Wu Zhi beyond sleep |lean against cinnamon tree
Winged dew obliquely fly | soak still hare
This poem is about a musician playing on an instrument called the Kong-hou. The theme of playing music was used many times by Li He, notably in the two poems titled “Magic Strings.” These are incantatory poems, re-creating scenes of shamanic sorcerors’ invocations. Here, even if the incantation were absent—and it is very much there—it would be above all through the images evoked by the music that the poet tries to represent the power of artistic creation.
On the first reading, one is struck by the abundance of images that follow each other as if there had been no link between them. Nonetheless, a reader familiar with the sense of certain metaphors, and with the systems of correspondences (numbers, elements, etc.), does not take long to grasp the metonymic logic that connects them. (We have already stated above, the poet refrains from using narrative elements to situate himself directly on the level of the metaphor.)
The poem starts with the expression “silk and plane,” which is derived from “silk and bamboo,” the usual metaphor designating musical instruments in general. From these images—which represent elements of nature—the line “overflows,” as if naturally, onto that of autumn and the empty sky. This empty sky, where the clouds are unmoving (“still”) and which is troubled only by the tears of the river goddess and of the Five Daughters (“White Daughters”): these last are the wives of the legendary King Shun (at whose death they wept on his tomb, from which bamboos sprang up)—immediately suggests a mythic place inhabited by death. This passage through the void is a necessary test. Let us point out that at the end of line 4 the poet has (very ingeniously) placed the name of the instrument, Kong-hou, which can graphically mean: “the void that waits.” The idea of a mythic place is confirmed by line 5, which, without transition, introduces the image of Mount Kun-lun, a sacred chain in the west of China. This mountain is famous for, among other reasons, its jade, hence the image of “broken jade” (line 5). However, this image is put in ordinary language to signify “sacrificing oneself for Beauty” (or dying for a noble cause). The idea of a passage into death is pursued then; but it is followed, in the same line, by the image of a resurrection suggested by the phoenix couple (supernatural birds symbolizing coupling and the miracle of life).
Starting at this point, the poem advances, supporting itself at each stage with metaphors and figures borrowed from different traditional myths: river goddess, Purple Emperor (also designating the emperor himself, since Li Ping was a court musician, and one of the August Ones of Heaven which reigns over the Purple Star); Nü-wa (mythic feminine figure who would have melted the stones of five colors to repair a corner of the sky wrecked by the demon Gong-gong); shamans; Wu Zhi (who, after a fault committed in the course of his initiation to become immortal, was condemned to stay on the Moon and trim the branches of the cinnamon tree that grows there: the tree, its branches ceaselessly growing back, gives the woodcutter neither respite nor an end to his labor). Through these characters, the poem shows the relationship established by music between terrestrial and supernatural elements. This link is suggested as well by the networks of correspondences based on numbers.
In line 7, the twelve porticos designate those of the imperial palace. But the images “melted lights” (the effects of the music acting on the elements) which follows makes one think of the twelve notes of the Chinese musical scale, and also of the twelve earthly branches which rejoin the initial image of the tree (the twelve terrestrial branches correspond to the ten celestial trunks). As to the “23 strings” of line 8, they are tied to the presence of celestial bodies (“Purple Emperor,” designating both the emperor in person and the Star of the same name; on the other hand, the quarter moon is called, in Chinese, moon string, etc.) and these strings evoke the 28 Celestial Mansions. Between the number 23 and the number 28 there is a gap. This gap is appropriately suggested by the following line, where the poet refers to the missing corner of sky and to the goddess Nü-wa who is repairing the heavenly gash with stones of five colors.
