Writing Poetry, Surviving War: The Works of Refugee Scholar-Official Chen Yuyi (1090-1139) 1621965465, 9781621965466

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Writing Poetry, Surviving War

Writing Poetry, Surviving War The Works of Refugee Scholar-Official Chen Yuyi (1090–1139)

Yugen Wang           Cambria Sinophone World Series General Editor: Victor H. Mair

Copyright 2020 Cambria Press All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Requests for permission should be directed to [email protected], or mailed to: Cambria Press 100 Corporate Parkway, Suite 128 Amherst, New York 14226, USA Image on front cover is Auspicious Cranes (1112) by Emperor Huizong of Song. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wang, Yugen, author. Title: Writing poetry, surviving war : the works of refugee scholar-official Chen Yuyi (1090-1139) / Yugen Wang. Description: Amherst, New York : Cambria Press, [2020] | Series: Cambria Sinophone world series | Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: "This is a study of the works of the Northern Song Chinese poet Chen Yuyi (1090-1139) as he led the Jurchen invasion during the massive political upheavals of a dynastic transition. This book demonstrates how Chen's poems epitomize the new style of writing in the Song that is markedly different from that of his Tang predecessors. Underscoring this stylistic and aesthetic analysis is a comparison of Chen and his model, the Tang master Du Fu (712-770). Through detailed analysis of Chen's poems, and of the political and psychological conditions under which they were written, the reader gains intimate insights into not only how a classical Chinese poet conducted his business, on the road, in crisis, but also the sources of the poet's inner strength, what culturally, psychologically, and emotionally sustained him on the long painful journey. This was an important period not only for Chen Yuyi but also for Chinese literary history. Chen's poems bring to focus the changing dynamics of the classical Chinese poet's relationship to the world. As his journey grew longer and brought him farther away from central China, the richness of the local landscapes in the south made him less apprehensive about the political situation, allowed him to endure the constant fluctuations in his environment, and revitalized his inner self as a poet. As Chen struggled and eventually reconciled with the political situation, he achieved a new balance between person and world, mind and landscape, a status later Chinese critics and theorists call qingjing jiaorong, the propitious fusion and coming together of emotion and nature in poetry. An original study on Chinese poetry, Writing Poetry, Surviving War is an important book for Asian studies and premodern Chinese humanities collections. It will appeal to scholarly and general audiences whose interests intersect China, premodern travel, trauma literature, traditional ideas of nature, and landscape poetry"-- Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020033107 (print) | LCCN 2020033108 (ebook) | ISBN 9781621965466 (library binding) | ISBN 9781621965657 (pdf) | ISBN 9781621965664 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Chen, Yuyi, 1090-1138--Criticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC PL2687.C477 Z93 2020 (print) | LCC PL2687.C477 (ebook) | DDC 895.11/42--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020033107 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020033108

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Part One: Early Works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Chapter 1: A Sojourner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Chapter 2: Life’s Splendid Blossoms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Chapter 3: Exile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 Part Two: The Journey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 Chapter 4: The Path Forward . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 Chapter 5: Mountains and Rivers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 Chapter 6: Face to Face . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197 Chapter 7: Poetic Perfection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233 Part Three: Aftermath . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265 Chapter 8: Breaking Through . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267 Chapter 9: Standing Alone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283 Epilogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325 Cambria Sinophone World Series . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337

Acknowledgments I would like to take this opportunity to thank the many individuals, colleagues, and friends who helped me during the long process of completing the book. The University of Oregon Humanities Center provided a term free of teaching in the early stages of the project. Xiaofei Tian from Harvard University gave generous help and warm encouragement in a critical moment of my writing. Maram Epstein, my colleague in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Oregon, showed great sympathy and was a role model for me during a time of personal difficulty. Luo Xuan from Zhejiang University of Water Resources and Electric Power helped me search the Chinese language scholarship on Chen Yuyi while she was a visiting scholar here. The anonymous reviewers of the manuscript walked the extra mile by not only correcting my translations of Chen Yuyi’s poems but providing frank and honest criticism of some of my unconscious habits and assumptions regarding the interpretation of Chen Yuyi’s work. Participants in a 2019 conference at National Tsing Hua University, particularly Yoji Asami from Osaka University, Ronald Egan from Stanford University, Charles Hartman from the University at Albany, SUNY, Huang Yizhen from National Taiwan University, Ari Levine from the University of Georgia, Li Gui from Shanghai Normal University, Wang Jilun from National Taiwan

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Normal University, and Zhang Ming from Peking University, offered valuable comments. Xiong Ying and Bai Xiaoping read an earlier version of the manuscript. Julie Hagen provided professional help with editing an earlier version of the manuscript, whose subtle touches improved not only my prose but also the flow of ideas. All the remaining flaws and shortcomings in writing and argument, however, are my own. I also want to thank Cambria Press, in particular my editor David Armstrong, for their high efficiency and professionalism in seeing the manuscript through to publication. Last but not least, my family has been with me during the entire journey. To Li and Rui, to their perseverance and understanding, this book is lovingly dedicated.

Introduction Chen Yuyi was twenty-three in the third month of the third year of Huizong’s Zhenghe reign, 1113, when he, together with eighteen other students, graduated from the Upper Hall of the Imperial College 太學上 舍釋褐 and obtained the official status qualifying him for government service.1 Because of his outstanding performance (he placed third in his class), he was soon appointed, in the eighth month of the year, as preceptor in the metropolitan prefecture of Kaide 開德府教授, a strategically important town on the banks of the Yellow River, just a few days’ journey from Kaifeng, the Northern Song capital. It was in this place more than a century before, in 1005, that the Song and Liao signed the “Treaty of Chanyuan” 澶淵之盟, which secured peace for both states and paved the way to unprecedented material and cultural development and prosperity for the Northern Song.2 At the time of Chen’s graduation, we may assume that he saw before him exciting prospects for a bright future. Despite four decades of intense partisan struggle between reformers and traditionalists, Huizong’s imperial court was characterized by strong political and intellectual activism, the momentum of which had been building since the beginning of the dynasty.3 As one of the top young scholars produced that year by the radically revamped education and examination system, Chen shared with many in his generation the lofty

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Confucian goal of bringing positive change to the world and benefits to the people by providing loyal and capable government service.4 For the geographically constrained but culturally expansive Song empire, that ancient goal carried a renewed sense of urgency.5 Thirteen years after Chen’s graduation, an event of enormous magnitude in national politics—the Jingkang Catastrophe 靖康之難 of 1126— and the subsequent reshuffling of geopolitical power in North China, would irrevocably change the trajectory of his career and his life. Prior to that, however, despite his share of ups and downs, Chen had been moving through the late Northern Song bureaucratic machine and had established himself as one of the most talented poets of his generation.6 The rampant sense of stagnation felt among his fellow officials and administrators did not seem to mitigate Chen’s enjoyment of the comfortable and collegial life that Kaifeng had to offer, as he hailed from the politically important and culturally sophisticated nearby metropolis of Luoyang.7 Having come out of the government school system and been trained with the proactive political ideology of the late Northern Song, Chen from early in his career demonstrated a determination to not let his mind be overly distracted by outside events. He remained hopeful and optimistic even when he was demoted and banished to a small suburban town outside Kaifeng at the end of 1124, one year before the initial Jurchen invasion. When Kaifeng quickly fell at the end of 1126 during the second Jurchen invasion and the whole country convulsed in response to the political tremors, Chen’s life was totally and violently upended, the magnitude of the shock far exceeding anything he and his colleagues and fellow scholars had ever experienced. Like many others, he abandoned his post, joined the massive flight south, and embarked on a journey that would last for more than five years and carry him over thousands of leagues of untrodden territory to eventually arrive at the fledgling Southern Song court in Zhejiang. The trials and tribulations of his personal odyssey would transform him as a poet. Historical events changed not only the subject matter and content of Chen’s poems, but also his mode and

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habits of expression. As he scrambled to flee the Jurchen soldiers, driven ever deeper into unfamiliar lands and territories, a new world of poetry opened up to him. Despite his early reputation as a poet of advanced technique, in the thirteen years between his graduation and the start of the war a palpable monotony, even apathy, came to permeate the intellectual and emotional outlook of his poems. His compositional activities intersected and meshed routinely with his official duties, and poems were used largely for socializing and communicating with colleagues and peers, as well as for personal expression. Most of that apathy dissipated after the Jingkang Catastrophe. On the road, fleeing the invasion, his poetry chronicled in excruciating, brutal detail his own pains and hardships and, to a lesser extent, those of his fellow refugees and scholar-officials, as they struggled for survival during and immediately after the political debacle. The enclosed circuit of his early poems was smashed open, injected with raw emotions and new imagery by one event after another as he tried to get a handle on events and on his writing. As his journey grew longer, the emotional rollercoaster stabilized; the richness of the local landscapes made him less apprehensive about the political situation, allowing him to endure the constant fluctuations in his immediate environment while remaining hopeful about things to come. The experience increased his poetic output and also gave his poems an emotional potency and directness of expression that were lacking in his pre-Jingkang works and hardly visible in the text-based poetry promoted by the Jiangxi school under which he had received his poetic education.8 Poetry once again became a tool for personal and political expression that he could reliably turn to during the most harrowing moments in his life. The physical world was evoked with purpose and vigor, described with a freshness and specificity that were not seen in his early works. The mountains and rivers he had sung of routinely in his early works gradually shed their masks as allegorical symbols and gained an immediacy of expression that would remain strong in his own works and be lifted to lofty heights

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by his Southern Song successors. The physical landscapes that filled his view began to exert an increasingly dominant presence in his poems, crowding out the emotions and worries surging inside him. The skillful but sometimes affected expressions of emotion in his early works were replaced by a direct dialogue with the natural landscape. At the end of his journey, Chen no longer tried to look beyond the mountains and rivers but accepted them as vital, constructive components of his selfhood and identity. This was an important moment for Chen Yuyi and for Chinese literary history as well. Chen’s post-Jingkang road poems give readers a “realtime” portrayal of how the traditional poetic dynamic between qing 情 (“emotion”) and jing 景 (“natural scenery”) developed, on a large scale and in intimate detail, into something new as Chen stumbled through large swaths of pristine, unfamiliar territory in south and southwest China. As he struggled, reconciled with, and made sense of his travel and the political situation, he achieved a new balance between person and world, mind and landscape—a status later theorists and critics called qingjing jiaorong 情景交融, the propitious fusion and coming together of emotion and nature in poetry.9 ***** Because of the boundary-crossing nature of Chen’s life, students of Song poetry have yet to find a way to appropriately periodize and classify his work. The Qing official Siku quanshu 四庫全書 editors saw him mainly as a Northern Song poet.10 Some modern scholars used the rather ambiguous term nandu shiren 南渡詩人 to describe him, referring to those poets who were born and established themselves in the Northern Song but fled to the south and had a successful career in the Southern Song. There is, however, no consensus regarding his designation.11 To avoid getting too involved in the problem of categorization, I adopt a practical approach and view his works through two conventional lenses to help situate Chen and his works in literary history.

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The first is his forward-leaning tendency, which points toward the Restoration poets 中興詩人 of the next generation, Yang Wanli 楊萬里 (1127–1206), Fan Chengda 范成大 (1126–1193), and Lu You 陸游 (1125– 1210). The early thirteenth-century literary critic Yan Yu identified Chen Yuyi and Yang Wanli as the creators of only two distinct styles of poetry that represent the Southern Song, but did not elaborate on the relationship between them.12 Chen Yan 陳衍 (1856–1937), the leading figure of the nineteenth-century Song poetry revival movement, considered Chen Yuyi’s seven-syllable quatrain a “harbinger of that of Yang Wanli” 開 誠齋先路.13 The contemporary scholar Zhang Fuxun 張福勳 extended the argument to include Chen Yuyi’s landscape poetry in general.14 Zhao Qiping 趙齊平 (1934–1993) saw not only a strong connection between Chen and Yang Wanli’s poetic styles but also a parallel in their development: both started by following the Jiangxi school but turned away from it in their later career.15 Michael A. Fuller also saw the connection between the two in their shared roots in the Jiangxi school but considered the innovation of the Yang Wanli generation as a result of their ability to recognize the school’s constraints and fight against its “inwardness of meaning and narrowness of imagination.”16 Whereas I actively pursue Chen’s inherent forward-leaning tendency, my approach is essentially retrospective. I take Chen Yuyi as representing the end point of a long-term development that had its beginnings in the landscape poetry of the early medieval period, rather than as a precursor to Yang Wanli. I refer especially to his deep poetic engagement with the works of the Tang master Du Fu as a framework for analysis. There is no question that Du Fu’s influence on Chen Yuyi was both profound and multifaceted, as noted by both traditional and modern commentators. After Du Fu’s canonization as the ultimate model for poetry, he became an inseparable part of any aspiring poet’s education and their skill set. So imposing was Du Fu’s status on the poetic altar of the late Northern Song that almost every new poet had in his or her heart an inner Du Fu. Attitudes and interpretive approaches toward Du Fu, as Charles Hartman

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argued, can serve as an effective barometer of larger intellectual and political changes in the period.17 Chen Yuyi was a prime example. In fact, he marked a high point in the scope and depth of the Northern Song’s collective Du Fu obsession. His relationship with Du Fu experienced a radical change, however, in the middle of his career after the Jingkang Catastrophe. His inner Du Fu was triggered abruptly and violently, under unusual circumstances. In a poem written in 1128, with the Jurchen soldiers hot on his heels, Chen lamented: “The only regret is, all my life, / I have taken lightly of Du Fu’s poems” 但 恨平生意, 輕了少陵詩.18 What was “taken lightly” were, of course, not the texts of Du Fu’s poems; they had been diligently studied, strenuously analyzed, and conscientiously imitated for decades by Northern Song poets, and by Chen himself, as the surest path toward poetic excellence. What was neglected was the moral and emotional potency of Du Fu’s poems, the immediacy of their meaning and their hefty relevance to lived experience. The modern scholar Qian Zhongshu 錢鍾書 (1910– 1998) pithily summarized the importance of this existential awakening for Chen Yuyi’s own poetic development. “Only during his own travels, through all the stumbling, scrambling, and wandering about,” Qian wrote, “did he begin to understand the profundity of Du Fu’s poems on the An Lushan Rebellion, surging inside him the same feelings of a smashed kingdom, broken family, a person being driven to the edge of the world” 在流離顛沛之中, 纔深切體會出杜甫詩裏所寫安史之亂的境界, 起了 國破家亡, 天涯淪落的同感.19 The forceful reentrance of lived experience into poetry led to significant changes in poetic representations of reality, breaking the tight grip of the enclosed-circuit, book-learning-based poetics of the Jiangxi school as poets once again committed to meaningful engagement and interaction with politics and culture, rejuvenating poetry’s traditional social and moral role, returning it to its cherished experiential roots.20 Du Fu was so integrated into the poetics of the Jiangxi school and Chen Yuyi’s poetic training that Chen’s post-Jingkang awakening seemed

