This figure does not completely explain the reality of a system where the two principal constituents follow each other at the same time that they complete each other. This sort of development, concurrently linear and symmetrical, would be better suggested, perhaps, by another figure, one inspired by the traditional Chinese representation of the yin/yang mutation:
Here can be observed a movement that turns upon itself, and yet at the same time opens itself to the infinite. Each element, as it emerges, “returns” and refers to its opposite, the element situated at the other “end” of the figure. It presents a play of pursuit (or pursuit of an Yi always other?) at the same time within and without, in time and beyond it. This spatial structure, founded on a reciprocal justification between the two lines, permits the poet to break, to a certain degree, the linear constraints. In many cases, the obscurity of a line that occurs due to the specific use of words (the use of a noun for a verb, of an empty word for a full word, etc.) or of syntactic anomalies is completely clarified by the presence of the partner line. It is also in the use of parallelism that the most audacious transgressions occur, transgressions whose consequences go beyond the domain of poetry. In the Tang, the explorations of the poets enriched the ordinary language, by upsetting and reordering its syntactic structures.19 Through parallelism, the poet creates a personal universe, one upon which he becomes capable of imposing a different verbal order.20
This personal universe is, however, a universe in the process of becoming. It must be remembered that the lü-shi contains not one but two couplets containing parallel lines, and that these couplets are in turn replaced in a linear context, since they are framed by nonparallel couplets. Thus the parallel couplets, whose structure has just been discussed, do not take their meaning from their own existence alone; this meaning is drawn from a dialectical system founded on a temporality and a spatiality that imply an internal transformation. If parallelism is characterized by its spatial nature, the nonparallel lines, which respect normal syntax, are submitted to temporal law. The composition of the lü-shi is traditionally presented in the following manner: the first and the fourth couplets, the nonparallel, assure the linear development and treat temporal themes; at both ends of the poem, they form discontinuous signifiers. In the center of this linearity the second and third couplets introduce a spatial order. And if the “linearity” is perceived at two times, the “spatiality” is also composed of two steps. Aiming at the bursting of the “normal order of things,” the poet introduces this new dimension by the affirmation (second couplet) of an order in which opposed or complementary facts are placed side by side to form an autonomous ensemble. This order is not static either, however. In the third couplet, also made up of parallel lines, it is reaffirmed, but undergoes a change, as if in following this new order a different relationship between things had been born, a relationship that the poet intends to exploit fully so as best to put to use its dynamic principles. This internal transformation between the two parallel couplets is observable not only on the level of content but also on that of syntax. It is obligatory, in effect, that the two couplets be made of two different syntactic types, and that, furthermore, this difference be founded in derivation, that is, that syntactically the third couplet be derived from the second.
Nonetheless, the very idea of transformation foreshadows the triumph of time, a metamorphosed, an open time. For after the two parallel couplets comes the final couplet, which is obligatorily nonparallel; this reintroduces linear narration into the discourse. The temporal order that inaugurated the poem reclaims its right, here, at the end of the poem. It is as if the poet, always conscious of his power over the language, nonetheless doubts the permanence of the universe of certitude that he has forged. Thus, this affirmation of a semiotic order (by the parallel lines) contains its own negation.
From this perspective the lü-shi is clearly a representation of a dialectical mode of thought. A drama in 4/4 time unfolds before the reader, a drama whose development obeys the dynamic laws of space-time:
Or, returning to the figure on this page, which represents parallelism as a system turning on itself, it can be said that the system is traversed by a temporal unfolding that prefigures its exploding:
This figure may suggest, in addition, that it is not merely a matter of a linear, but rather of a spiral, development. Beginning from lived time, the poet attempts to go beyond it by establishing a spatial order within which he may rediscover his intimate relationship with things (his desire to “live among his own,” as Claude Lévi-Strauss puts it). And if, in the end, the poet dives back into time, it is an exploded time, a time broken open and assured of further metamorphoses. There are rare examples where, contrary to the rule, the poet ends a lü-shi with a parallel couplet, as if to maintain the spatial order to the end. This occurs in Du Fu’s “On Learning that the Imperial Army Has Retaken He-nan and He-bei.”21 The poem ends with three successive parallel couplets, the last of which, anticipating the return voyage that the poet will make with his loved ones, is intended to prolong the state of euphoria produced by the news.