One can isolate—simplifying greatly—from this abundance of images, the following themes: artistic creation is an initiation that involves tests, tests to the death from which one can only emerge successful by uniting oneself with the supernatural world. The sought-after relation with the supernatural is sexual in nature. One sees in the poem on the one hand supernatural beings (or beings with ties to the supernatural) which are feminine figures: river goddess, Nü-wa, shamans; and on the other, male human beings: Li Ping the musician, the emperor, and Wu Zhi. This sexual nature is underscored by the phallic symbol that is the musical instrument, which is presented to us in the form of trees: erect plane trees, sprung up bamboos, twelve earthly branches and the cinnamon tree of which the branches are always growing back. Let us underscore also that even the name of the musician, Li (line 4), means “plum tree.” The interaction of the two types of being—feminine and masculine, supernatural and human—regulate the rhythm of the cosmic movement. Through his defiance, the artist violates the order of the rules and lines up the elements in a process of metamorphosis: halted clouds, smashed jades, phoenixes that sing, orchids that laugh, melted light, burned stones, autumn rain (let us recall that the image of the rain is connected to that of the clouds in line 2; these two images, combined, in Chinese designate the sexual act), dancing dragon and shaking hare. This last image of the hare, seemingly incongruous and as if lost in this “forest of symbols,” itself constitutes a symbol: that of fecundity and immortality. In effect, the myths of the moon hold it as where the hare and the toad are and where the cinnamon tree grows. In evoking the moon through the beings that live there, the poet wants to avoid naming her, avoid presenting her as a distant place or as an exterior decoration. Because of this, the ambiguity between the human and the supernatural worlds is maintained. Wu Zhi and the hare are both real and transfigured beings. If Wu Zhi—who trims the cinnamon tree—and the hare—which makes the elixir of immortality—at last know ecstasy and happiness, they will not forget their tragic condition. The cinnamon tree will grow its branches back and the moon will wane. Immortality itself is mortal. The final image, of the cinnamon tree (a sacred tree), which rejoins the initial image, of the plane tree (an earthly tree), shows the process of sublimation, at the same time as the eternal return.
An apparent deregulation, an internal unity, thus appear in this poem with incantatory accents. This disrupted universe, these mixed elements, are revived by language itself. Through the metaphoric images (silk and plane tree, broken jades, singing phoenixes, cloud-rain, twelve porticos and twenty-three strings) and the mythic figures, the poet constantly keeps the language on the metonymic axis, without external commentary, as if the images had given birth to themselves. The poem thus presents itself as an uninterrupted series of “emergences” of metaphors, emergences that are nothing other than the actualization of an already developed metonymic system. To use an image, we can say that metaphor and metonymy here form the obverse and reverse of a single canvas.
The poet, more than he who speaks, is he who allows himself to speak. He appears as an interpreter as well as an arranger of myths accumulated over thousands of years. Everything happens as if the poet could only accomplish his own myth through having lived out the other myths. In arranging them, he transforms them. This subterranean passage through myths is his own self-creation.
—
Li Shang-yin (812–858) lived soon after Li He. As with the latter, he is famous for his way of manipulating images, but his process is often different. Creator of the secret passion, he proceeds by allusion. For that, he uses images rich in symbolic meanings, like Li He, but makes greater use of formal devices (caesura, parallelism, strophic progression, etc.), organizing them along two axes: linear and spatial. Not using narrative and anecdotal elements, these images rely on oppositions and internal combinations, which fully release their connotative content.
By his method of milking out a
ll the metonymic virtualities that an image contains in itself, he attaches himself to that popular tradition of the Six Dynasties that we have mentioned above.
We have chosen to analyze two lü-shi by the poet, the first of which is “Untitled”:14
The encounters—difficult
the partings—more so!
The east wind has weakened
and the hundred flowers fade
The silkworm, as long as it lives
will endlessly let out its thread
The candle doesn’t stop shedding tears
till burnt and reduced to ashes
In the morning’s mirror grow pale
the clouds of hair
To the night song replies the echo
refreshed under the moon’s light
From here to Mount Peng
the road is not longer
Diligent, the Green Bird
oversees our journeys!