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almost predestined. Despite his own claims and the attempts of his Southern Song commentators, however, this awakening did not turn him into another Du Fu. Chen’s surreal feeling of reliving Du Fu’s postAn Lushan Rebellion helplessness and agony, and his intense, selfconscious effort to emulate his writing in every possible way turned out to be emotionally and morally lifting but illusory, anachronistic, and technically unviable. As much as he tried to adopt Du Fu’s entire poetic persona and mentality, shedding Du Fu’s tears and gazing Du Fu’s gazes, the intensity of his impersonation slackened as the journey dragged on and Chen was forced to situate himself in the world he actually faced and engage with and accept the indigenous landscapes he encountered in the south. By trying to become Du Fu, he succeeded instead in rediscovering and becoming himself. In this work I undertake to show how Chen’s voluntary Du Fu impersonation was thwarted and undone internally and by the visceral actualities of his protracted journey. The result was that, toward the end of his travel, as the local landscapes increasingly dominated his thoughts and emotions, he was able to reach a balance and reconciliation with the world and with himself. James M. Hargett suggested that the persistent tension in Chen’s early works between the self-conscious desire to emulate the Tang models and the new trends in Song poetry ceased to be a real conflict in practice.21 I would further argue that his constant and close encounter with nature during the post-Jingkang period was a main contributor to resolving that tension—and to his eventual poetic success. In comparing Chen’s nature poetry with that of the Tang poet Wang Wei 王維 (ca. 699–ca. 761), David McCraw concluded that whereas Wang “is famous for writing entire poems without a hint of personal response,” Chen’s voice “is more explicit and more personal” with its “minute focus and delicacy of perception.”22 At their best, Chen Yuyi’s post-Jingkang poems represent the epitome of an explicit, intimate personal perspective in constant negotiation with what the poet sees and feels as a refugee on the road. Yoshikawa Kōjirō 吉川幸次郎 (1904–1980) considered the ability to combine minuteness and transcendence a key trait of Song

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poets in general.23 Chen Yuyi excels at seeing and describing the minute details of his personal experience, with a level of self-awareness that separates him from most of his Tang models. This retrospective lens of analysis is necessary because Chen’s attempt and failure to become another Du Fu provide a live example of how the broader literary and intellectual transformation from the Tang to the Song was materialized. Chen failed not because of his lack of talent, but because he and Du Fu were writing from different assumptions, with very different expectations and skill sets. By Chen’s time, poetry as an integral part of politics and culture had lost much of its legitimacy. The “falling away from the integrated notion of culture and politics in early medieval times,” according to Xiaofei Tian, saw its pace quicken in the eighth and ninth centuries of the Tang; and some of the changes in sentiment were perpetuated and made irrevocable in the Song.24 The poems from Chen Yuyi’s extended travels bring to focus the changing dynamics of the classical poet’s relationship to the world; as he starts to find adequacy in the moment and in the local landscape, Du Fu gradually disappears in his poems. The collective eleventh-century pursuit of ideological and intellectual cohesion and emotional unflappability requires that Chen write more cogently and realistically than Du Fu; the political contingencies of his travel mandate that he observe and make sense of the chaos in the world from his constrained perspectives as a road traveler. The result is an intimate, efficient, logically coherent and technically precise style that differs from that of Du Fu and many of his other Tang predecessors. ***** From the beginning of the Chinese literary tradition, poetry was framed by a strong, albeit mostly implicit belief that defined the content and outlook of classical poetry for much of its early and medieval history. This was the cherished notion of spontaneity, according to which the poet acts mainly as a conveyor of cosmic energy, following the rhythms

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and vibrations of the physical universe but not necessarily interacting with it or affecting its course. The strong technical expertise and explicit artistic control the poet was expected to wield in the new poetic regime of the Jiangxi school in the late Northern Song represented a significant move away from the classical understanding. The change, however, was gradual and long in the making. Nature plays a variety of roles in the earliest Chinese poetic anthology Shijing 詩經 (Classic of Poetry, or Book of Songs), the fountainhead of Chinese poetry. It serves as what later scholars call the “affective image” (xing 興) that metaphorically launches a poem’s political or moral agenda. It also serves as the physical setting for the actions characters take in the poem: campaigning soldiers march to battle with the sight of burgeoning willow trees in spring and return home in winter amid falling flakes of snow; women pick wild vegetables in the fields while longing for their absent husbands; laborers toil in the immediate environs of their livelihood; villagers joyously celebrate the cycles of the year and of life. The mundane materiality of nature’s role in early Chinese poetry can sometimes be overlooked in the larger historical context because it takes on a thick allegorical guise in the Chuci 楚辭 (Lyrics of Chu), a subsequent anthology that played a similarly formative if not more important role in shaping classical Chinese poetry’s deep engagement with nature. Because of the genre’s heavily figurative mode of expression, the outlandish plants and flowers native to the ancient southern state of Chu featured prominently in the poems, but without much detail for their identification in the physical world. This allegorized use of natural images could be taken as a reinforced version of the “affective image” in the Shijing, because the association between image and meaning in the Chuci is integrated, strengthened, and more consistent. Unlike the sometimes fortuitous or incidental association between image and meaning in the Shijing, the Chu lyrics make the physical qualities of the plants and flowers central to their allegorical meaning, with pleasing smells symbolizing the upright adviser, repulsive ones, the petty slanderer.25

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At the same time, the tightening of the correlation between image and meaning in the Chu lyrics was accompanied by a change in the conception of the poet. In the Shijing, we know very little about the poet behind the poem, other than a few cases when we are told explicitly of the individuals responsible for their creation. The Chu lyrics represent a substantial step toward our modern notion of the poet as an artist with full subjectivity and historical agency. Not only do natural images assume a more direct role in a poem’s meaning, but the image of the person behind a poem’s making also becomes clearer, especially with the centerpiece “Li sao” 離騷 (Encountering sorrow) attributed to Qu Yuan 屈原 (ca. 340–ca. 278 BC). That poem’s temporal and spatial construction is closely associated with Qu Yuan as a historical person, as far as Sima Qian’s account tells us, and the emotional and ideological makeup of his persona allows us to more confidently ground the poem’s composition in real history. Still, however, the poetic world of “Li sao” exists essentially by itself, in a rarefied parallel universe that can be generally tied to Qu Yuan’s lived experience but lacks material specificity and detail. An important development in the early medieval period affected both the representation of nature and the conception of the poet. We can better understand this trend if we look at the works of two of the most influential poets of the period, Tao Qian 陶潛 (365–427) and Xie Lingyun 謝靈運 (385–433). Although there are undeniable differences between them—Tao’s use of nature imagery is quite generic and steeped in the classical tradition, whereas Xie’s involvement with it is grittier and more visceral—nature plays a substantially more active role in initiating the works of both poets as compared to earlier periods. Tao Qian famously created the image of the poet as a recluse, who chooses to live in a harsh physical environment to be free from the corrupt world of officialdom, transforming the farmstead into a romanticized, culturally and aesthetically appealing space of tianyuan 田園 (“gardens and fields”). In the well-discussed fifth poem of his “Drinking Wine” 飲酒 series, we find the speaker situated in a physically plausible but idealized

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landscape: picking chrysanthemums along an eastern hedge while gazing at the distant mountains in the south, as birds at sunset return to their perches.26 Although the details of the landscape are not fully drawn and scholars still debate the nature and content of that iconic gaze— that is, whether the speaker incidentally catches sight of the mountains or intentionally directs his gaze toward them—the mode of looking established there provides a paradigm for all subsequent landscape poetry.27 Symbolizing harmony with nature and timeless aesthetic beauty, Tao Qian’s tianyuan is essentially different from Qu Yuan’s world of fantastic flowers and plants, roamed by goddesses, shamans, avatars of legendary historical figures, and a host of other beings. To many, it represents the true beginning of Chinese nature poetry. By pushing beyond Tao Qian’s tianyuan, at the border between home and uncultivated land, further into the wilds, Xie Lingyun not only gave landscape poetry real legitimacy but also established its basic mode of observation and writing. We can say with greater confidence that the landscapes described in his poems can be more reasonably correlated with the actual mountains and rivers he experienced on his road. Furthermore, in Xie we also have an opportunity to see how his actual travels changed the dynamics of his relationship with nature. If at the start of his journey to Yongjia 永嘉, the poet-landscape relationship is still quite conventional in that nature is employed or evoked mainly to express the poet’s frustration over his political exile, the relationship gradually changes as he gets deeper into the landscape and the encounter becomes more intimate, physical, and at times religious. From gazing at clouds atop craggy mountain cliffs from his Yongning 永寧 villa, to watching the churning rapids at the Fuchun 富春 islets during his travels, to his many local excursions after arriving in Yongjia and his deep adventures in the interior of the mountains while living in retirement, Xie demonstrates the full spectrum of his increasingly intense, and interactive, relationship with the natural world.28

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The innovation of Xie Lingyun’s landscape poetry resides as well in the mode of observation and description. The closeness and intimacy with which he engages the natural landscape shaped the genre’s subsequent development, contributing to the foregrounding of nature as a primary subject matter and a key source of inspiration, and the establishment of the mobile, on-the-road way of looking as one of the major modes of observation and description in poetry.29 We need only turn to the later works of Du Fu, especially those after his arrival at Kuizhou 夔州, to see the magnitude of the impact. Du Fu’s relationship with nature and his way of writing changed significantly after he left the familiar but politically frustrating environment of Chang’an following the An Lushan Rebellion. In the absence of his usual human interlocutors, he settled eventually into an extended mode of solitary dialogue with the mountains and streams of the upper Yangzi, turning himself essentially into another Xie Lingyun and allowing the power of raw nature to dominate his mind and writing. One could argue that it was Du Fu who ultimately secured Xie Lingyun’s landscape-poetry legacy and solidified his deep, intimate, and dynamic mode of observation and writing. As Stephen Owen shows, the younger generations of poets after Du Fu in the late Tang vehemently promoted, through their lifestyle and their poetry, the notion that poetry is as much the result of meticulous craftsmanship as a demonstration of spontaneous talent and keen observation.30 Further signs of change in this direction can be seen in the Xikun 西崑 poets of the early Northern Song; although their explicitly imitative poems were informed by an underlying desire for internal consistency and aesthetic coherence that was absent in the source for their imitation, the late-Tang poet Li Shangyin 李商隱 (813–858), their commitment to sophisticated craftsmanship was a continuation of that long-term trend.31 It is the Jiangxi school of the late Northern Song, however, as I argued elsewhere, that played the most substantive role in consolidating this long-term technical shift, promoting and installing the idea across the board, in poetic theory, practice, and pedagogy.32

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Heavily influenced by the self-conscious and technically sophisticated Jiangxi school style of writing, Chen Yuyi struggled mightily to find his own voice at the start of his journey after the Jingkang Catastrophe. As he traveled through different terrains from the Central Plains deep into mountains in the south and southwest, he gradually gained a handle on both his personal situation and his writing. What emerged can be described as a reinforced and integrated version of his writing seen partly in Xie Lingyun and Du Fu and partly in his more recent Northern Song predecessor, the Jiangxi school patriarch Huang Tingjian 黃庭 堅 (1045–1105). More than Xie Lingyun and Du Fu, and much in the vein of Huang Tingjian, Chen strove to stay in the concrete and the present, refusing to let himself be carried away by the intensity of the political situation and the hardships of prolonged travel. His poetry emerged as both a tool for chronicling his physical journey and a pillar of emotional and moral support. He was able to find a balance between technicality and spontaneity, between the urging voices of an inner Du Fu and the demanding material requirements of writing while on the run. As McCraw observes, in Chen’s works, “the prominence of verbs of perception continually reminds the reader of the speaker.”33 Describing how that authentic personal voice emerges from the tension, trauma, and terror of his travel and from the psychological pressure of living up to Du Fu is my main task in this book. ***** Chen’s Jiangxi school upbringing provided him with the requisite skills and abilities to produce the kind of highly allusive, meticulously crafted poetry that was in fashion in the last half century of the Northern Song. Qian Zhongshu once mocked the effect of reading such densely decorated poems as “listening to someone play the lute from behind the curtains” 隔簾聽琵琶 or listening to “strangers speak their local dialects among themselves” 異鄉人講他們的方言.34 There is a considerable portion of Chen’s early poems that are clearly the result of this style of poetry. But overall his writing is straightforward, precise, and practical, especially

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for poems from the post-Jingkang period. As readers we are thus largely exempt from the formidable task of having to lift those heavy metaphorical curtains to get to the meaning. That is to say, unlike with Huang Tingjian and many other Jiangxi poets, we can enter the world of Chen Yuyi’s poetry with relatively little resistance on the semantic and lexical levels. The challenge of reading Chen Yuyi is of a different kind. The meaning of his poems is so tightly dependent on, and interwoven with, the specific events and concrete thoughts and feelings of his travel that the reader must first get through the dense woods of these happenings to see the light of meaning. Bai Dunren 白敦仁 (1918–2004) speaks for us all when he comments that “there are works in Yuyi’s poetry that look easy to understand but are actually hard to understand, poems that are prone to misunderstanding if the specific historical contexts are not sorted out” 與義詩有看似易懂, 但如果不弄清其具體歷史背景實難真正讀懂, 甚 至產生誤解的.35 An essential part of my job is to provide those contexts—to put Chen’s poems in their original circumstances or “ecosystems” of meaning, in his “live stream” of emotion and thought. A couple of metaphors from contemporary Song sources might help us better see the benefit of this immersive approach. In discussing his ideal methods of reading canonical Confucian literature, the Northern Song thinker Cheng Hao 程顥 (1032– 1085) invoked the familiar imagery of “hawks flying and fishes leaping” 鳶飛魚躍, urging readers to indulge themselves in the lively world of natural, spontaneous action in order to fully understand the ancient works.36 To capture the fullness of meaning in Chen Yuyi’s road poems, I suggest that we allow ourselves to be also inspired by Cheng Hao’s illustrious Southern Song successor, the Neo-Confucian philosopher and synthesizer Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200). Consistent with the general message in his extensive dushu fa 讀書法 (“methods of reading”), Zhu admonished his disciples to emulate, among others, the gritty, pragmatic gardener, the yuanfu 園夫. “A good gardener waters the vegetables and fruits according to the conditions of each plant, watering them one by

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one. After a while, when the job is done, soil and water are harmoniously matched and each plant receives its allotment and follows its natural course of growth” 善灌之夫, 隨其蔬果, 株株而灌之. 少間灌溉既足, 則 泥水相和, 而物得其潤, 自然生長.37 As we follow Chen Yuyi on his five-and-a-half-year-long journey from the beginning of 1126 to the summer of 1131, I try to emulate both Cheng Hao’s happy hawks and fishes and Zhu Xi’s conscientious gardener, feeling the poet’s pains and joys by trudging and slushing along with him. This up-close perspective informed Chen’s own ways of looking and writing as he told his story through the intensely observant eyes of a traveler on the road, alone in overwhelming solitude, in panic at most times, not knowing what was to happen the next minute. Through detailed analysis of a considerable portion of his poems, and the material and psychological conditions under which they were written, we try to understand the large concerns and patterns of his poetry and also the sources of his inner strength, what psychologically and morally sustained him on the long dreadful journey. The fact that there are many metaphysical and transcendental elements in Song intellectual thought and literature does not invalidate my baseline argument that the poems of Chen Yuyi, and Song poetry in general, are more materially grounded than those of their Tang predecessors. Chen’s work merits this intensive, biographically and chronologically based treatment for another reason as well. He epitomizes the emerging prototype of a committed poet who takes poetry as a major task in his life, making consistent, self-conscious, and careful decisions about not only how and what to write but also how much to write. His modest output—565 poems in total in his main collection, the focus of this book —shows a combination of deliberateness, compactness, and restraint that perfectly embodies the poetic theory that informed the writing of his generation.38 Because of his thematic and stylistic consistency and unity in his post-Jingkang poems, one could push the point further by taking the 292 poems written on the road after 1126 as one single piece of