Examples
Having observed in general terms the implications of the lü-shi form, we shall now analyze two poems in their entirety.
Du Fu: “Evocation of the Past”
Many mountains ten thousand valleys | arrive Jing-men
Be born grow Luminous Lady | there still a village
Once leave Purple Terrace | directly northern desert
Alone dwell Green Tomb | facing yellow dusk
Painted picture not recognize | spring breeze face
Jade amulets in vain return | moonlit night soul
Thousand years pi-pa | filled with barbarous accents
Clear-distinct grief regrets | echo in this song22
This poem evokes the famous story of a lady of the Han court, in the reign of the emperor Yuan-di. This lady is known by her maiden name, Wang Zhao-jun, as well as by her honorific, Ming-fei, “Luminous Lady.” According to the custom of the time, each new lady of the harem was presented to the emperor only through her portrait, which was prepared by the court painter. Wang Zhao-jun, above intrigue, and sure of her beauty, did not deign to bribe the painter, Mao Yan-shou, as did the majority of the court ladies, in order to be sure of a flattering portrait. Because of this failure, she had never been received by the emperor in person. Thus, when the emperor was forced to choose from among his harem to provide a “princess” for a marriage of alliance with a barbarian leader, he chose Zhao-jun, entirely on the basis of her portrait. It was not until the presentation of the “princess” to the barbarian envoy that the emperor saw the Luminous Lady for the first time. He was struck by her dazzling beauty, but despite his desire, was unable to keep her.
What the poet focuses on here, beyond the theme of blocked destiny, is human fragility in the face of a hostile nature, and, through this confrontation, communion with another universe, where regret and fantasy are blended together. The beginning and the end of the poem, the first and fourth couplets, touch on the life of the heroine in its chronological unfolding. The first couplet retraces her life as a young girl in the village of her birth; the last, her posthumous life, a metamorphosed life, perpetuated in time. The linear linking is underlined by the expression “ten thousand valleys” in the first line, echoed by “thousand years” in the penultimate line.
The two middle couplets, made of parallel lines, “fix,” through several outstanding images, the “tragic” events that marked the fate of Ming-fei. These images face each other, thus opposing and changing each other. Nonetheless, there does exist, between the two couplets, a relationship of transformation (static → dynamic).
Both lines of the second couplet begin with verbal forms (“once leave” and “alone dwell”) followed by a preposition (“directly in” and “facing”). This syntactic structure gives a passive tone to the sentences and orients them in a single direction (A → B), reflecting very well the fate of Wang Zhao-jun, a fate determined by
forces beyond her own will.
In the third couplet, the verb of each proposition is placed in the middle of the line, thus tying the terms together; the omission of the personal pronoun and of the preposition suppresses any idea of direction. “Painted picture” and “face of springtime wind” (first line of the couplet), as well as “jade amulets” and “soul of lunar light” (second line) are put in an A ⇄ B scheme of equivalence in a relationship of continual coming and going, whence comes the possibility of a double reading:
In the jingling of jade the soul of the Luminous Lady is rediscovered
or
The Luminous Lady makes her jade amulets jingle once more.
As a corollary to the syntactic transformation that takes place between the two parallel couplets, the organization of images also follows a transformational process. There are in the second couplet four colored elements: Purple Terrace (royal palace), northern desert, Green Tomb (according to legend, the tomb of Wang Zhao-jun, though made in the desert, always remained green), and yellow dusk. These color elements oppose each other at the same time that they harmonize, to form a picture that opens onto the third couplet. That couplet in turn quite appropriately begins with the word “picture.” The fateful role played by a painted picture in the life of the heroine is suggested again, but in place of that misleading portrait her life itself is allowed to provide the image for a golden legend. With the help of conventional images (“springtime breeze” = a woman’s face; “jade amulets” = feminine presence; “lunar soul”=the goddess Chang-E, imprisoned on the moon) all constructed from elements of nature, the poet subtly integrates the presence of the Luminous Lady into a universe full of solitary grandeur, where the natural and the supernatural blend together. Thus the past and the present, here and elsewhere, seem to melt together in a dynamic space that refuse to give way to the inexorable course of time.
