Reticence And Confession:
The Poetry of Wang Wei and Li Qingzhao
TRANSLATIONS
Matthew Flannery
CONTENTS
The quatrains of Wang Wei (699-759) and lyrics of Li Qingzhao (1084-1151) are close to the antipodes of style, voice, form, and expression in China’s traditional poetry. Yet, they share a common theme of separation and loneliness that, if one of many topoi for Wang Wei, was something of an obsession for Li. As a result, their works use contrasting styles to express similar feelings: if Wang is chiseled and succinct, Li is detailed, discursive; if Wang is reserved and formal, Li is explicit, emotional; if he is reticent, she, confessional.
Wang Wei
Wang Wei, in his interests and activities, was a typical scholar-bureaucrat of the literatus class that staffed the imperial government. If he stands out in his class, it is because he was good in this role. He held important government offices, he excelled at painting, poetry, music. The painting and music are gone, the poetry remains. An eremitic streak made him, out of office, fond of spending time on his extensive estate, Wangchuan Villa. This was located on the Wang Chuan (Wang River) in Lantian among the Zhongnan Shan, or Southern Mountains, not far south of the Tang dynasty’s (618-906) then secondary capital, Chang’an. Among his most famous poems is a set of twenty quatrains (jueju), the “Wangchuan Collection,” that describe scenes on his estate.
Wang Wei wrote in several forms of poetry; perhaps his jueju are most distinctive. Arising in Wang’s time during the later seventh and early eighth centuries, “jueju” means “cut-off verse,” but the origin and sense of this term are disputed. The compression of the jueju helps make it, in traditional opinion, the most difficult Chinese verse form. In comparison to the notoriously short Japanese haiku, for example, it is longer by three characters (approximately: haiku length is determined by a compound measure that is neither words nor purely syllabic). Moreover, structure in jueju is more complex than in haiku. A haiku is traditionally divided into three phrases. It commences by describing a scene or situation; this then becomes a foil for a following epiphanic revelation, an insight into the depicted situation. The descriptive passage may take up either the first or both opening phrases of a haiku; the revelation is borne by the remainder. Structurally, then, a haiku is scarcely more than a pair of phrases. The first establishes a situation, the second reacts to it. This structure lends haiku their logic: the abbreviated immediacy of their dual statements aims at provoking a sudden awareness in readers. By comparison, the quatrain, heavier in structure and styling, is formally more complex, a conventional poem bound by rules of composition whose tiny length must complete a progression from beginning, middle, to end. Its functional development is also more complex than in haiku. Usually, its first line begins a description of scene that is extended and refined in the second. The third line is the turn: it often unveils the emotional or personal meaning of the poem even as it steers toward the fourth line, a summary that unites the poem. If haiku are remarks, jueju are stories.
While the simplicity of a haiku’s structure may foster sudden intuitive awareness, it does not lend itself as well to other things: to such devices as metaphor or simile, to complex subject matter and relations of meaning. While not substantially larger than a haiku, the jueju has a rich capacity for complexity that can freight complicated relations and levels of meaning; treated simply, as in Wang’s “Wangchuan Collection,” it can sustain a haiku-like atmosphere
Much of Wang Wei’s verse is lushi, or regulated verse — regulated, that is, by rules of prosody that present complex technical challenges to its poets. (He also wrote in the less rule-bound genre of gushi, or ancient verse.) Lushi take three forms. The jueju has four lines, while most other lushi are written in the more popular eight-line form (confusingly: also termed “lushi.” Here, “lushi,” unqualified, is to be taken in its broad meaning). A third form, pai lushi, or successive regulated verses, adds lines in groups of four to the eight-line lushi. In every format, lushi have lines of five or seven characters. Thus, the structural arrangement of a lushi is a rectangular block of characters, implying a dignified, formal regularity of style. As befits its greater length, Wang Wei used the eight-line lushi for more philosophic, discursive, or referential poetry, reserving the jueju for quieter, more evanescent expressions of personal feeling.
Wang’s efforts in jueju, appropriate to its form, are spare, concentrated, precise. The concision of jueju promotes compact metaphoric imagery capable of achieving veiled expressions of feeling. The jueju enabled some of the most quietly evocative writing in Chinese verse, often expressing emotion through indirection. “Jueju is generally considered the ideal form for expressing a fleeting mood or capturing the essence of a landscape scene.” (Richard Bodman and Shirleen S. Wong in William H. Nienhauser, Jr., The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature, University of Indiana Press, I, 688) Typically, emotion and landscape merge, with emotion conveyed by description of scene. Thus, should a poet speak of a lonely boat, it is not the boat that is lonely. Not every jueju is serious or employed primarily to express mood, but the model for using it this way was early set by the verses of Chen Zi’ang (656-698 or 661-702), Meng Haoran (689-740), and Wang, artists who championed simplicity of diction, indirect expression of feeling, and an avoidance of the historical-literary allusions and references more characteristic of the eight-line lushi.