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composition that collectively tells his story. Chen Yuyi mostly wrote not out of spontaneous sentimentality but from precise observation and, like some of his Jiangxi school predecessors and colleagues, in implicit but deliberate defiance of the contemporary tendency toward copiousness and volume in literary production.39 This drive toward unity and internal cohesion is also illustrated in Chen’s generic choices. There are no clearly marked yongshi shi 詠史 詩 (“poems on history”) or yongwu shi 詠物詩 (“poems on things”) in his collection, two genres that played a disproportionately large role in medieval Chinese poetry. Another manifestation is his fondness for the wuyan gushi 五言古詩, the unregulated, ancient-style verse in the fivesyllable line. This relatively free-wheeling form gave him the latitude to deal with the fluidity of the challenges he faced on the road and to explore new possibilities as they appeared. Both the absence of yongwu shi and yongshi shi and his favoring the wuyan gushi are emblematic of Chen’s quest for unity in form and function, expectation and reality, his deliberate opting out of and into certain genres, forms, and styles to meet the needs of writing on the road. ***** At the most basic level, the book is a study of Chen Yuyi’s poetry, focused on those composed during his five-and-a-half-year-long journey while he was fleeing the invading Jurchen armies. A key line of my analysis is how the disaster and displacement helped reactivate the moral and emotional potency of his poems without mitigating the collective Song poetic pursuit for sophistication and technical precision. I use Chen’s Jiangxi school-influenced, quintessential late-Northern Song style and habits of writing to set up his post-1126 awakening, devoting the three chapters of Part I to the tendencies, patterns, and conflicts inherent in his early works. In Part II, from chapter 4 to chapter 7, I focus on the Journey, both the physical journey that brought him thousands of miles away from the Central Plains and the psychological and emotional one

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that culminates in his sense of achieving poetic perfection toward the end of his travel. In Part III, which consists of chapters 8 and 9, I discuss the aftermath of his poetic transformation by looking at poems written during the last months of his journey after being summoned by the court, as well as those in the last few years of his life in Zhejiang. The shape of Chen Yuyi’s collected poems has remained quite stable over the centuries. The earliest block-printed edition of 1142, published four years after his death under the financial auspices of the Huzhou 湖 州 prefectural government where he served briefly as governor toward the end of his career, was based on the manuscripts preserved by his family. My study is based on the 1990 modern critical edition by Bai Dunren, which in turn is based on the text and commentary by Hu Zhi completed in the 1190s, during the Southern Song.40 Dates and events of Chen’s life are based on Bai Dunren’s meticulously-researched 1983 chronological biography (nianpu 年譜) for the poet, which again is based on an earlier work by Hu Zhi.41 In recounting these events, I also draw heavily on two historical records, both from the Southern Song period, that have a direct bearing on Chen’s life and travels: the Jingkang yaolu 靖康要錄 (Essential record of the Jingkang period) attributed to Wang Zao 汪藻 (1079–1154) and Jianyan yilai xinian yaolu 建炎以來繫年要錄 (Essential record since the Jianyan period, arranged by year) by Li Xinchuan 李心傳 (1167–1244).42 Compared with the scarcity of official records on Huizong’s reign before the Jingkang Catastrophe, these two works are true treasure troves of information that help us navigate the tumultuous events occurring on the larger political and military stage as Chen navigated his own path through the meandering southern landscape.

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Notes 1. Unless otherwise noted, dates for Chen’s life and work follow the original Chinese sources. An example of the difference between the Chinese and Western calendars is the Treaty of Chanyuan, which was concluded on the twelfth day of the twelfth lunar month in the first year of Zhenzong’s Jingde reign, 1004, corresponding to January 24, 1005. 2. Twitchett and Smith, Cambridge History, 262–270; Franke and Twitchett, Cambridge History, 104–110; Nap-Yin Lau, “Waging War.” Chanzhou 澶 州, modern Puyang 濮陽, was upgraded to a metropolitan prefecture and renamed Kaide in 1106. 3. Levine, “Reigns.” 4. Under the new Three Hall 三舍 system, candidates could enter government service by either graduating from the Upper Hall of the Imperial College, as Chen Yuyi did, or taking an equivalent triennial examination. The Three Hall system was a nationwide tiered system comprising an Outer Hall 外舍, an Inner Hall 內舍, and an Upper Hall 上舍. Each level was responsible for educating and selecting outstanding graduates for government service. The system was adopted early in Huizong’s reign to replace the old civil services examinations. The number of students in all government schools nationwide is said to have reached 200,000 at one point. Chaffee, Thorny Gates, 77–80; Chaffee, “Sung Education,” 300–305; Yongguang Hu, “Reassessment.” 5. From its founding in 960, the Song was under constant military threat from its powerful northern neighbors, the Khitan Liao, Tangut Western Xia, Jurchen Jin, and, finally, the Mongols, who ended the Southern Song in 1279. 6. After comparing Chen’s techniques with those of his Northern Song and Tang predecessors, David R. McCraw concludes that Chen was “as skilled a poet as any of his more eminent colleagues.” McCraw, “Poetry,” 344. I agree with McCraw in this assessment. 7. Chen’s family relocated from Sichuan to Luoyang with his great-grandfather Chen Xiliang 陳希亮 (1002–1065), who was an acquaintance of Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037–1101) and was well known during Renzong’s reign. See Hargett, “Poetry,” 27–29. 8. Chen’s Jiangxi school designation began to gather proponents toward the end of the Southern Song among critics such as Yan Yu 嚴羽 (1191–

Introduction

9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

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1241), Liu Chenweng 劉辰翁 (1232–1297), and Fang Hui 方回 (1227– 1307). Fang was the author who conjured the “One Progenitor, Three Patriarchs” 一祖三宗 theory, which considers the Tang master Du Fu 杜 甫 (712–770) to be the Jiangxi school’s single model and Huang Tingjian 黃庭堅 (1045–1105), Chen Shidao 陳師道 (1053–1101), and Chen Yuyi its three most accomplished members. In a recent article, Zhu Xinliang argued that the Jiangxi school link was established earlier, by Chen Yuyi’s commentator Hu Zhi 胡穉. Zhu Xinliang, “Fang Hui.” Although I agree that Chen Yuyi’s Jiangxi school classification is debatable—both David McCraw and Michael Fuller, for example, strongly suggested that it was a post hoc creation—there is also no question that the school heavily influenced Chen’s poetic thought and early writing. McCraw, “Poetry,” 292; Fuller, Drifting, 123–181. For a detailed and comprehensive review of the question, see Hang, Chen Yuyi, 172–225. The early Qing scholar Wang Fuzhi 王夫之 (1619–1692) contributed most significantly to the formulation of this theory. See Wong, “Ch’ing and Ching”; Cai Yingjun, Bixing. Yong, Siku quanshu, 1349. Two recent studies, for example, seem to take very different approaches on the matter. Wang Jiansheng does not discuss Chen Yuyi in his study on the nandu shiren, while Yang Yuhua considers Chen “the crown jewel of nandu poetry” 南渡詩人之冠. Wang Jiansheng, Tongxiang zhongxing; Yang Yuhua, Chen Yuyi, 116–138. Yang’s view obviously echoes that of Hu Yunyi 胡雲翼 (1906–1965), one of the most influential modern scholars on Song poetry, who called Chen “the greatest poet during the nandu period” 南渡時期的第一大詩人. Hu Yunyi, Songshi, 138. My approach is close to that of Hang Yong in his book-length study on the poet. Hang, Chen Yuyi. I want to thank an anonymous reviewer for bringing Hang’s book to my attention. Guo Shaoyu, Canglang, 59. Chen Yan, Songshi, 145. For Chen Yan’s role in the Song poetry revival movement, see Kowallis, Subtle Revolution, 153–231; Shengqing Wu, Modern Archaics, 14–24. Zhang Fuxun, “Jianzhai.” Zhao Qiping, Songshi, 258–260. Fuller, Drifting, 181. Hartman, “Tang Poet.” See chapter 5. Qian Zhongshu, Songshi, 131.

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20. Michael Fuller offers an extended look at poetry’s renewed attempt at meaningful dialogue with the Neo-Confucian movement of the Southern Song. Fuller, Drifting. 21. Hargett, “Poetry,” 15. 22. McCraw, “Poetry,” 93, 90, and 95, respectively. 23. Cited in McCraw, “Poetry,” 158. 24. Tian, The Halberd, 255. 25. Wang Guoying conducted a comprehensive survey of the representation of nature in the Shijing and Chuci in connection with the rise of landscape poetry in the early medieval period. Wang Guoying, Zhongguo shanshui, 11–36. 26. Yuan, Tao Yuanming, 247. 27. For the debate, see Tian, Tao Yuanming. 28. Xie Lingyun’s historical role in originating the new type of landscape poetry is the topic of several excellent studies. See, among others, Gu, Xie Lingyun, 15–34; Ge Xiaoyin, Badai, 177–189; Frodsham, Murmuring Stream; and Westbrook, “Landscape Description.” My emphasis on the grittier, physical aspects of Xie’s nature imagery should not be taken as negating the spiritual dimensions of his work. In a seminal article, Richard Mather brilliantly establishes the “landscape Buddhism” of Xie’s nature imagery, anticipating the works of later poets such as Wang Wei and Liu Zongyuan. Mather, “Landscape Buddhism.” Wendy Swartz in a recent article on Xie’s “Rhapsody on Dwelling in the Mountains” 山 居賦 details the physical environment and activities the poet claims to have performed during his stay in his mountain estate after his brief stint as governor of Yongjia between 422 and 423. See Swartz, “There’s No Place.” 29. Xiaofei Tian describes at length this imaginary, mobile mode of looking and seeing in another connection. See Tian, Visionary Journeys, 21–67. 30. Owen, Late Tang. 31. On the latter point, see Yugen Wang, “Xikun.” 32. Yugen Wang, Ten Thousand Scrolls. 33. McCraw, “Poetry,” 95. 34. Qian Zhongshu, Songshi, 97, 102; Yugen Wang, “Passing Handan,” 51. 35. Bai, “Preface,” 9. 36. Cheng and Cheng, Er Cheng, 59. The images derive from Mao 239 in the Classic of Poetry: “The hawk flies up to heaven; / The fishes leap in the deep” 鳶飛戾天, 魚躍于淵. Legge, She King, 445.

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37. Zhu Xi, Zhuzi, 167. Zhu clearly thinks there is a way of doing the job, that it is not just a matter of following one’s instincts: the emphasis here is on “according to the conditions of each plant” 隨其蔬果 and “watering them one by one” 株株而灌之. 38. The number of 565 does not include his 18 song lyrics 詞, the 68 compositions in the “Outer Collection” 外集, or the 29 extra pieces or fragments in “Leftover Writings” 佚詩文. The output is small compared with his Tang counterparts, let alone with his prolific Song contemporaries: Du Fu wrote about fifteen hundred, Huang Tingjian about nineteen hundred, and Lu You, the most prolific poet before the eighteenth century, wrote about nine thousand poems. 39. As Zheng Qian (1906–1991) pointed out, Chen Yuyi had likely compiled his own collection before his death and intentionally left out some poems, which were garnered by later editors and made their way eventually into the “Outer Collection.” Zheng Qian, Chen Jianzhai, 379. Judging from the fact that there are only sixty-eight poems in the “Outer Collection,” Chen’s actual compositions may not have exceeded the extant number by very much. 40. Bai, CYYJJJ. 41. Bai, Nianpu. 42. Wang Zhiyong, Jingkang. Li Xinchuan, Jianyan yilai xinian yaolu (hereafter cited as JYYL).

Writing Poetry, Surviving War

Part One

Early Works

Chapter 1

A Sojourner When news of the siege of Kaifeng broke, Chen Yuyi was in the nearby town Chenliu 陳留, fifty-two Chinese leagues to the southeast on the Bian Canal, a section of the Grand Canal that connected the Yellow River through the Huai to the Yangzi.1 He had been demoted from a prestigious court position and banished to Chenliu to serve as director of the wine monopoly office there, owing to his association with the recently ousted Grand Councilor Wang Fu 王黼 (1079–1126).2 It had been about a year since his arrival, and thirteen years since his graduation from the Imperial College. The 184 poems in Chen’s collection written prior to his Chenliu exile were, like many compositions by his contemporaries in this period, products of the very active social life he led while fulfilling his diverse responsibilities as a newly employed government official; many of them were written in exchanges with members of a close-knit community of writing peers, former classmates, and fellow office holders he had become acquainted with since his Imperial College student days.3 The intellectual and ideological homogeneity of this group was striking, compared with similar communities in the Tang or the early decades of the Northern Song, when territorial consolidation brought men into

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service from different parts of the newly unified empire with oftentimes conflicting views, interests, and political affiliations.4 The people with whom Chen exchanged poems were not only physically close, located within a short radius from Kaifeng, but also, like Chen himself, mostly new graduates and young scholars starting their careers at the bottom of a bureaucratic system that by the early twelfth century had accumulated a glut of scholar-officials in the civil service.5 During his first thirteen years as a civil servant, Chen did not see much advancement in terms of official rank. He served out his first three-year tenure as preceptor of the government school in Kaide and returned to Kaifeng in the eighth month of 1116 to await a new assignment. More than two years passed before he was given another post, as registrar or biyong lu 辟雍錄 in the Outer Hall of the Imperial College, one of the lowest-ranked administrative positions in the college.6 He served in that position for less than two years and in the spring of 1120 moved to Ruzhou 汝州 to fulfill his mandatory mourning obligations, on the death of his mother. After his mourning period was over, he returned to Kaifeng and was reinstated and promoted to erudite 博士 of the Imperial College. From that position he was further promoted to assistant editorial director 著作佐郎 in the Imperial Library. This was the last office he held prior to his Chenliu exile. Although still low in rank, it was a coveted “literary appointment” (guanzhi 館職) that carried both prestige and a built-in path toward advancement to the highest positions in the central government. Like the works of others just starting their careers, Chen’s poems from this period demonstrate an easily recognizable sense of anxiety and concern about personal success. He used poetry in fulfilling his many social responsibilities in his official and personal lives, as well as for self-expression, recording the experiences and affirming the collective hopes and beliefs of similarly educated, like-minded young scholars who were moving slowly through the bureaucratic system and through the mundane cycles of daily life. Among the finest poets of his generation, Chen was admired for his mastery of the most sophisticated poetic skills

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of his time, which were deeply influenced by the Jiangxi school. The use of obscure allusions to rare texts, a practice beloved by some of the school’s early practitioners, had by this point lost some of its luster but was still earnestly followed by many people. Some of Chen Yuyi’s poems from this period are still very abstruse, strewn with references to all kinds of texts, but on the whole they are clean, linear, and pragmatic, key attributes that would solidify in later periods and become defining characteristics of his poetry. In terms of form and subject matter, the early poems demonstrate Chen’s wide interests as a young writer; his desire to showcase his skills and abilities among his peers sometimes overwhelms the internal call for personal voice, making it hard for the reader to find a consistent pattern and personality. Even in the diverse array of poems discussed later in this chapter and in chapter 2, however, we can see an emerging tendency toward balanced discussion, precision of linguistic description, and pragmatism in coping with reality. All these underlying forces will be important for his later transformation and differentiate him from both his Tang and Northern Song predecessors. In this chapter, I focus on poems written during his two years sojourn in Kaifeng awaiting reappointment after the initial Kaide post. In chapter 2, I examine the more dynamic and experimental forces in poems he composed during the subsequent six years. My purpose is to show that at the end of the first decade of his creative life, a clear poetic identity emerges, forged on quintessential late-Northern Song expectations. As we will see in his post-Jingkang works, some aspects and components of this identity would be shattered and recalibrated, but his essential ways of seeing the world and habits of writing would stand the catastrophe and determine the outcome of his poetic transformation.