The last couplet, however, reintroduces the idea of time. Yet, in the final analysis, is it life or is it time that triumphs? The more time passes, the more life changes. Even regret and bitterness are transformed into song (during her lifetime among the barbarians Wang Zhao-jun became an excellent player of the pi-pa, an instrument that originated in Central Asia), and the echoes of her song come down to us here.
Cui Hao: “Pavilion of the Yellow Crane”
The Ancients already riding | Yellow Crane leave
This place keep empty | Yellow Crane Pavilion
Yellow Crane once left | never again return
White clouds thousand years | for-nothing gliding distant-peaceful
Sunlit river clear-distinct | Hanyang trees
Perfumed plant abundant-thick | Isle of Parrots
Setting sun homeland | where then to be found?
Misty waves on the river | to the man infinite sadness23
Pavilion of the Yellow Crane, a famous site, is built upon an elevation dominating the Yang-tze River in the present province of Hu-bei. The pavilion enjoys a panoramic view of the river flowing east toward the sea. This place has always seemed to haunt Chinese poets, and many have written poems there, most notably involving the theme of farewell to a friend going far away. Anecdotes abound, of which one concerns this particular poem. It is said that Li Bai once climbed the pavilion, and was about to compose a poem on the magnificence of the landscape when his eyes fell upon a poem inscribed on the wall. It was, of course, precisely this poem of Cui Hao’s. After reading it he exclaimed, “I can do no better,” and threw away his brush in disappointment. Afterwards, frustrated, Li Bai could not rest until he had written a poem of equal quality in another elevated place. The opportunity presented itself at last in Nan-jing, where he finally wrote a very beautiful lü-shi, he celebrated “Terrace of the Phoenix.”
But, to return to the poem: it is apparent that here the parallelism begins, as the rule allows, from the first couplet; nonetheless it is not complete, either in the first or the second couplet, in the sense that the lines in these two couplets are only parallel before the caesura. The poet seems to want to accent the contrast between the human order and the “beyond.” The incomplete parallelism signifies that the two orders are in an unequal relationship. There is on the one hand a “celestial” order, with its inaccessible splendor (the white clouds), and on the other, the human order, already abandoned by that splendor that once inhabited it. In the first quatrain, made up of two couplets, the image of the Yellow Crane is repeated three times, an even more striking fact when it is remembered that the repetition of words is in principle forbidden in the lü-shi. There is apparent in these three occurrences a sliding of meaning that reflects a theme in transformation: the Yellow Crane is, in these successive manifestations,
(1) A vehicle for attaining the beyond (in accordance with Taoist myth).
(2) An empty name that the human world hangs onto.
(3) A symbol of lost immortality.
The image of the Yellow Crane also evokes the image of the white clouds, contrasting the movement of the bird with the insouciance of the clouds, and contrasting their colors as well. The white clouds themselves are endowed with multiple connotations, among them notably of dream, of separation, and of the vanity of earthly things. The Yellow Crane gone, there remains only an abandoned universe, a world with a piece cut away, where, from this point forward, all desire is revealed to be vain (the word kong, “empty,” “vain,” appears twice in the Chinese, in lines 2 and 4).
Nonetheless, one consolation remains: the present world, a world that dwells in space, a world that the light of the sun still warms. This idea of a form of life that endures despite the contrary forces of time is reflected also on the level of syntax.