Li Shang-yin sang, in a series of highly allusive poems, the secret loves he had experienced. In this poem, except for line 1, which is in a spoken style, and which reveals the poem’s theme (the shared passion and the drama of separation), all the rest is composed of a series of images and metaphors, forming a metonymic network, at times based on phonic links (puns). In line 3, “silkworm” (can) is a homonym of the expression can-mian (lovemaking); while “silk thread” (si) is a homonym of si (“amorous thought”). In addition, this same “silk thread” is part of the expression “blue threads” (qing-si) which means “black hair” and which announces the image of the hair in line 6. In line 4, “ashes” (hui) is part of the expression xin-hui (“broken heart”), which thus continues the idea of a forbidden love contained in the preceding lines; in addition, ce hui (“ashes”) designates both the gray color that prefigures the changing of hair color in line 5. Still in line 4, the image of the candle flame returns, on the one hand, with that of the east wind in line 2, and, on the other, with that of the moon’s light in line 6. The image of the moon, for its part, recalls the figure of the goddess Chang-E who lives alone up there; she confirms that the fatal separation will not be solved until they reach the Immortal Isles (where Mount Peng is found), which is to say, beyond death. After all these indications, if we again take up the poem as a whole, we notice how the act of lovemaking signified by line 2 is taken up in the following lines by a space-time mutation. First the space. A space that expands unceasingly until attaining an inaccessible sphere, in this poem the images of flowers, of silkworm and of candle (the character designating the candle wax contains the radical of the bee), familiar images “at ground level,” are found transformed into celestial images: cloud, moon and finally legendary mountain and mythical bird. As to the season, the end of spring that line 2 announces progresses through the four following lines, in the alternation of days and of seasons, before taking up the dream of a renewal that will triumph over death, embodied by the Green Bird. Across this space-time where human failings are in symbiosis with the environment around them, the drama of unrealized love, holding the universe as witness, becomes a universal drama.
The second lü-shi of Li Shang-yin is titled “Cithara Ornate with Brocade”:15
I (1) Ornate cithara pure chance | here are fifty strings
(2) Each string each fret | think of flowered years
II (3) Scholar Zhuang morning dream | wandering butterfly
(4) Emperor Wang spring heart | confide turtledove
III (5) Wide sea clear moon | pearls become tears
(6) Blue Field bright sun | jade born mist
IV (7) This passion can last | become pursuit-memory
(8) Only this instant | already dispossessed
This poem, written in a “laconic” style, has as its theme the reminiscence of a passion. The first couplet immediately puts the poem in a setting of ambiguity. The poet opens his initial theme with an object which is both real and legendary. This is a jin-se, a 50-string instrument ornamented with brocade. However, ordinarily, a jin-se only has 25 strings. It is true that a legend recounts that in the beginning—in high Chinese antiquity—the instrument in fact had 50 strings, but, during a concert, an emperor of the Zhou, unable emotionally to handle the too-poignant music played by one of his favorites, ordered that the number of strings be reduced by half. In reading the first couplet, one is sure that the poet is in the presence of a real object (a keepsake left by a woman he loved?), but one wonders if he is not also dreaming of an imaginary object, in relation to which he can identify with some inconsolable lover in Antiquity. In any case, the image of the cithara allows the poet to not designate himself as “I”: it is offered as a place (topos) of metamorphoses. These 50 strings perhaps evoke the years the poet has lived (certain commentaries suggest that he wrote the poem at the age of 50). In any case, these years converge on an obsessive image: a flower (to which the image of brocade also alludes) which is not a simple decorative object, but suggests a buried and unrealized desire. The images of strings and frets have sexual connotations: in the Taoist tradition, the woman’s sex is designated by “musical strings” and the man’s by a “jade column” (in Chinese, “column” and “fret” are the same word). Thus, this cithara that abruptly begins the poem, through its multiple allusions and the echo of its song, poses a series of questions filled with ambiguity: lived experience or dream? Identification of oneself or creation of an imaginary double? Pursuit of a lost love, or endless quest for the other?