Wang Wei’s “Wangchuan Collection”
The jueju in Wang Wei’s “Wangchuan Collection” describe twenty locales on his Wangchuan estate and were written for his close friend Pei Di (716-?). Subsequently, Pei composed twenty responsive jueju on the scenes described by Wang. Pei Di’s work is not as consistently fine as Wang’s; yet, that his works have their moments, as illustrated by his response to Wang’s first quatrain.
Mengcheng Hollow
I built a hut below this ancient city.
Often now, I climb a nearby tower.
The city’s antique face is gone.
People come and go alone
The jueju in Wang Wei’s “Wangchuan Collection” usually have simple structures. There are exceptions, as the narrative disjunction in “Xinyi Village”:
Hibiscus bloom on high branches:
petals unfold all over the mountain.
Empty valleys fill with silence.
Extravagant, they open. Fall.
Here, hibiscus blossoms are the topos of the first two lines, but after the poet introduces a new subject in line three, hibiscus return incognito in the fourth. But typically in this collection, Wang’s syntax and diction are uncontrived: direct, blunt, compressed. One source of his compression is that Wang omits words of grammatical connectivity in favor of juxtaposing independent statements, leaving the reader to contrive a narrative logic to unite each poem. Thus, in his “Magnolia Park,” the reader must combine disparate lines about fading light, flocking birds, jade shadows, and restless colors to limn day’s end in autumn.
If the jueju in “Wangchuan Collection” tend to be simple in structure and content, yet, they are painted pure, intense. In a collection noted for its treatment of color, Wang positions light and color words such that they illumine austere surroundings. “Below red railings, crowds of trees,” “Layered mountains redden again,” “Jade shadows sometimes brighten,” “The river … / sometimes gleams through blue-crowned pines.” The pictorial qualities of Wang’s poems incited the archetypical literatus Su Shi (1036-1101) to comment: “In his pictures are poems; in his poems, pictures.”
Consistent with Su Shi, jueju in “Wangchuan” mostly delineate landscapes. But landscape is metaphor. If Wang’s language is cool, hard, jewel-like, the feelings under his surfaces are intensified by their verbal repression. Sometimes, things can stand as symbols — “…slanting sun / shines on jade green moss,” where untrampled moss signifies a solitary’s isolation. More commonly, his poems are metaphors of the whole, portraits of emotions not because they use tools such as symbols or similes but because their moods are sculpted by nice selections of word, phrase, scene.
Wang Wei, many in his family, were devout Buddhists. This influenced the content of his longer poems, where Buddhist themes or terms are common. But his jueju tend to be vehicles for direct imagery at the expense of philosophical content; at most, they express Buddhist thought not prescriptively but experientially. Thus, a Buddhist attitude toward nature — acceptance of events, of things as they are, even if illusions — may be said to pervade his quatrains. Compared to his longer poems, nature is more immediate in his jueju; they evince more direct and, at the same time, quieter, unadorned views of the natural world. “Wang’s random and apparently aimless representation seems … untouched by the cognitive process.” (Marie Chan, Cen Shen, Twayne Publishers, 28) In its simplicity, most of Wang’s “Wangchuan Collection” seems on the edge of merging, not with a religious or philosophical order, but with the natural.
Yet, a reserve, a caution, intervenes between him and the world. It is often said that Wang Wei and other literati were somewhat torn between the spiritual or natural worlds and the pleasures and responsibilities of secular life. Especially, many experienced a conflict between Daoist-Buddhist yearnings for a pure, isolate life and engagement with the everyday world — a desire to partake of its sociability, wealth, and power; to sample its aesthetic and mental stimulations; to fulfill Confucian duties to family and state.
Similarly, Wang’s desire for unity with nature ultimately seems frustrated: before merger with the world, self-consciousness intervenes. This is often expressed as loneliness, a fundamental separateness of the individual, a failure to erase the crevasse between self and other; a feeling that, in the end, the world remains out there, I, in here.