Clearly, the third couplet carries on the sentence-type of line 4, while slightly transforming it. The sentence in line 4 may be analyzed as follows:
theme complement of time redoubled qualifiers
white clouds thousand years peaceful, peaceful
In lines 5 and 6, the segment before the caesura is constructed from the same sentence-type, without the complement of time:
theme redoubled qualifiers
sunlit river distinct, distinct
perfumed plant thick, thick
This sentence-type, made of a nominal group and a redoubled qualifier (repeated three times in lines 4, 5, and 6), reinforces the idea of a state of things that persists.
As for the segment after the caesura in lines 5 and 6, it is made in both cases of a single nominative form, “trees of Han-yang” and “Isle of Parrots.” The scene is static. The verbal form is omitted where something like “running along the” for line 5 and “growing on” for line 6 might be expected. The living nature that the segment of the line before the caesura depicts seems to end abruptly in a fixed image. Han-yang (a town on the other side of the river) and the Isle of Parrots (in the middle of the river) are place names. Their presence here, as circumstantial as it may appear, is not without its own symbolic nuance, moreover. The yang of Han-yang is the very term that represents one of the principles of the yin-yang pair, the principle of the active life. The name Han-yang means “the yang (or south) side of the river Han” and evokes a world in activity, still in the brilliance of the sun. As for the parrots, one cannot help but relate them to the Yellow Crane of the poem. After the disappearance of the immortal bird, nothing remains in this world but ornamental and imitative birds, birds that are only able to repeat ad infinitum the words they have learned.
Ad infinitum? But here arrives the last couplet, recalling the rule of Time, as announced in the opening of the poem (The Ancients…). It is a time that has never ceased to exercise its power, but that has merely been denied for an instant. The setting sun foreshadows the arrival of the yin principle. From the syntactic point of view,” the sentences return to the “spoken” style, as the expressions “where, then, is it found?” (line 7) and “so as to” (not translated in line 8, after the caesura) confirm. These lines take up again the linear thread of the discourse. It is an open discourse
, however. The final interrogative form marks an irrepressible nostalgia. The misty waves, which cover everything again, and confound everything in view, inspire in the poet a feeling of sadness. Yet, at the same time, they give him the illusion of being able to return to the place of his origin.
The gu-ti-shi
It would be easy to end here the analysis of the active process through which the Chinese poet forges his poetic language. Nonetheless, recalling the beginning of the chapter, and the ensemble of forms that were presented, it seems appropriate to present another form here, that of the gu-ti-shi (“ancient-style poem”), a form that is in opposition to the beautiful order of the lü-shi. The gu-ti-shi is in opposition to jin-ti-shi (“modern-style verse,” of which the lü-shi is the principle form), primarily through its absence of constraints, its freer character, and its sometimes more “epic” dimensions. It may be interesting, then, to follow the analyses of the lü-shi with a concrete example of the oldstyle poetry, so as to show both the points of opposition and those of correlation between the two forms as they were practiced in the Tang. The poem under discussion will be, like the first of the lü-shi analyzed, a work by Du Fu. This poet, who is considered by tradition to be the greatest master of the lü-shi, was no less excellent a practitioner of the old style (the other grand masters of this style are Li Bai, Li He, and Bai Ju-yi). With Du Fu specific choices of form had a deep significance. In his youth, the poet lived through the period of great prosperity of the Tang, the period that saw the rise of a whole generation of poets of genius. This period of prosperity came to a brutal halt with the rebellion of An Lu-shan. This revolt, which precipitated China into a terrible tragedy, deeply marked the lives of the poets who were its witnesses or its victims. Du Fu knew in turn the suffering of exodus and of imprisonment by the rebels. It was during the revolt and just afterwards, as Arthur Waley pointed out, that Du Fu composed a series of poems in the ancient style, realistic poems full of vehement emotion in which he describes tragic scenes and denounces the injustices of war. Compared to the lü-shi, which he had composed with an exemplary formal rigor, these poems burst forth, a veritable explosion. The rupture of society is translated here by a rupture of form.
Chinese Poetic Writing Page 8