Native Clump One prominent feature of Chen Yuyi’s poetic collection that first strikes the reader is its concentration on one particular type of verse. Opening the collection leads us to a different landscape than those in the work

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of most of his medieval counterparts or his more recent Northern Song predecessors. Following three pieces of fu 賦 (rhapsody, poetic exposition) at the top of the collection (one composed in 1122 in Ruzhou and the other two in Chenliu in 1125), the reader is quickly ushered into the major verse form that occupies the bulk of the collection, shi 詩 poetry. The first shi poem (hereafter, simply “poem”), number four in the collection, is a wuyan gushi, the ancient five-syllable style of unregulated verse. Chen showed a lot of love for this form and he especially liked to use it in his post-Jingkang road compositions. It is only fitting that we start our discussion with this poem. Written in late 1113 after his arrival at his Kaide preceptorship post, the poem is titled “Matching the Rhymes of Assistant Magistrate Xie Wenji, Who Sent Me a Poem; Also Shown to Liu Xuanshu” 次韻謝文 驥主簿見寄兼示劉宣叔 (#4/19–20).7 As a note attached to the poem by Chen himself tells us, his friend Xie Wenji proposed a “ten-year contract” 十年之約 with him in his original poem, to which this poem is Chen’s response.8 We do not know the exact content of that “contract,” but from Chen’s verse we can infer that the two young men at the start of their careers had reaffirmed with each other their commitment to scholarly pursuits. Ten years down the road, Chen would be in quite a different emotional state, but at this moment he was very optimistic. “Ten years are indeed too late,” he concludes the poem; “Please take heed of these words instead” 十年亦晚矣, 請便事斯語 (ll. 31–32; my emphasis).9 “These words” (siyu 斯語) are Chen’s own pledge, elaborated in the main body of the poem, to remain focused on the present moment, to keep his feet grounded in the actual circumstances and events of his life. The message is vividly expressed in the first stanza of the poem through a familiar metaphor.10 斷蓬隨天風 A broken tumbleweed follows skyward winds, 飄蕩去何許 2 Drifting, dancing, how far will it go?

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寒草不自振 The cold grasses do not uplift themselves, 生死依墻堵 4 Clinging to the corners of the wall, life or death. The plainness of the language in this opening stanza can be deceptive because it conceals the heavily allusive style in which the poem as a whole is written.11 But even here we hear the clear voices of earlier poets. The two references to the tumbleweed metaphor illustrate the subtle semantic and affective rerouting being carried out by Chen in the poem. As Hu Zhi and Bai Dunren have conscientiously noted, the image of the drifting tumbleweed is traceable to an “Unclassified Poem” 雜詩 by the early medieval poet Cao Zhi 曹植 (192–232): “The tumbleweed leaves its roots, / Drifting and rolling, tossed by the long winds. // How could one expect that a twisting gust rises, / Blowing me into the clouds? // Up and up, no signs of stopping— / When will the heavenly roads end?” 轉蓬離本根, 飄颻隨長風. 何意迴飆舉, 吹我入雲中. 高高上無極, 天路 安可窮? (ll. 1–6).12 Another apparent reference is the second in Du Fu’s three-poem series titled “Getting Out What Stirs Me” 遣興. As translated by Stephen Owen: “The dandelion puff does not grow without roots, / But it is tossed along with the high winds. // In cold weather, it falls ten thousand leagues away, / Never again to return to its native clump” 蓬生非無根, 漂蕩隨 高風. 天寒落萬里, 不復歸本叢 (2 of 3, ll. 1–4).13 Cao Zhi tells a classic story of the blown tumbleweed in flight. Du Fu adds a material dimension to it, situating the plant in a barren winter landscape that tries to pull it back to the ground but is unable to restrain its heavenly ascent. Whereas Cao Zhi’s account features a personified perspective from the tumbleweed itself (“How could one expect that a twisting gust rises, / Blowing me into the clouds?”), Du Fu looks at it from his third-person poet’s point of view, narrating the dandelion puff’s fate with a tacit sympathy that is absent in Cao Zhi’s impassioned presentation. Du Fu’s influence on Chen Yuyi is obvious in this example.

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Not only is he alluded to four times in the poem, but his conception of the tumbleweed’s material existence is inherited in Chen Yuyi’s take on the metaphor. Chen goes a step further by offering more detail in the tumbleweed’s natural habitat, presenting the plant side by side with the wall-clinging cold grasses (hancao 寒草), characterizing the latter’s contrasting path as a deliberate choice. Chen’s tumbleweed does not exist and act alone but is part of a larger world in which the tumbleweeds and winter grasses are equals but with diverging paths and fates. As Chen’s poem progresses, that larger world takes clearer shape, situated in a still greater, more abstract system of meaning in which the plants at the start of the poem metaphorically convey the poem’s key message of staying put and taking the world as it is, a lesson drawn from the many historical examples given in the bulk of the poem. The conventional image of the tumbleweeds having no control over their destination serves as a foil for the ensuing discourse on the importance of staying put in difficult situations, mirrored in the image of the winter grasses vehemently clinging to their local environment (the “corners of the wall,” qiangdu 墻堵), refusing to let themselves be yanked away like the tumbleweeds. The two metaphors are used to suggest that in spite of the fact that he and his friend Xie Wenji will inevitably be separated by uncontrollable forces in their respective careers and will go on different paths, they must make every effort to stay on their own course. For Chen and his friend, accepting this reality is the starting point. The phrasing and setup of the contrast imply Chen’s emotional and psychological identification with the winter grasses; in this he differs from Du Fu in another aspect. Unlike the latter’s broad-stroke approach that sends the tumbleweeds immediately “ten thousand leagues” (wanli 萬里) away from their “native clump” (bencong 本叢), Chen’s view stays with it, at the “corners of the wall,” looking up. In the larger context of his poetry as a whole, this determination to accept the realities of the world as they present themselves is a persistent underlying force that drives his decisions across different periods of his life. Developmentally, the strong

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determination shown in “Matching the Rhymes of Assistant Magistrate Xie Wenji” will become a major theme in his future work, especially his post-Jingkang road compositions. The unadorned, unpretentious diction and straightforward rhetoric we see in the poem’s opening stanza will gain weight and importance, becoming his major mode of description and expression.14

Heaven’s Engines This pragmatic attitude toward the material environment also underlies the highly conventional ideological concerns that animate the following poem: Autumn Meditations Matching the Rhymes of Preceptor Zhou 次韻周教授秋懷 (#7/32) 一官不辦作生涯 Nothing accomplished in office, I scrape along with my life; 幾見秋風捲岸沙 2 How many times have I seen autumn winds swirl up sands on the river banks? 宋玉有文悲落木 Song Yu composed a poem lamenting the fallen leaves;15 陶潛無酒對黃花 4 Tao Qian had no wine while facing the yellow flowers.16 天機袞袞山新瘦 Heaven’s engines surge, the mountains have newly become lean; 世事悠悠日自斜 6 Matters of the world move slowly, the sun sets all by itself. 誤矣載書三十乘 How mistaken Zhang Hua was, carrying thirty cartloads of books!17 東門何地不宜瓜 8 Which spot out of Eastern Gate was not suitable for growing melons?18

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The exact identity of Preceptor Zhou is unclear; he was probably Chen’s other instructor colleague in the Kaide prefectural school.19 The phrase “How many times have I seen” (l. 2) places the poem’s date of composition most likely in the fall of 1115 or 1116, two or three years into his term there.20 This is the last of only four poems preserved from the Kaide period. “Autumn meditations” (qiuhuai 秋懷) is a conventional genre with a history going back to the beginnings of lyric poetry in the early medieval period. The contractions of the natural world as winter approaches deeply touch the poet, pushing him into an introspective mode customarily associated with feelings of sadness and lack of fulfillment. The poet then extends the coupling of internal thought and external landscape diachronically from the present moment to his long-term status, and from there further into history, with the four historical precedents from Song Yu, Tao Qian, Zhang Hua, and Shao Ping, invoked in the second and fourth couplets (ll. 3–4 and 7–8), providing models for how he might deal with his own situation. Chen performs these conventional tasks adeptly while maintaining a clear detachment that prevents him from getting too mired in one particular rut. “Matters of the world move slowly” (shishi youyou 世事悠悠) perfectly mirrors the undisturbed pace of the setting sun (ri zi xie 日自斜, l. 6). The human and the natural worlds follow their own cycles of progress while remaining in sync with each other in their general movement. The sunset does not pull the poet into the traditional lamentation of decline but remains an independent reference point for his thoughts and feelings. The steadiness of the physical and natural world provides a major source of assurance, a counterforce to help dispel the feelings of unworthiness and lack of achievement inherent in the situation. What happens internally in the poet’s mind when the poem closes further reinforces this effect. Chen claims Zhang Hua’s commitment to book reading was misguided (l. 7), and he endorses Shao Ping’s withdrawn approach as more desirable (l. 8).

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The traditional qiuhuai poem was usually not driven by such a desire for a clear-cut solution but focused on the presentation of different choices and conflicting sentiments aroused by the diminishing autumn landscape as the season deepens. Chen gives due attention to those traditional choices and sentiments but arrives at a solution, albeit a rhetorical one, at the end of his poem. His endorsement of the solution embodied in Shao Ping, of course, does not necessarily mean he would personally adopt it. His expression of a desire for withdrawal and freedom at the end of the poem takes place in the general context of taking stock of his first official appointment at this moment in his life. Nevertheless, the resoluteness of his conclusion is driven by an underlying narrative in the poem’s intellectual and affective framework that is more vigorously envisioned than in a traditional qiuhuai poem. The third couplet demonstrates this, where the slow progression of worldly affairs and the leisurely pace of the setting sun are juxtaposed with the vibrant inner workings of a physical universe in transit from summer to autumn. “Does Heaven turn? Does the Earth sit still? Do sun and moon compete for a place to shine?” 天其運乎? 地其處乎? 日月其爭於所乎? In Zhuangzi’s “The Turning of Heaven” 天運 chapter, the character earnestly asks. “I wonder,” he continues, “is there some mechanism that works it and won’t let it stop? I wonder if it just rolls and turns and can’t bring itself to a halt?” 意者其有機緘而不得已邪? 意者其運轉而不能 自止邪?21 The question of whether Heaven’s movement is controlled by a mechanism or is naturally spontaneous leads the Zhuangzian character to the conclusion of spontaneity, the concept of ziran 自然, “all-so-byitself.” Zhuangzi resolves the tension in his questions by conjuring a mechanism that automatically turns things on and off. With the line “Heaven’s engines surge, the mountains have newly become lean” (l. 5), Chen endows the spontaneous movement of the universe with subtle but recognizable causality. The mountains’ newly acquired status, shou 瘦 (emaciated, thin, lean), which describes the visual effect after the leaves have fallen from the trees, is no longer

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seen as neutral but as the result of energetic heavenly movement, an outcome of the natural passage of time. The difference between “Heaven’s engines surge; the mountains have newly become lean” and “the surge of the heavenly engines causes the mountains to become lean” is subtle; though Chen does not make it explicit, his wording and syntax suggest strong correlation.22 The Zhuangzian character looks at the movement of the physical universe and arrives at the conclusion of spontaneous automation; Chen’s poetic persona sees not only the physical universe’s lively progression but also its observable visual effect in the mountain landscape. Using shou to describe the result of the heavenly movement is poetic and innovative. This is the celebrated technique of juyan 句 眼, or shiyan 詩眼, by which a line or a poem acquires an “eye” that gives it focus and meaning. The use of shou here is not merely a technical choice. It also implies a particular way of seeing and describing the world. Jonathan Chaves considered it a fundamental desire of Song poets “to find precisely the right language for the accurate evocation of a particular phenomenon or event.”23 What internally drives Chen Yuyi’s poetry and his use of language from the start of his career is this concurrent pursuit of linguistic precision and cognitive understanding. His use of the word gungun 袞 袞 (to surge) in the same line suggests a similar interest in the energetic force underlying the seemingly indifferent heavenly movement.24

Continuous Progress The vigorous conception of the world suggested in the Preceptor Zhou poem receives more forceful expression in the poem immediately following it, “Matching the Rhymes of the Court Gentleman for Enlightened Achievement Zhang Juchen, Who Showed Me a Poem in the Jian Chu Style” 次韻張矩臣迪功郎見示建除體 (#8/35), the first poem Chen wrote in Kaifeng while awaiting his reappointment. Zhang Juchen was a cousin of Chen’s on his mother’s side and appears a lot in his poems from the early period. The position of court gentleman for enlightened

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achievement 迪功郎 was the lowest rank in the revamped thirty-sevenstep official ranking system adopted during the Yuanfeng period. The Jian Chu style referred to in the title originated in a poem by the Six Dynasties poet Bao Zhao 鮑照 (ca. 414–466).25 In Jian Chu-style poems, the twelve characters that correlated to the twelve Earthly Branches and twelve Double Hours, starting with jian 建 and chu 除—namely, jian chu man ping ding zhi po wei cheng shou kai bi 建除滿平定執破危成收開 閉—are used to start each of the poem’s twelve rhymed couplets. Zhang Juchen and the other three friends and colleagues whose names have appeared so far (Preceptor Zhou and Assistant Magistrates Xie Wenji and Liu Xuanshu) were all scholars just starting out in their careers, like Chen himself, and anxiously climbing the bottom rungs of the official ladder, a task that had become increasingly difficult over the course of the preceding century. As a group, they showed tremendous commonality in their worldview, training, and career paths, as well as in their methods and habits of reading and poetic composition. Their outlook was defined by both their burning aspirations and the practical understanding that only a small number of them would eventually enjoy success their predecessors had achieved. This reality required them to remain optimistic under the most difficult circumstances and confident in their ability to serve the empire and achieve personal success. At the same time, as their youthful ambitions were dampened in the increasingly glutted bureaucratic system, they were often overtaken by frustration, anxiety, and a sense of underachievement and failure, as we caught a glimpse of in the qiuhuai poem to Preceptor Zhou. This mixed intellectual and emotional outlook helped them forge their collective identity as fellow strivers and sufferers and created a sense of belonging. This implicit sense of shared mission and culture was a major force in shaping Chen’s worldview and the emotionality of his early poems. The human figures would largely disappear and recede to the background in his post-1126 road poems but this shared sense of common culture would remain a constant force urging him on.