These questions the poet will never pose explicitly. Interrupting the conversational tone and narrative of couplet I, without transition he introduces in the two following couplets (II and III), parallel couplets, a spatial organization of the signs based on reversible equivalence (II) and on linked connection (III). Because of these structures, and without any commentary being needed, the images are signifying on their own, in attracting each other and combining to form a complex network with its own internal logic. Through these images, one grasps the themes of the pursuit of a memory, of a lived or a dreamed passion, of a quest through life which is transformed over the length of cyclic time which might perhaps permit the lovers to find each other once more.
The two couplets are articulated thus: couplet II raises the poem to the metaphoric level and, starting on this level a “metonymic field” opens up which the poet exploits in couplet III, a couplet that is itself made of a series of images giving birth each to the other. Here first of all is the symbolic sense attached to the images that appear in couplet II:
Scholar Zhuang / butterfly: the Taoist philosopher Zhuang-zi, waking from a dream where he was a butterfly, asked himself whether he had really dreamed of being a butterfly, or if it was the butterfly who dreamed of becoming Zhuang-zi. (Had he awoken as Zhuang-zi or was he nothing but a being dreamt by a butterfly?) The philosopher illustrates the Taoist conception of the illusory nature of life and the identity of all beings.
Emperor Wang / turtledove: according to the legend, Emperor Wang of Shu, inconsolable after the death of his favorite concubine, abandoned his throne and disappeared. His soul was transformed immediately into a du-juan (turtledove), whose call resembles sobbing. It is said that this turtledove, in singing, spits blood, which is transformed in its turn into bright red flowers found throughout the land of Shu and which have the same name. The du-juan thus symbolizes a brief passion that is prolonged through metamorphosis. Let us again point out that for “scholar Zhuang / butterfly” as well as for “emperor Wang / turtledove” there is a sex change: the butterfly and the turtledove always have a feminine connotation in the poetry of Li Shang-yin.
If the poet identifies with scholar Zhuang and emperor Wang, these two are made equivalent to the butterfly and the turtledove. This sequence of equivalences is underscored by the grammatical structure of the two sentences. The two lines, being parallel, have an identical structure: two living subjects (A and B) bound by a verb. The two verbs, “to wander” and “to change,” which in current usage are transitive verbs, are ror “in,” f
or example). Therefore, the progression of the sentence, instead of being one-way: A → B, becomes reversible: A ↔ B. It is in this way that the second line, for example, can be read: “Emperor Wang’s heart is transformed into a turtledove” or, inversely, “a turtledove is transformed into emperor Wang’s heart.” Through this linguistic device, the poet puts human elements into a relationship of reversibility with those of nature, to signify that, through transforming his lived passion and his unsatisfied desire into other things, he feeds the hope that he will find them again. Alternatively, since the two lines are parallel, “waking dream” and “springtime heart,” “butterfly” and “turtledove” are face to face and oppose each other: on the one hand, illusion, forgetfulness, and carelessness; on the other, carnal desire, memory and tragic passion. The poet’s feeling that these two poles represent an irreconcilable rift is made more evident by the formal structure.
This couplet, made in the mode of equivalence, is metaphoric in nature (which a metonymic structure supports: dream/butterfly, heart/turtledove). He establishes links of analogy between different kinds of beings (and among different realms): between the poet and the two people (Zhuang and Wang) first; then, between those characters and the butterfly and turtledove from the animal realm. Finally, the image of the animal realm pulls along that of the plant realm, represented by the flower. All these links established, give rise to the idea of interchangeability and of transformation and open a large metonymic field, which the poet exploits in the following couplet.
In effect, couplet III is composed of a series of metaphors having links of contiguity among them. The two lines begin respectively with images of sea and field, the combination of which, in Chinese, signifies: transformation.16 Beyond the animal and plant realms, the poet’s quest thus goes further; it touches the mineral realm, represented by the pearl and the jade. There is space to identify the myths contained in the two lines.
Chinese Poetic Writing Page 12