giving up hope of a spiritual encounter, but not, perhaps, of an evening spent drinking in pleasant company.
In “Early Autumn,” the season evokes feelings that translate into pure songs that possess the speaker’s zither:
When tender chrysanthemums hold in their new colors,
Distant mountains corral evening mist,
And cool winds startle green trees,
Then pure rhymes enter my vermilion threads.
The pensive wife, polychrome tabby-weave silk in her loom, Her man on campaign in the heavens outside the passes.
Wild geese fly, fish stay in the river,
As if only they would transmit his letters and news! ( QTS 9052) Chrysanthemums suggest autumn and the poet Tao Qian, who wrote of seclusion, drinking, and transcendence. As the evenings grow cool, the speaker plays pure songs on her zither. A story enters her instrument and demands expression. She sings about a woman waiting.
As Double Seven, the festival celebrating the meeting of the Herd Boy and Weaver Girl, approaches, the weaving wife wishes for news of her wandering man. Textile work is the ultimate woman’s work; here is a dutiful and productive wife sticking virtuously to her domestic d
uties in the absence of her husband. The wife waiting at her loom for an absent husband, an image as old as the Gushi shijiu shou (Nineteen Old Songs) of the Han dynasty, is a cliché in the Tang that still has the power to move. He may already be dead—as in a poem by Chen Tao (c. 841) that closes with the poignant image of bones by the riverside that are still living lovers in the dreams of their wives back home. Wild geese and fish, carriers of messages in folk tales, bring her no news. The zither tells a folk tale that harmonizes with the speaker’s longing and loneliness.
In “Sad Thoughts” (see page 109), the zither provides a conduit for communication with sources of divine inspiration: “Alone strumming my vermilion strings, I naturally break into pure song.” The instrument also allows her to release negative emotions that might otherwise obstruct her spiritual progress:
Releasing my feelings, I stop resenting heartless friends;
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Nourishing my nature, I toss off as empty the waves of the bitter sea.
( QTS 9050–9051)
Yu Xuanji sends her sorrows by means of her zither in another poem, this one addressed to her friend and traveling companion Wen Tingyun (c. 812–887). He is the only person aside from Li Yi whom she addresses by his cognomen ( zi). In “Sent to Wen Feiqing,” she berates him for not writing:
Beside the stepping stones of my staircase, disorderly crickets cry out; On the branches in the courtyard, mist and dew are clear.
In the moonlight, my neighbors’ music echoes;
Atop the storied building, distant mountains brighten.
Over my jeweled mat, a cool breeze touches me;
From my turquoise zither, the sorrows I send you arise.
If Lord Xi is too lazy for letters and tablets,