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The Jian Chu poem to his cousin and fellow scholar Zhang Juchen offers a good example of this shared peer sentiment. Beneath the poem’s fluid narrative progression we can detect Chen’s heightened awareness of belonging and his desire for mutual support within the imagined community. It was written as much for the poet himself as for Zhang. Allusive at times at the lexical level, the poem on the whole is marked by fluidity of narration; it is expository rather than parallelistic; argumentative, not metaphorical—all important features of his later work. It had Chen’s larger circle of colleagues and fellow poets as its implied audience, but the message was directed specifically toward Zhang Juchen. It was through this precise targeting that the poem served the larger purpose of giving expression to the group’s collective point of view. The poem opens with what the speaker thinks, sees, and feels on a fictional journey to Jiande 建德, Established Virtue, the name of an imagined country in the south originally conjured by Master South of Market, a character in the Zhuangzi, to illustrate the values of simplicity and self-satisfaction.26 “Established Virtue, my former country, / Swiftly, I quicken my return carriages” 建德我故國, 歸哉遄我驅 (ll. 1–2). The opening couplet fulfills the technical requirement of starting the poem with the word Jian while introducing the poem’s general theme. Everything in the physical world seems to be reacting enthusiastically as the imagined journey continues: “Western winds blow over wooded plains, / Playing the pipes and flutes for me” 平林過西風, 為我起笙竽 (ll. 7–8). Whereas the first third of the poem (ll. 1–8) focuses on the poet himself (the first-person pronoun wo 我 [I, me, my] appears three times), in the remaining two-thirds (ll. 9–24) the attention shifts to Zhang Juchen, the poem’s recipient: “I surely know that you, Sir, are the right person / To share this solitary pleasure with” 定知張公子, 能共寂寞娛 (ll. 9– 10); “I present and bequeath these [words] to you, Sir, / My intentions heavier than the sable robes” 執此以贈君, 意重貂襜褕 (ll. 11–12). The sable robe is a symbol of honor and affection traditionally bestowed by a ruler on his close attendants; it is a token of love that the Fair One in “Four Sorrows Poem” 四愁詩 by Zhang Heng 張衡 (78–139) bequeaths

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her lover.27 Chen evokes the object to confirm with Zhang Juchen that internal happiness in solitary scholarly pursuits can be shared among like-minded friends and that it weighs more than those valuable tokens of imperial favor and romantic love. The Jian Chu is by no means an easy form to navigate but Chen Yuyi demonstrates his skills deftly, overcoming the form’s intrinsic trend toward abstraction, handing out one specific moral admonishment after another. Occasional abstruseness of vocabulary is offset by the manifest friendship between Chen and Zhang, and their shared commitment to staying steadfast despite perceived material hardships. We hear the poet speak directly to a dear friend and fellow colleague. The intimate tone and strong but unassuming “assertion of self,” to borrow a phrase from Peter Sturman, were a trademark of Chen’s poetry and would play a key role in maintaining his faith and mental tranquility in the postJingkang period.28 Thematically, the intimate tone is matched by the directness of the poem’s message, which the poet states and affirms repeatedly with his friend. “My bosom is filled with the shining light of the autumn moon, / Not feeling the emptiness in the stomach” 滿懷秋月色, 未覺飢腸虛 (ll. 5–6). “Tattered caps, green sandals, / As long as they last, my heart is pleased” 破帽與青鞋, 耐久心亦舒 (ll. 13–14).29 He then quickens the poem’s pace and uses four consecutive lines to drive the message home: “In precarious places, step up your feet; / When safe, do not halt your carriages. // Success and failure lie in virtue and morality, / Not reside in material gain and benefits” 危處要進步, 安處勿停車; 成虧在道德, 不在 功利區 (ll. 15–18). Never ceasing to strive for moral betterment was an age-old message that had gained particular contemporary pertinence for Chen and his friends, becoming a motto guiding their daily choices. That the obscure Jian Chu form was revitalized for this purpose illustrates the depth and practical potency of the late Northern Song collective emphasis on continuous progress.

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The Essential Needs of a Scholar The seventh and last year of Huizong’s Zhenghe reign, 1117, was an anxious but important moment in Chen’s life as he stayed in Kaifeng awaiting a new post, a process that was both stressful and timeconsuming. His extended wait heightened his sense of being stranded, of being stuck, but it also provided a leisurely period for regrouping and reflection. He had written very few poems in the four years after his graduation prior to this point; only a little more than a dozen have been preserved. The tension we see in some of these poems, where resignation and withdrawal alternate with a determination to achieve continuous progress and moral improvement, symbolizes the poet’s general emotional state during the two and a half years of waiting. This remained a core dynamic that defined the emotional outlook of his poems throughout this period, although a tendency toward unity and consolidation began to emerge. Fourteen poems under two group titles, composed over the course of his waiting period, reveal this new tendency. These are the four poems in “Miscellaneous Thoughts Presented to Chen Guozuo and Hu Yuanmao” 雜書示陳國佐胡元茂四首 (#18–21/56–63) and the ten poems in “Expressing My Feelings and Presented to My Friends” 書懷示友十首 (#22–31/65–80). Chen Guozuo and Hu Yuanmao were fellow graduates with Chen Yuyi in the 1113 class and were placed ahead of him (Chen Yuyi placed third). It might be safe to assume that they, like Chen himself, had just completed their initial three-year terms of appointment and were likewise waiting in Kaifeng for new assignments. Thematically, these fourteen poems are in the same category as the qiuhuai and Jian Chu poems I have discussed. They express thoughts about the general life situations facing these young scholars, the tension and potential conflict between their official duties and their intellectual and literary pursuits. The combination of the conventional power of personal expression in the shuhuai 書懷 (“expressing my feelings”) genre with the collective Northern Song quest for intellectual community and

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for peer support and sympathy, clearly indicated by shi 示 (“presented to”) or shiyou 示友 (“presented to my friends”) in the title, aptly summarizes Chen’s commitment. The opening poem under the first title sets the deliberative tone for the entire group. Miscellaneous Thoughts Presented to Chen Guozuo and Hu Yuanmao: Four Poems (1 of 4) (#18/56) 一官專為口 I seek office solely for the sake of feeding my mouth, 俯仰汗我顏 2 Bending and bowing, sweat soaks my forehead.30 願將千日飢 I wish to use a thousand days of hunger, 換此三歲閑 4 To trade for three years of this freedom.31 冥冥雲表鴈 The wild geese beyond the unfathomable clouds, 時節自往還 6 They come and go, following the right time and season. 不憂稻粱絕 Not worried about the exhaustion of grains, 憂在羅網間 8 Their worry lies among the snares and nets. 絕勝杜拾遺 Far superior to Du the Reminder,32 一飽常間關 10 One filled belly came only after many hard travels. 晚知儒冠誤 In old age he finally understood the mistakes of the scholar’s cap, 猶戀終南山 12 But still could not let go of Mount Zhongnan.33 The poem contemplates a perennial question—how to situate oneself in a challenging world and reconcile scholarly ideals with one’s material needs. Chen does so through contrasting the official route with the alternate paths, a theme we have already seen a few times in the poems discussed in this chapter. The Preceptor Zhou poem, especially,

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is animated by a similar underlying concern. The difference here is that Chen justifies his choice explicitly, and in practical terms: “I seek office solely for the sake of feeding my mouth” (l. 1). The poem’s three stanzas, each four lines in length, look at and deal with this central question in three different ways: by directly expressing frustration over the official career’s constraints and lack of freedom (ll. 1–4); by presenting the alternate solution, illustrated by the metaphorical wild geese (ll. 5–8); and by invoking a similar situation faced previously by Du Fu (ll. 9–12). What sets the poem further apart is the progressive, pragmatic thought and reasoning it demonstrates. The poet first expresses his wish (yuan 願) to trade “a thousand days of hunger” for “three years of this freedom” (ll. 3–4). He then resorts to the traditional migrating geese metaphor to illustrate that freedom but does not let himself be carried away by it, allowing his mind to soar into the clouds with the geese but keeping his feet on the ground. His choices are practically reasoned. He presents a rounded picture of the geese’s situation; they not only enjoy the freedom but have their own worries as well. He uses clear and unmistakable words to describe their worries (“not worried about,” bu you 不憂, l. 7; “their worry lies,” you zai 憂在, l. 8). He expresses his evaluation of the human situation facing Du Fu using the strong term jue sheng 絕勝 (“far superior,” l. 9). The way how Du Fu is invoked in the last stanza is especially revealing: Chen commiserates with his Tang model but keeps evaluating his choices. One idea the poet persistently pushes here and elsewhere in the set is that pursuing one’s scholarly ideals and meeting one’s material needs are not necessarily mutually exclusive but can be reconciled in practice, if one makes that choice. In the third poem of the set (3 of 4, #20), Chen writes: “Although a scholar’s essential needs are food and clothing, / One seeks benevolence and gets benevolence” 士要雖 衣食, 求仁今得仁 (ll. 7–8). Confucius makes a famous comment in the Analects on the decision by the brothers Bo Yi 伯夷 and Shu Qi 叔齊 to go into hiding and starve to death instead of serving the new dynasty

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under King Wu of Zhou because they did not approve of the king’s unjust means. Confucius calls the brothers’ morally celebrated action the result of their choice: “They sought benevolence and got it. So why should they have any complaints?” 求仁而得仁, 又何怨?34 By reviving Confucius’s comment and applying it to the mundane situation facing the contemporary scholar, Chen acknowledges the need for survival but also considers devotion to one’s scholarly ideals a personal decision. In a slightly later poem written in 1119, “Seeing Off the Court Gentleman for Enlightened Achievement Zhang [Juchen] on His Way to a Staff Position in the Southern Capital” 送張迪功赴南京掾二首 (1 of 2) (#65/131–132), he invokes the same rationale: “The year is late, still a sojourner; / We seek an official’s tiny salary only for the sake of feeding ourselves” 晚 歲還為客, 微官只為身 (ll. 5–6).

Finding Meaning in the Present The image of the scholar’s cap (ruguan 儒冠) in the penultimate line of Chen’s poem represents a culturally constructed situation of human dependency, the cap being a traditional symbol of social and political success. As I noted earlier, both lines in the ending couplet are modified from a famous Du Fu poem, “Respectfully Presented to Vice-Director of the Left, the Senior Wei: Twenty-Two Couplets.” This is the first time in Chen’s poems, including those we have not covered, that Du Fu enters the argument emphatically and conspicuously (aside from routine borrowings on the lexical and image levels), so I will digress to show how Chen’s invoking and borrowing from Du Fu illustrates his respect for the Tang master, and also how such borrowings are made to serve his own purposes and motives in the new composition. Du Fu’s poem is much longer with twenty-two rhymed couplets, or forty-four lines, and can be divided into three sections. Du Fu’s talent in creating vivid, powerful contrasts without resolving them is universally celebrated and is here demonstrated in the poem’s opening couplet:

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“Those in fine silk pants don’t starve to death, / But a scholar’s cap often ruins a man.”35 This reminds us immediately of another graphic contrast in “Going from the Capital to Fengxian County, Singing My Feelings: Five Hundred Words” 自京赴奉先縣詠懷五百字: “Crimson gates reek with meat and ale, / While on the streets are bones of the frozen dead” 朱門酒肉臭, 路有凍死骨.36 In the poem’s subsequent forty-two lines, Du Fu hands out one indignant accusation after another for all the perceived injustices he has suffered in his life. Du Fu starts by reciting his heroic youthful ambitions: 甫昔少年日 In days gone by when I was young, 早充觀國賓 6 I early had a place with Guan’s “guests of the realm.”37 讀書破萬卷 In reading I wore out ten thousand scrolls, 下筆如有神 8 I seemed helped by the gods when using my brush. 賦料揚雄敵 For rhapsodies I reckoned to be Yang Xiong’s rival,38 詩看子建親 10 in poems I looked on Cao Zhi as close kin.39 李邕求識面 Li Yong sought to know me by face,40 王翰願卜鄰 12 Wang Han wanted to settle in my neighborhood.41 自謂頗挺出 I thought that I would stand out as quite exceptional, 立登要路津 14 and at once occupy some crucial position. 致君堯舜上 I would make my lord greater than Yao or Shun, 再使風俗淳 16 and cause our customs again to be pure. Things, however, quickly spiraled downward as his ambitions and wishes were dashed, one by one:

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此意竟蕭條 In the end these thoughts became bleak, 行謌非隱淪 18 I went along singing, not hiding away. 騎驢三十載 I rode on a donkey for thirty years,42 旅食京華春 20 and dined as a sponger in the capital for many springs. 朝扣富兒門 At dawn I knocked at the gates of the rich, 暮隨肥馬塵 22 at dusk I chased the dust of plump horses. 殘盃與冷炙 There were dregs of goblets and cold roasts— 到處潛悲辛 24 wherever I went, I had sorrow and pain hidden within. 主上頃見徵 I was recently summoned by His Majesty, 歘然欲求伸 26 and in an instant was aflame with desire for advancement. 青冥却垂翅 But in the dark heavens my wings drooped, 蹭蹬無縱鱗 28 I lost footing, and did not get to ply my fins freely. The extended description of the poet’s deep “sorrow and pain” 悲辛 (l. 24) successfully prepares the reader for the poet’s bold action in the last section of the poem: 焉能心怏怏 How can I let my heart stay miserable?— 祇是走踆踆 36 all I can do is hurry away. 今欲東入海 Now I would wish to go east to the sea, 即將西去秦 38 and right away leave Qin in the west.

22

Writing Poetry, Surviving War 尚憐終南山 Still I will cherish Mount Zhongnan,43 迴首清渭濱 40 and turn my head to the banks of the clear Wei.44 常擬報一飯 Always I have intended to repay that one meal,45 況懷辭大臣 42 even more I care about leaving a great official. 白鷗沒浩蕩 The white gull disappears in the boundless expanse, 萬里誰能馴 44 across thousands of leagues who can tame it?