Wang Wei’s emotional distance is best expressed in his jueju. His longer poems can convey moods of tranquility, contentment, release, but his quatrains translate loneliness into a language quietly remote. Loneliness blossoms from his clipped, polished diction, from the isolate objects of a precise pictorialism, from scenes and places unpeopled, from a crystalline, palpable stillness that pervades many of these works. Often, he merely describes. “Hibiscus bloom on high branches.” “An egret flaps up; settles down.” Other times, description is thin veil. “Empty valleys fill with silence.” “Light slides from autumn slopes.” Occasionally, emotions verge explicit. “I sit alone in dark bamboo.” “Empty sorrow never ends.” The imagery of his jueju is so factual, noncommittal, feelings can seem hard to find. Some have dubbed them mere descriptions. It is often the accumulation, the summation rather than the individuality, of his carefully-wrought lines that yields emotion. They infiltrate: one reads a poem — feelings. In these terse, tiny works, under carefully-chiseled surfaces, are some of Chinese literature’s most fugitive feelings.
Li Qingzhao
Li Qingzhao’s life and poems are partly products of unusual attitudes toward women by her father, husband, a few others. She was born of, married into, prominent families. Both parents were writers. Wealth and status helped insulate her and her male supporters from criticism as they dismissed social conventions governing women’s roles. Her father educated her, her husband Zhao Mingcheng (1081-1129) collected and coauthored with her, the literatus Su Shi advised her on literary skills.
None of this would have been offered to, or taken root in, a personality unequipped to absorb it. Li appears to have been, at the least out of necessity, formidable. She acted vigorously in tumultuous times, was known for her critical acumen, was dubbed “Scholar out of Office.” Barred by gender from the main socially-acceptable occupation for a literatus — government work — she was recognized as a scholar, if an unemployed one.
Li and her husband Zhao Mingcheng were close, shared an intense interest in art. Together, they collected “ten warehouses” of it: calligraphies, paintings, bronzes, inscriptions in stone, books, ceramics; of which they published annotated rubbings of the bronze and stone inscriptions (lost).
This period of her life ended with Zhao Mingcheng’s death at 49 by illness while journeying on government business. A second marriage was brutal, short. Remarriage and divorce were unusual in her society. She followed one with the other. Traditionally, widows remained single in honor of dead husbands. If Li followed tradition toward the end, it was, perhaps, for her own reasons. Once divorced, intense mourning for her first husband appears to have mellowed into the resignations of age.
Her life is important to her work: her poems are chiefly autobiographical. But poetic persona need not be congruent with personality. Li’s apparent toughness, for example, is not seen in her work: it may have been the product more of survival than of innate personality, or she may have regarded it as inappropriate to poetic writing. It seems as if external decisiveness hid or protected much of her emotional life, which surfaced in her work, instead.
Many of her poems are identified with one of three periods in her life. Critics have noted the circularity of assuming a poem must be from a period of her life to portray it, only to argue that, portraying it, it must be from it. A poem about an event in an author’s life indicates little about the poem’s chronology beyond establishing its earliest possible date. Thus, we may at least assume that poems about separation from her husband date after her marriage, yet before his death; poems ruing his loss, after he died; and poems expressing resignation, toward the end. Otherwise, there is little external evidence of dates of composition for Li’s work. Indeed, there is little evidence of composition. Her poems were not preserved like a man’s: hardly fifty survive. Yet they easily make her one China’s great poets.
Structure and Expression
Li Qingzhao’s usual poetic form was the ci, or words to songs. Compared to the formality of lushi, including the jueju, the ci, while no less difficult to write — no less rule-bound — has apparently informal structures, including variations in poem and line length. These traits lend it a romantic, lyrical appearance; and it was used this way, less for philosophy than direct emotions. Differences in structure between the jueju and ci underlie other important contrasts between the work of Li and Wang.
As the ci was taken up by poets of high social status in the eighth century, it added new formal and expressive potentials to a poetic world dominated by the forms of lushi and its predecessor genre, gushi (ancient verse). Ci are songs, that is, lyrics to melodies. With melodies numerous yet finite, many lyrics were written to the same tune, often by the same author. The musical notation of these tunes, excepting an album of seventeen examples now hard to interpret, is gone. After the ci was adopted by the social elite in late Tang times, singing its lyrics gradually waned, leaving it a literary form. But new lyrics, still labeled with the titles of their ostensible tunes, continued to be written.
With many ci bearing the same tune title, titles became almost useless in distinguishing among poems. But ci continued to use tune titles less to identify individual ci as to identify the rules governing their composition. Even when ci were sung, there was more to writing lyrics than fitting them to a tune — they had to conform to the detailed literary patterns of their tune’s model lyric. Thus, a new ci had to replicate the rhyme and tone patterns, syntax, number and length of lines, and other literary features of its originary model. This contrasts with the rules for writing lushi, in which general regulations govern all poems written in each of its three forms. By comparison, ci encompass 800+ forms — one for each model lyric. The many forms of ci lend them, as a group, an air of informality, of spontaneity; yet, the compositional rules for each model are about as exacting as the rules for a lushi; but they are specific for each ci, while the rules for lushi govern everything written in each type of lushi. The abundance and variety of ci formats belie their detailed compositional requirements.