The retrospective poem presents Du Fu’s perspective as the poet reflects on his life and is poised to take final leave of both the place that was frustrating and Wei Ji 韋濟 (686–752), the “great official” referred to in line 42, to whom the poem is addressed. Du Fu proudly began taking the examinations at a young age, but after thirteen years, in 747 when he wrote this poem, he still had not seen much success in his official career. To make things worse, he had failed a special examination earlier that year (referenced in lines 25–28). This recent setback seems all that was necessary to unleash his pent-up emotions, sending him on a protracted tirade against perceived snobbery and injustice. The poem’s length is an indication of the intensity of his emotions.46 It no doubt represents a critical moment of emotional importance for the poet—a dejected Du Fu at the midpoint of his career angrily taking stock of his personal history and perceived failure in life. We see him, toward the end of the poem, assume the posture of one ready to leave official Chang’an behind for good. That move, however, is thwarted internally by a series of hidden countermoves embedded in the poem. Early on, for example, he clearly expresses his intention of “not hiding away” (l. 18) and later, his desire for “advancement” (l. 26) despite the many setbacks. The backward gaze toward Mount Zhongnan and the banks of the Wei in lines 39–40 unmistakably indicates his desire to stay, a thread of the poem’s narrative that can be overlooked amid its impassioned presentation of the gull’s

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dramatic action of diving into the “boundless expanse,” across “thousands of leagues” (ll. 43–44) of water on the open sea. This embedded tension and internal conflict, however, are emblematic of Du Fu’s general mode of poetry.47 By concluding his poem with the couplet “In old age he [Du Fu] finally understood the faults of the scholar’s cap, / But still could not let go of Mount Zhongnan” (ll. 11–12), Chen Yuyi contracts Du Fu’s extended presentation, turning it into a thesis. Du Fu makes his case by passionately imploring Wei Ji and exhaustively enumerating his reasons, by “telling you all”: “Just listen quietly, sir, / A poor fellow begs to tell you all” 丈人 試靜聽, 賤子請具陳 (ll. 3–4). Chen builds his thesis methodically, step by step, despite the short length of his poem. In so doing, he is not in dialogue with Du Fu; he is quietly evaluating Du Fu’s choices. Whereas Du Fu thrives on presenting his internal conflicts, Chen Yuyi wants to reduce the conflicts, trying to find meaning and order in the present situation.

Ji Kang’s Genuineness The entire third poem in the set is motivated by this desire for balanced discussion. It concerns two figures in the early medieval period, Ji Kang 嵇康 (223–262) and Shan Tao 山濤 (205–283). When Shan Tao left a prestigious position in which he was responsible for recruiting scholars for government service, he recommended Ji Kang to be his successor, but the offer was angrily refused by Ji, who sent Shan Tao a famous letter ending their friendship.48 In the letter, Ji Kang denounces Shan Tao’s alleged betrayal of their scholarly ideals and his abandonment of moral integrity for political gain.49 Chen’s evaluation of the historical event is not only revisionist but also an illustration of his commitment to impartial and balanced discussion. On the one hand, he indirectly challenges the lopsided traditional criticism of Shan Tao’s tainted morality by praising his outstanding performance in his job: “Shan Tao, a pillar of the state, / Eager to recruit

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talented scholars as if finding a treasure on the ground” 巨源邦之棟, 急士如拾珍 (ll. 1–2). This evaluative mindset allows him to see the “narrow-mindedness” (ai 隘, l. 5) of Ji Kang’s actions. On the other hand, he makes sure to not mitigate the traditional moral judgment, affirming that integrity of character “far exceeds” (yuan sheng 遠勝) political and material gains (ll. 3–4). Taking sides with one particular position is not his goal; he endeavors to reveal the complexity of a given situation and arrive at a conclusion that can accommodate the different sides and aspects of the issue based on a more tolerant framework of interpretation. Ji Kang’s narrow-mindedness is immediately turned around and viewed from another perspective—as evidence of his “genuineness” (zhen 真; “It all the more shows Ji Kang’s genuineness” 益見叔夜真, l. 6). Likewise, a scholar’s pursuit of material benefit is understood sympathetically as a practical, necessary choice that should not impede his moral and ethical decisions (“A scholar’s essential needs are food and clothing; / Now one seeks benevolence and gets benevolence,” ll. 7–8). The duality of a given position, however, is not presented as an intrinsic value by itself but is used by Chen to illustrate his larger point. In couplets that feature such dual elements, the second line usually subverts or overthrows the apparent concessions made in the first. In this way, Chen shows his interest in a conclusion and also in the process that leads to the conclusion. He concludes the poem under discussion with the couplet “In my view, the songs of the Bamboo Grove, / Would be wanting without this person” 余評竹林詠, 未可少若人 (ll. 11–12), casting Shan Tao in a positive light.50 But before coming to that conclusion, he cites another example regarding the Western Han figures Wang Sheng 王 生 and Zhang Shizhi 張釋之, arguing that their seemingly conflicting ways of life and scholarship are actually complementary: “Splendidly beautiful, both are beyond comparison” 盛美俱絕倫 (l. 10).51 This balanced approach reveals a general mindset in Chen Yuyi’s early works: the understanding that age-old, lofty literati ideals and practical, rational decisions can coexist. In the reassessment of the

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controversy involving Ji Kang and Shan Tao, the notion of genuineness provides possible common ground on which a balance can be reached that transcends the narrowness or one-sidedness of the traditional view. The balancing act between honoring accepted values and giving voice to underrecognized or suppressed perspectives (e.g., acknowledging the merit of Shan Tao’s job performance) is not entirely neutral or technical; we see the argument pivot toward accepting genuine responses to the actual situation.52 Recognizing the power of the actual material situation in limiting one’s choices is an underlying thread that informs Chen’s early poems.

Enduring Adversity The ten poems in the second set, “Expressing My Feelings and Presented to My Friends” (#22–31/65–80), systematically showcase Chen’s tendency for rational choice. A persistent impulse driving the narrative of the poems is the willingness to forge ahead under unfavorable conditions. The first six poems affirm this sentiment among members of the target audience themselves. Poems seven and eight turn to comparable historical precedents, enlisting the moral support of the eminent Western Han scholars and writers Jia Yi 賈誼 (ca. 201–169 BC), Dong Zhongshu 董 仲舒 (179–104 BC), and Yang Xiong 揚雄 (53 BC–AD 18). The last two poems turn to the natural world for inspiration, using the lateblooming chrysanthemum shining over a wilted autumn landscape, and bamboo enduring winter, to symbolize the constrained scholar’s mental resilience. The set’s overall design and its gradual thematic progression are emblematic of Chen’s carefully calculated approach to his subject matter and his writing. In the opening poem, Chen shows a familiar detached attitude toward worldly success: “Fame and success no longer concern me, / My mind has been swept clean of them” 功名勿念我, 此心已掃除 (ll. 13–14). In the second poem, he adds a twist by rhetorically asking Zhang Juchen: “Why should you end up just like us— / Donning the poor scholar’s blue

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robes without success?” 胡為隨我輩, 碌碌著青袍? (ll. 5–6). In the sixth poem, he invokes Tao Qian, expressing his desire to emulate the iconic recluse poet by also returning to the farmstead: “How can I acquire two acres of land, / To return and live in Tao Yuanming’s simple hut?” 如 何求二頃, 歸臥淵明廬? (ll. 9–10). In the seventh poem, Chen compares the strengths and weaknesses of Dong Zhongshu and Jia Yi. “Zhongshu specialized in one single text throughout his life,” he writes, “Managing matters of government not his strength” 仲舒老一經, 策世非所長 (ll. 1– 2).53 On the other hand, he praises Jia Yi’s political savvy: “Great indeed are Jia Yi’s treatises, / Shining brightly, opening or closing” 偉哉賈生 書, 開闔有耿光 (ll. 5–6).54 The ninth poem begins by eulogizing the brilliance of the autumn chrysanthemum: “Chrysanthemums rustling in the tenth month / Shine brightly over the white grasses” 蕭蕭十月菊, 耿耿照白草 (ll. 1–2). This rather conventional imagery, however, conceals a subtle change in the poem’s underlying ideological and emotional framework. Chen’s position here is influenced by his Northern Song predecessor Su Shi. The latter’s rewriting of a poem on the same subject by the Tang poet and scholar Han Yu 韓愈 (768–824) provides key stepping-stones for Chen as he constructs his own argument on how to evaluate the autumn chrysanthemum’s lateness in blooming. In the final poem in a set of eleven autumn meditations poems, Han Yu raises a question: “Frost-covered chrysanthemums, fresh and bright, / Already late, what is the use of your beautiful bloom?” 鮮鮮霜中菊, 既晚 何用好? (ll. 1–2).55 To Han, the chrysanthemum’s physical beauty is out of place in the wilting autumn landscape. The autumn chrysanthemum is not appreciated in its own right as an object that exists and thrives in this particular late moment of the season; it is evaluated for what it is not, based on an imposed human conception of usefulness. In the subsequent couplet, Han continues his lament and philosophical musings by turning his attention from the chrysanthemums to the butterflies playing among them: “Fragrance-chasing butterflies, flitting, fluttering, /

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Why are you not born earlier?” 揚揚弄芳蝶, 爾生還不早? (ll. 3–4). Again, the butterfly’s existence is measured implicitly against what is absent: the glories of high spring, when flowers should be blooming, when butterflies should be born. Han Yu recognizes the points of view of neither the chrysanthemum nor the butterfly; his evaluation is fixed nostalgically on a missed high moment in the past.56 Unlike Han Yu, Su Shi begins his poem “Sweet Chrysanthemum” 甘菊 by recognizing the merit of the flower’s lateness, implicitly addressing Han Yu’s question: “Mountains of Yue start to chill up only in spring; / Frost-covered late chrysanthemums are all the more beautiful” 越山 春始寒, 霜菊晚愈好 (ll. 1–2).57 Moving from the tacit notion that the chrysanthemum’s lateness should be accepted on its own terms, Su Shi openly expresses his dismay with Han Yu’s comment on the butterflies: “I am rather surprised by the old man of Changli [Han Yu], / Who lamented your not being born earlier” 頗訝昌黎翁, 恨爾生不早 (ll. 17–20). Chen Yuyi picks up right where Su Shi left off. Building on the latter’s recognition of the late chrysanthemum’s fine intrinsic quality, Chen pushes the argument a step further by getting into the conditions responsible for its creation: “Wind and frost must be fully endured, / Standing alone late in the season, they look all the more beautiful” 風 霜要飽更, 獨立晚更好 (ll. 5–6). By making “enduring wind and frost” (jing fengshuang 更風霜) a necessary condition for the chrysanthemum’s beauty, Chen Yuyi is uttering a collective late Northern Song conviction not only in the intrinsic value of aesthetic beauty but also in the notion that hardship and effort are a necessary condition for success.58 The concluding poem in the set gives this idea another emphasis by celebrating the bamboo plant’s perseverance under harsh winter weather: “Green, green are the bamboos west of the hall, / Not changing their color or withering in winter” 青青堂西竹, 歲寒不緇磷 (ll. 1–2).59

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The Power of Nature “Expressing My Feelings” is a traditional theme Chen frequently visited at key moments of his life, to rally his thoughts as a platform for reflection.60 The contemplative nature of the genre and its relatively straightforward style of expression gave the poet the latitude to deal with a wide range of feelings and moods. Chen’s use of nature imagery in the last two poems of “Expressing My Feelings and Presented to My Friends” reveals the influence of the traditional allegorical mode of poetry, but we do not see it expand into full-blown figuration. Natural objects such as the bamboo plant and chrysanthemum blossoms, or wind and frost in the ninth poem, demonstrate different degrees of metaphoricity or materiality. They serve as objective correlatives for the mental toughness of the human actor (autumn chrysanthemums and winter bamboo), or as menacing forces that disturb the mind. The following poem is an example of the latter. Wind and Rain 風雨 (#32/80) 風雨破秋夕 Wind and rain break the autumn evening, 梧葉窗前驚 2 Startling the wutong leaves in front of the window. 不愁黃落盡 Not worried by all the yellowing and falling, 滿意作秋聲 4 They happily make the sounds of autumn. 客子無定力 The sojourner lacks the power to stabilize his mind, 夢中波撼城 6 In his dreams, waves shatter on the walls of the city. 覺來俱不見 Waking up, there is nothing there to be seen— 微月照殘更 8 The faint moonlight shines over the lingering night.

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In addition to the storm’s impact on the physical world, it has a dramatic effect in the speaker’s mind. The poem describes the internal process by which the autumnal agitation is stilled, domesticated, and aestheticized in the mind of the speaker, who uses the stormy evening event as an opportunity for his own mental regeneration. First, the nightly sounds that have startled the wutong leaves are transformed from a potential cause for worry (chou 愁) into a source of gratifying acoustic production: “They [the startled leaves] happily make the sounds of autumn” (l. 4). Then in the second half, the focus turns inward, from the physical world to the human, with the process of transformation repeating itself in the mirror image of the speaker receiving and dealing with the effects of the sounds. He at first succumbs to the force of the nighttime storm in the figurative space of a dream, but then, on waking, he restores order through the visual power of his eyes. As in his other early poems, the easy semantic flow of this little poem, a five-syllable, ancient-style unregulated verse, is undergirded by a calm but firm assertion of authority on the part of the poet-observer. The speaker’s stated lack of power “to stabilize his mind” (l. 5) in the middle of the poem turns out to be rhetorical, as a preparation for the visual and psychological stability reached at the poem’s end. We have seen the power of such disturbances from the natural world on the poet’s mind before—sands being scooped up by winds on the banks of the Yellow River; tumbleweeds helplessly blown into the skies. The human protagonist in these events faces a force that is not always or necessarily in sync with his wishes and desires, sometimes even threatening his existence. In an earlier poem entitled “Winter Plum” 蠟梅 (#15/50), the plum flower’s intense fragrance acts as a weapon of aggression on the weakness of the human figure: “I only worry that its intense fragrance takes advantage of my lack in strength, / Intoxicating me so much that I cannot stand without help” 只愁繁香欺定力, 薰我欲醉須人扶 (ll. 9– 10).61 Placed in the key fifth position of the first line in the Chinese original, the word qi serves as the “eye” that brings the line to life (juyan); it constructs, however playfully, an implicit battle between the physical

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object and the human mind that illustrates Chen’s general perception and representation of the world in his early poems. Deriving from the Sanskrit samādhibala, the Chinese word dingli 定 力, which is used in both “Winter Plum” and in the fifth line of “Wind and Rain,” literally means “the power to still or stabilize the mind” and by Chen’s time had acquired both religious and philosophical prominence. It denotes an intense state of concentration and meditative absorption, an absolute mindfulness in which all external stimulation is vividly present but has nothing to do with what is going on inside.62 The classically imagined easy, fluid reciprocity and spontaneous harmony between the mind and nature described by the early medieval literary theorist Liu Xie 劉勰 (ca. 465–ca. 522), borrowing words from the interhuman relationship, as “Our affections go out as a gift, / And stirring xing [affective image] comes back like an answer” 情往似贈, 興來如答, is no longer taken for granted.63 What is implied is a new understanding that nature can be an overwhelming or aggressive force, indifferent in its actions, and that the human party must remain constantly apprehensive and marshal all their strengths to improve themselves, to cultivate their dingli to match up with, mitigate, or counter the impact. The perceived competition in “Wind and Rain” between the outside world’s aggression and the human mind’s ability to counter and eventually gain control of it will become one of Chen Yuyi’s main battles in his life, especially in the post-Jingkang period. Here, that battle is fought abstractly, with humor, in the transfigured space of a dream. The poem starts by describing how the storm “breaks” (po 破, l. 1) the evening and “startles” (jing 驚, l. 2) the wutong leaves outside. The disturbances are quickly counteracted, with the positive sentiment of manyi 满意 (contented, satisfied; l. 4) replacing the conventional feelings of chou 愁 (to worry, l. 3). The order thus restored, however, proves to be both precarious and partial; it is immediately put to a test by way of the dream, where the whistling sounds of leaves are amplified and transformed into waves shattering on the walls of the city (l. 6). The situation is

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eventually resolved when the dream is itself broken and the speaker’s visual power is restored to preside over the poststorm, postdream moonlit night landscape (l. 8).

Three Texts for Comparison Three prior texts help contextualize the changes in “Wind and Rain” concerning the relationship between the poet and the world. These are “Nine Arguments” 九辯, attributed to Song Yu; “Rhapsody on the Autumn Sounds” 秋聲賦 by the Northern Song scholar and poet Ouyang Xiu 歐 陽修 (1007–1072); and a poem by Huang Tingjian that was believed to have directly inspired Chen’s composition.64 In Song Yu’s “Nine Arguments,” the desolate autumn landscape is used to express the speaker’s frustration over unfulfilled aspirations in his political and social life. The poem begins, in David Hawkes’s translation: “Alas for the breath of autumn! Wan and drear: flower and leaf fluttering fall and turn to decay” 悲哉秋之為氣也! 蕭瑟兮草木搖落而變衰.65 The poem’s impact on later compositions is huge. Hawkes considers that it establishes not only the tone and vocabulary but also the “pathos” of subsequent works.66 There is not much background information that would help us situate the anxious speaker in the poem in a particular time and place or link the poem to the life experience of its attributed author, Song Yu. What we have is a vague, generically conceived figure, “an impoverished, unemployed scholar who loses the evenness of his mind” 貧士失職而 志不平; “a traveler on the road who has no companion” 羈旅而無友 生.67 The bleakness of the human situation is further illustrated by the conditions of the birds and insects: “The fluttering swallows leave on their homeward journey; / the forlorn cicada makes no sound. // The wild geese call as they travel southwards; / the partridge chatters with a mournful cry. // Alone he waits for the dawn to come, unsleeping, / mourning with the cricket, the midnight traveler” 燕翩翩其辭歸兮, 蟬寂

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漠而無聲. 鴈廱廱而南遊兮, 鵾雞啁哳而悲鳴. 獨申旦而不寐兮, 哀蟋 蟀之宵征.68 As in the Han fu by the great rhapsodists of the subsequent era, the description of the autumn landscape in Song Yu’s attributed poem is aided by the profuse use of synonyms, homophones, onomatopoeias, and other rare combinations of sounds and phonemes that dominate the poem’s lexical landscape. Unlike Song Yu’s “Nine Arguments,” Ouyang Xiu’s “Rhapsody on the Autumn Sounds” is devoted to the splendors of autumn, its cornucopia of sounds, and their effect on the speaker’s mind. In keeping with this positive sentiment, Ouyang takes the autumnal “yellowing and falling” as part of the normal cycle of seasonal change, arguing that the sad emotional connotations they traditionally evoke are arbitrary. This revelation brings the speaker to ask the famous question that concludes the poem: “Then, why should we lament these sounds of autumn?” 亦何恨乎秋聲?69 The optimism and revisionist mindset in Ouyang Xiu’s work are an important intellectual foundation for the calm acceptance that animates Chen Yuyi’s “Wind and Rain.” In the poem, the autumn storm is treated not so much as a physical event as a source and means for the speaker’s mental emancipation, a phenomenon that is embraced in its full presentness and positivity. The third text for comparison is a quatrain by Huang Tingjian titled “Sleeping in Daytime, on the Seventeenth Day of the Sixth Month” 六月十 七日晝寢. The poem reads, in Stephen Owen’s translation, “In this world’s red dust, wearing hat of straw and raven black hose, / I imagine seeing a pair of white birds upon the gray-green isles. // A horse is munching on dry straw, a sound by my pillow at noon, / As the dream forms, it becomes wind-blown rain rolling the waves on the river” 紅塵席帽 烏鞾裏, 想見滄洲白鳥雙. 馬齕枯萁諠午枕, 夢成風雨浪翻江.70 Owen considers the poem an example of “the imagination’s transformation of everyday experience,” by means of which a quotidian event “acquires a nearly magical dignity.”71 By skillfully tapping on the quatrain form’s power to capture the dynamic between the fleeting experiential moment

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and its aesthetic realization, Huang Tingjian demonstrates he is a master of advanced techniques and a magician of poetic transformation.72 There is another transformation concerning Huang’s poem. As Chen’s verse was believed to have been inspired by Huang Tingjian’s piece, Huang’s, according to a story told by Ye Mengde 葉夢得 (1077–1148), was inspired by an earlier poem by Chao Duanyou 晁端友 (jinshi 1053), Ye’s maternal grandfather. Chao’s “Spending the Night at an Inn Outside of the West Gate of Jizhou” 宿濟州西門外旅館, also a seven-syllable quatrain, reads: “Winter woods in the last sunlight, crows about to roost; / Blue lamp flames flicker on the wall, at once there, at once gone. // In the stillness of a gentle rain I doze off in a nap, / I lie listening to a tired horse munch on the last of the hay” 寒林殘日欲棲烏, 壁裏青燈乍有無. 小雨愔愔人假寐, 臥聽疲馬齧殘芻.73 Ye Mengde tells the story as a reader who tries to understand the experiential basis for Huang Tingjian’s poem: how his grandfather had a great reputation for poetry; how Huang in his youth so liked the ending couplet of his grandfather’s poem that he built his own poem on it; how Huang later told his good friend Chao Buzhi 晁補之 (1053–1110), Ye’s uncle and Chao Duanyou’s son, about the experience; and how Ye himself did not understand Huang’s poem until, one day, he had an opportunity to replicate the experience himself. “Then one day,” Ye wrote, “while resting in an inn, I heard a sound coming from the next room, PENG-PANG, TANG-TA, like winds and waves blowing through a boat. I rose up and went to take a look: lo! a horse was eating from a trough, and the sound was created when water and fodder squished and squashed against each other between its walls” 一日, 憩於逆旅, 聞 傍舍有澎湃鞺鞳之聲, 如風浪之歷船者. 起視之, 乃馬食於槽, 水與草 齟齪於槽間, 而為此聲.74

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What the Eyes See and the Ears Hear The story Ye Mengde tells is a marvelous example of the tangled relationship between art and lived experience. A revamped understanding of this relationship lies at the heart of the achievement and success of Song poetry. Jonathan Chaves considers defining how the Song poets navigated between the orientation toward “concrete world” and “experience” and the “admitted tendency to recast earlier poetic material” a key problem for the modern scholar.75 Stephen Owen comments, after comparing the two poems by Chao Duanyou and Huang Tingjian, “Even more than in earlier periods, in the Song the relation between poetry and experience became reciprocal: poems grew out of experience, but the experience of poetry also shaped experience in the world outside poetry.”76 Song poets wrote with the bona fide faith that poetry was deeply rooted in everyday experience, was the result of direct, careful observation, deep thought, and precise language. Ye was perhaps right in criticizing the overemphasis Huang Tingjian placed on the technical part of the process, but it was a general conviction of Song writers that careful observation and sophisticated technique are not mutually exclusive but mutually enhancing, that they can work together to carry out the desired aesthetic transformation from experience to art. In the larger scheme of things, this mirrors the Song literati’s proclaimed effort of pursuing knowledge through the study of the material world, as summarized by the popular Neo-Confucian agenda of gewu zhizhi 格物致知, “extending knowledge by the investigation of things.” The desire to understand the experiential basis of poetry gained increasing popularity in the Northern Song. Su Shi, for example, wrote his “An Account of Stone Bell Mountain” 石鐘山記 to describe how he set out to learn what caused the intriguing bell-like ringing sound of the rocks at the base of the mountain. He eventually resolved the question, and understood the myth, after he visited the site in person and examined the mountain’s unusual acoustic mechanism. The moral of the story, as Su Shi says at the end of his account, is that “what

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the eyes see and the ears hear” 目見耳聞 should always be the basis of our knowledge of the world.77 This quest for proof and eye-witness experience transcended particular mediums and forms of literary and artistic pursuit. In discussing Mountain Villa, a famous landscape painting by Li Gonglin, a good friend of Su Shi and Huang Tingjian, Robert E. Harrist Jr. wrote, “While Li Gonglin evoked memories of Wang Wei and Lu Hong in his painting, he also depicted himself among the specific, named sites of his own property, among those cliffs and those waterfalls, in topography rendered so convincingly and with such a powerful sense of reality that his contemporaries who commented on the painting were sure they could find their way through the real landscape of the Longmian Mountains after seeing Mountain Villa.”78 This intimate, firsthand relationship with the world and one’s immediate surroundings firmly grounded the poet or artist in his lived experience and material reality. As Li Gonglin’s Mountain Villa depicts his specific perspective as an actual dweller on Longmian Mountains, Chen Yuyi’s “Wind and Rain” is enacted by the microscopic, inside-out experiences of me, of this “sojourner,” this observer. Despite its apparent concern with the external natural process, the poem’s narrative hinges internally on this particular me’s mental power, his dingli to stabilize the situation. The keenness in the observation of the serene moonlit landscape at the end of the poem depends on the observer’s full presence in the immediate aftermath of the storm and the dream. It is the speaker’s restabilized position in the night landscape that makes the minute cognitive processes of waking (jue 覺) and seeing (jian 見) possible (l. 7); that enables his mind to register such delicate perceptions as the faintness (wei 微) of the moonlight and the lingering (can 殘) status of the night (l. 8). Illumination takes place in both the physical landscape and the poet’s mind. The clarity of the situation derives as much from the speaker’s reinstalled position in the nocturnal landscape as from his calm confidence in the mind’s capacity to understand its representation. Of all possible sights on awakening from the dream, it is the moonlight, symbol of nature’s eternal serenity, that fills the speaker’s view and mind. As we

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will continue to see in subsequent periods of Chen Yuyi’s life, delicate natural beauty remains a most invigorating source of strength in coping with the unpredictabilities of the world.

The Poet Sojourner and the Street Traveler If the realistically grounded nature of the poet-observer’s presence in “Wind and Rain” is only subtly implied, it is explicit in other poems written during his Kaifeng sojourn. We find the poet routinely traversing the gritty Kaifeng roads and navigating the city streets that infamously swirl with “yellow dust” (huangchen 黃塵) and “yellow dirt” (huangtu 黃土). “The winds swept the ground, throwing up the noises of the marketplace” 卷地風拋市井聲.79 The hustle and bustle of life fills the poet’s ears during the annual Pure and Bright festival, and his description draws the reader instantly into the thick of it on the early twelfth-century city’s streets. “The northern winds swirled across the fields, grieving the end of the year, / The yellow dust swelled on the streets, blocking the traveler’s path” 北風掠野悲歲暮, 黃塵漲街人不度.80 “Yellow dusts whipping in the face, the traveler forged ahead nonetheless” 黃塵滿面人猶去.81 “In the tenth month, the northern winds hastened the ending of the year; / On the broad thoroughfare, the yellow dirt soiled the scholar’s cap” 十月 北風催歲闌, 九衢黃土污儒冠.82 All the dirt and the swirling winds are seen and felt from the standpoint of a traveler weathering the elements on the road, a participant in the wuthering landscape, rather than a detached, transcendent observer. As Yoshikawa pointed out in discussing a poem by Wang Anshi 王安石 (1021–1086), Kaifeng “was famous for the bad condition of its streets, which were dusty in good weather and a sea of mud when it rained.” The experience Wang describes of riding home from his office on horseback in mid-eleventh-century Kaifeng, Yoshikawa continues, “does not seem very different from the twentieth-century government clerk riding the streetcar home in the evening.”83

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Clearly we do not have to take all of Chen Yuyi’s yellow dirt references literally; the point is that the observation and experience emanate from the view of an actual traveler at the ground level on the street. The perspective of a ground-level observer also animates the writing of Chen Yuyi’s contemporary, the Kaifeng native Meng Yuanlao 孟元老 (ca. 1090–1150), who wrote a well-known memoir on life in the city in the last few years of its glory, before Kaifeng fell in the Jingkang Catastrophe.84 Writing from his stranded, nostalgic position in the south, Meng Yuanlao provided a comprehensive survey of life in the hedonistic city when it was the splendid Northern Song eastern capital. As Stephen West wrote, “The capital that appears in the text of Meng Yuanlao recreates the memory of a particular group of capital dwellers. They were monied young gourmands, who lived a life of leisure and ease in the frenzied culture of the city, and whose contact with commercial and mercantile interests defined a social class that was not incorporated by the regular boundaries of more orthodox history.”85 I would argue that the boundaries between the ways of seeing and living of Meng Yuanlao’s city dwellers and those of poet-sojourners and street travelers become quite blurry in Chen Yuyi’s poems.