Early ci lack variety in form compared to later examples: their appearance has something of the block-like format of lushi that result from lines of equal length. A division into two stanzas is a constant among ci, but their shapes became increasingly irregular, informal in the numbers and lengths of their lines. Despite complex rules for writing a new work on a model tune, the ci’s informal appearance, its relation to song, and its closer proximity to folk origins encouraged a freer flow of feeling than in such older poetic forms as lushi and gushi. Differences in content, expression, and form between jueju and ci reflect the contrast between the formal, reserved quality of Wang Wei’s work and the expressionist tone of Li Qingzhao’s.
Li Qingzhao Again
The subject matter of early ci (about the eighth century) was much confined to topics related to love and loneliness. The thematic poverty of early ci was relieved by a slow expansion of subject matter by the greatest ci writers of the Song (960-1279) to include history, politics, philosophy. It is slightly ironic that Li Qingzhao’s work centers on the earliest theme common to ci, which tend in every period to be heavily populated with abandoned lovers, often imperial courtesans whom the emperor had not the time, perhaps the energy, to gratify. With most assays on this theme written by men without direct experience of women’s feelings, their ci were habited by public protagonists: imperial courtesans, river goddesses, historical figures. But Li’s emotions were personal, and one of her major contributions to the ci was to bring, to an old theme, lived feeling.
Another aspect of Li Qingzhao’s stature as an artist was her imaginative creation of new tropes. In her “Fenghuang Tai Shang Yi Chui Xiao” (“In the metal lion, incense cools”), for example, she was the first to invoke the conversational interruption: “I start to say — then I stop.” In “Wuling Chun” (“The wind stops. Fallen flowers scent the earth”), she writes, “I fear those tiny boats / could not carry this much sorrow,” for the first time attributing physicality—weight—to emotion. And the long train of inarticulate monosyllables that opens her “Shengsheng Man” is bizarre, perhaps unique:
Seek. Seek. Search. Search.
Cold. Cold. Void. Void.
Sorrow. Sorrow. Pain. Pain. Grief. Grief.
Subsequent to the happier, more conventional poems apparently of her youth, Li portrays loneliness in three phases: happiness frustrated by separation; loss and sorrow; resignation. Poems concerning the first phase, such as “Yi Jian Mei” (“Red Lotus: fragrance fading”), focus on frequent separations from her husband Zhao Mingcheng, who traveled widely in government service. In their lonely sorrow, these poems point already toward the despair of her second period, the resignation of her third.
Zhao Mingcheng’s premature death inaugurated a new phase in Li’s life and poetry. Her mourning is abysmal. The almost unendurable sorrow caused by Zhao’s death stimulates what seems to have been an inherent sensitivity to loss, separation. Time acquires a slow, turning quality, like a spit. Each of life’s objects — a jacket; rain; sunlight off a curtain hook — becomes palpable, magnified, blooming in existential immediacy as its meaning and reason decline. Her depiction of the slow grind of interminable pain is remarkable.
Gradually, in her final phase, time mutes, transmutes her pain into the private sorrows of age. In “Yong Yu Luo” (“The falling sun was molten metal”), for example, despair resolves to resignation. Reminiscence, rising, absorbs pain. Reflection restores old colors and sounds; weariness enfeebles action; hair and skin suffuse with change. Despair and hope leave together.
That Li’s work projects a poetic persona is no objection to her authenticity, her capacity for feeling. Writers do this. That is their talent: to project themselves into situations even of others. But Li was not dealing in others’ feelings. We have remarked that sides of Li’s personality—her toughness, her political acumen, her ability to manipulate emotions for a poetic result—are absent from her work. She is projecting a defined image for a particular result. Yet, compared to the female personae crafted by males more detached from experiential realities, Li’s personal life allowed her poetic persona to excel in the truth, accuracy, authenticity of feeling.
Today, perhaps the most arresting quality of Li’s work is the modernity of her emotional expression. Her loneliness, despair, the jaded decadence of her listless resignation combine with relentless self-examination and analysis of mood to make her poems, in spite of eight centuries, seem as if shaped by recent times. That they should have, to contemporary ears, such presence of feeling and expressive sensitivity to mood tells much, not only of Li’s sensibilities, but also of the long, complex development and mature sophistication of a culture that had become, before Li Qingzhao’s time, ancient.