The Water Ink Plum Quatrains The picture of Chen Yuyi’s early poetry would be incomplete if we did not discuss a set of critically acclaimed poems that showcase the poet’s sophisticated skills and his keen awareness and clever manipulation of another type of boundaries, those between art and reality. These are “Five Quatrains on Water Ink Plum in Harmony with Zhang Guichen” 和張 規臣水墨梅五絕 (#45–49/99–107).86 The five quatrains helped catapult Chen into national prominence and secured his early reputation as a talented poet. They received high accolades from Southern Song critics and scholars across the board. Hu Zi 胡仔 (fl. 1147–1167), for example, recounts that it was because Emperor Huizong particularly liked the opening couplet of the fourth poem that Chen was promoted to erudite

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of the Imperial College in 1122.87 Zhu Xi expressed his special fondness of the ending couplet of the third poem.88 The ink plum painting referred to in the title was believed to be from the hands of Zhongren 仲仁, a well-known monk of an earlier generation who created and helped popularize the ink plum genre, owing to his lifelong love of the flower and his dedication to painting it.89 Huang Tingjian, among others, especially liked Zhongren’s paintings and praised them for the way they “transcend the ordinary and enter the realm of the divine” 超凡入聖.90 In one poem on a painting made especially for him by Zhongren, Huang wrote: “Having arrived South of the Lake, heading for South of the Ranges soon, / I moored my boat to get close to Master Blooming Light” 我向湖南更嶺南, 繫舡來近花光老 (ll. 11–12).91 Blooming Light 花光 was an epithet for Zhongren, who was abbot of a monastery of the same name in Hunan when Huang visited him. “Having painted the southern branches, he went on to the northern ones, / And then added a thousand peaks rising into the sunny sky” 寫盡南枝與北 枝, 更作千峰倚晴昊 (ll. 15–16).92 Lou Yue 樓鑰 (1137–1213) wrote while commenting on the work of a later painter: “A slanting branch all of a sudden appears in front of the window, / Shining upon my face with dozens of gorgeous blossoms. // After Jianzhai is gone for a thousand years, / Who will again compose fine poems for your praise?” 窗前驚 見一枝斜, 照眼英英十數花. 千載簡齋仙去後, 何人更著好詩誇?93 Hu Zhiyu 胡祇遹 (1227–1293) laments that after Huang Tingjian and Chen Yuyi, no other poets will be able to capture the flower’s beauty with such elegant effect: “After Fuweng’s songs and Jianzhai’s poems, / Who is able to lay down another word? // Not seeing your clear silhouette, I see your painted images; / On the empty road, the moon hangs on the western sky as before” 涪翁歌罷簡齋詩, 肯放來人更措辭? 不見清姿 見圖畫, 依然清路月西時.94 Zeng Minxing 曾敏行 (1118–1175) of the late twelfth century summarizes it all: “[Blooming Light’s] paintings gained importance because of [Huang’s and Chen’s] poems” 畫因詩重; “thereafter everyone started to make these paintings” 人遂為此畫.95

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Chen Yuyi’s matching pieces “in harmony with” (he 和) Zhang Guichen’s poems created such a self-sufficient world of their own that they were appreciated by later readers as if wholly original compositions. Chen’s brilliance also lies in that his poems give the reader such a feel of immediacy that they can be taken as referring directly to the plum blossoms instead of their painted images. At the same time, the five quatrains almost never stray from the painted nature of the objects, as the water-ink (shuimo 水墨) medium is always at the center of the poems’ narrative, in the foreground or background. The five poems create a wondrous, dreamy world of romantic love, ecstatic discovery, and nostalgia for lost innocence and eternal beauty. Prosodically, the poems reach such a rhythmic and formal perfection that they are almost matchless among the best works written on the topic. They are ideal texts for repeated appreciation and recitation, each experience giving the reader fresh pleasure and making them desire another rendezvous with them in the future. They represent the epitome of what the classical allegorical tradition of yongwu poetry could offer (although they are not marked or conceived of as such), and at the same time they are every bit an illustration of the new Song style, with their precise descriptions, sophisticated design, and exquisite craftsmanship.

Take a Metaphor at Its Face Value Let us start with the third poem in the series, where we see Chen plunge into the thick of a traditional metaphor: Five Quatrains on Water Ink Plum in Harmony with Zhang Guichen (3 of 5) (#47) 粲粲江南萬玉妃 Beamingly brilliant, ten thousand Jade Ladies from Southland,96 別來幾度見春歸 2 Since parting, how many times have I bid farewell to spring? 相逢京洛渾依舊 Meeting you again in Capital Luo, all seems to be as before,97

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Writing Poetry, Surviving War 唯恨緇塵染素衣 4 I only regret that black dust has tainted your white robes.

The Western Jin poet Lu Ji 陸機 (261–303) used tainted clothes as signs of the corrupting forces in the dusty world of Luoyang, the imperial capital, or “Capital Luo”: “Since leaving home, I have traveled far off, / Three thousand leagues of extended road. // Capital Luo is full of windblown dust, / My white clothes have all turned black” 辭家遠行游, 悠悠 三千里. 京洛多風塵, 素衣化為緇 (ll. 1–4).98 David Knechtges tactfully asks: “Is Lu Ji speaking literally here, or does he use the blackening of his clothes to indicate that the capital is a place where many people have sullied the purity of traditional mores?”99 Xie Tiao 謝脁 (464–499) obviously shared Lu Ji’s concerns when he wrote, in Richard B. Mather’s translation, “Who is it can stay in Capital Luo, / Where black dust will befoul unsullied clothes?” 誰能久京洛? 緇塵染素衣.100 At first glance, Chen Yuyi’s poem seems to be treating the painted plum blossoms anthropomorphically in the image of a beautiful lady. This is a technique with a long history.101 It turns out, however, that Chen uses the device skillfully to highlight the effect of the painting’s central technique, ran 染, applying black blots of ink on the paper with the paintbrush. The love narrative is used so naturally and to such stunning effect that once drawn into it, the reader fully commits to its internal logic. Just as we regret, together with the speaker, the unfortunate blackening of the Jade Lady’s clothes, we are immediately led out of the imagined world and realize that the poem has been describing the central feature of the ink plum painting the entire time. Let us imagine for a moment how Chen experiences this epiphanic moment. As he establishes his initial contact with the painting, as his gaze intensifies and his relationship with the black dots and white spaces on the paper becomes more immersive, myriad thoughts and emotions arise in his mind. Gradually he loses grasp on the flowers’ painted reality and becomes a character in the story that is now unfolding imaginatively before his eyes: the blurry images of the plum blossoms slowly transform

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into the smiling face of a woman whom he vaguely recognizes as the one he has met in Southland before. And as the story starts to become real, he remembers their meeting, parting, and reunion and also immediately spots the stains on her clothes as the lovers reunite. Just as the stains are starting to enter the metaphorical loop and threaten her moral integrity, however, he is brought out of the story, and sees the painted images of the plum blossoms but now with astonished eyes and renewed fascination. In discussing Huang Tingjian’s advanced technique for employing metaphors in his poems, Qian Zhongshu describes the complicated semantic process as taking a metaphor first at its face value and then using it to leverage for the intended meaning: “Accepting what is wrong as if it is true, sitting on what is real pretending it is fabricated” 將錯 而遽認真, 坐實以為鑿空.102 Borrowing Qian’s keen and mind-boggling description may help us understand the process and drama of meaning in Chen Yuyi’s poem.

Painted Plums and Their Natural Existence Chinese plum starts to flower in midwinter, and its early blooming is celebrated not only for its beauty but also for its moral significance. The ethereal image of the plum blossoms blooming vibrantly against the winter snow has come to symbolize, like the late-blooming chrysanthemum and cold-enduring bamboo, perseverance, purity, and the transitory and ephemeral nature of human life. Following the first two poems, the third poem in “Five Quatrains on Water Ink Plum in Harmony with Zhang Guichen,” the one under discussion, represents the culmination of the poet’s celebration of the flower’s unsurpassed natural beauty and unsulliable moral integrity. The point is clearly made in the opening poem in the set (1 of 5, #45): “Clever skills will never eliminate the woman of Wuyan’s ugliness, / This flower’s elegant beauty is simply matchless. // Even if white could turn into black, / The peaches and prunes still are just slaves” 巧畫無

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鹽醜不除, 此花風韻更清姝. 從教變白能為黑, 桃李依然是僕奴.103 The natural beauty of the flower transcends any artifice or technique, just as the innate ugliness of the woman of Wuyan or the ordinariness of fruit trees cannot be changed by even the most skillful painter. The focus then shifts in the second poem of the set (2 of 5, #46), from the plum blossom’s innate beauty to the poet’s personal experience with it: how his eye illness has prevented him from fully appreciating its beauty, and how an accidental encounter brings forth complicated emotions of ecstatic joy, tender love, and disbelief.104 “Blurry flowers, sickly eyes for so many years, / The plum blossoms must have remained all as before. // Who would think I’d also make acquaintance of Chen Xuan’s face— / Dazed, I dare not show my love at first” 病見昏花已數年, 只應梅蘂固 依然. 誰教也作陳玄面, 眼亂初逢未敢憐.105 The tentativeness of love and recognition, suggested by such modal words as ying 應 (must), gu 固 (expectedly), ye 也 (also), and weigan 未 敢 (dare not), has completely dissipated when the third poem begins, with the blooming brilliance of the full-bodied flower eliminating any lingering feelings of hesitation and self-doubt. The certainty is explicitly affirmed in the third line of the poem, “Meeting you again at Capital Luo, all seems to be as before” (Xiangfeng jingluo hun yijiu). In this retrospective light, the third poem presents evidence of the plum blossom’s unmatched beauty as well as the poet’s belief in its moral integrity. His conviction is shaken only temporarily by the look of the lady’s soiled clothes; the suspicions are instantly dispelled by the realization that the stains on her robes are not a reflection of the lady’s moral defect but an effect created by the water-ink painting’s very technique. Structurally, in the larger design of the five-poem set, the third poem plays a pivotal role in anchoring the poems and shifting their focus from the qualities and traits of the flower to the artistic process responsible for their representation. Gazing at the Jade Lady’s black-spotted white robes, with her integrity proven intact despite years of exposure to dirt and contamination, the poet no longer allows himself to be drawn into

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that virtual artistic world. He retreats from his role as an immersive participant in the imagined romantic reunion to his primary role as a viewer of and a commentator on the painting. As he does so, the black spots on the lady’s clothes are restored to their material existence as black ink blots on the paper’s surface. At this point, the practical functions of the poet as an appreciative, active viewer of the painting as well as a self-conscious craftsman of poetry become the dominant mode again, and the poet reaffirms his status as an art critic. The remaining two poems in the set stand out as a full-fledged enacting of that role, with the relationship between art and nature occupying the foreground: Five Quatrains on Water Ink Plum in Harmony with Zhang Guichen (4 of 5) (#48) 含章簷下春風面 Under the eaves of Hanzhang palace, a beautiful face in spring breezes, 造化功成秋兔毫 2 The Creator’s deeds are accomplished on the brush tip of the autumn hare. 意足不求顏色似 When the meaning is sufficient, there’s no need to seek resemblance of color, 前身相馬九方臯 4 In your former life, you must have been the horse judger Jiufang Gao. Once on the seventh day of the first lunar month, while Princess Shouyang 壽陽公主, daughter of Emperor Wu of Song (r. 420–422), was resting under the eaves of Hanzhang 含章 palace, a plum blossom fell down onto her forehead, leaving a beautiful five-petal floral imprint.106 This is the origin of the so-called plum blossom makeup 梅花妝 popular in Tang and Song times.107

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That beautiful story highlights the power of the Creator in “making” (zao 造) and “shaping” (hua 化) our experiences of beauty. Chen’s purpose in telling the story in the poem, however, is not to negate the importance of human intervention; on the contrary, it is through this intervention, by means of the brush tip of the painter, Chen Yuyi emphasizes, that the great deeds of nature are “accomplished” (cheng 成). This is indeed a strong point, that what the Creator naturally endows is not sufficient, that coincidence and magic play equally important roles in nature’s marvelous happenings and in our experience of beauty. The gist of this understanding is distilled in the image of the “brush tip of the autumn hare” 秋兔毫 in line 2—an object that represents at once nature’s finest gift, humans’ exquisite taste, and serendipitous discovery. The second half of the poem further advances the point by celebrating an alternate approach toward human intervention in painting. Jiufang Gao’s legendary horse-judging skills focused on a horse’s intrinsic quality rather than its looks.108 By suggesting that Blooming Light was reincarnated as Jiufang Gao through painting, Chen Yuyi apparently endorses the primacy of “meaning” 意 over “resemblance of color” 顏色 似 (l. 3), a popular position that can be traced back to the beginnings of Chinese painting. By suggesting that the absence of color in the blackand-white water-ink painting was not necessarily a liability but could instead be a more effective way of representing the flower’s essence or “meaning,” Chen gives the ancient idea a clever spin that had resonance for painting theory and criticism in later periods.109 It also gives expression to a new understanding of beauty and its artistic representation: that poetic and artistic techniques not only depict natural beauty but can shape and even create our experiences of it.110 The fifth poem concludes the set by affirming the view that artistic representations of a natural object are not necessarily inferior to its natural existence:

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Five Quatrains on Water Ink Plum in Harmony with Zhang Guichen (5 of 5) (#49) 自讀西湖處士詩 Ever since reading the Retired Scholar of West Lake’s poems, 年年臨水看幽姿 2 Year after year, I come to the waterside to look at your secluded appearance. 晴窗畫出橫斜影 The slanting silhouette painted across a sunlit window, 絕勝前村夜雪時 4 Far superior to your lonely presence in the front village on the snowy night. The last line evokes “Early Plum Blossoms” 早梅, a five-syllable quatrain by the late Tang and Five Dynasties monk-poet Qiji 齊己 (864– 938): “All ten thousand trees were deadly frozen, / Your solitary roots alone warmed back to life. // In the front village, out of deep snow, / A single branch bloomed last night” 萬木凍欲折, 孤根暖獨回. 前村深 雪裏, 昨夜一枝開.111 Chen’s third line alludes to a poem by the early Northern Song poet Lin Bu 林逋 (967–1028), the “Retired Scholar of West Lake” referenced in the opening line, who lived in quiet solitude by the West Lake of Hangzhou for much of his adult life. A beautifully crafted middle couplet in Lin’s poem describes the plum’s fragrance as well as its physical beauty by the water: “Scattered shadows of your slanting branches over clear, shallow water, / Your hidden fragrance floats in the moonlit evening” 疏影橫斜 水清淺, 暗香浮動月黃昏 (ll. 3–4).112 In Qiji’s poem, all objects and events in the natural world—the freezing cold, the remote village, the night snow—pivot toward the winter plum’s vibrant early blooming that is revealed at the end of the poem. In contrast, Chen Yuyi’s poem is argumentative and theoretically oriented, and focuses on how the beauty of the plum blossoms can be understood differently in art and in life. Stylistically, the last poem in Chen’s set also shakes off the

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heavy figuration that marks the language of the second, third, and fourth poems and brings us back to the direct argument of the opening poem. The plum blossom’s sophisticatedly painted silhouette, set slantingly against the sunlit window (presumably referring to Blooming Light’s painting), is “far superior” (jue sheng), Chen emphatically proclaims, to its natural presence as described in Qiji’s poem.

The Relationship Between Art and Reality The active realignment between art and reality, the understanding that technique is an enhancement, not necessarily an impediment to the innate beauty of natural objects, which creates room for artistic intervention but does not negate the primacy of natural beauty, constitutes an important theoretical thread running through Chen Yuyi’s early compositions. The classical model envisioned the poet as an observer of thrilling occurrences in the world, a perceptive and conscientious reporter of serendipitous discovery, like Qiji in his “Early Plum Blossoms.” Having the acumen to survey the landscape was considered essential to a traditional poet’s success but he was not usually conceived as an enhancer, shaper, or creator of beauty, or an evaluator or assessor of his art. By concluding that the artistically created, color-bereft ink plum blossoms in Blooming Light’s painting are superior to their shining natural presence in Qiji’s poem, Chen Yuyi prominently assumes the role of an evaluator. The tangled loop between art and experience gains another manifestation in the last ink plum poem as well. Chen does not elaborate on what exactly motivates his annual ritual of going to the waterside to watch the plum’s “secluded appearance” 幽姿 (l. 2) after reading Lin Bu’s poems. The jue sheng statement that ends the poem may suggest his disappointment at the flower’s actual physical existence. But that is not the point. As the discussion in this chapter suggests, reading poems as a starting point or precondition for better appreciating an object’s natural beauty, or going to an object’s physical habitat for verification after reading its description in a poem, steadily gained popularity in

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the late Northern Song during Chen’s lifetime. Thus conceived, a poem is not merely an image but a trace of the object it depicts, a material vestige of what was on the poet’s mind, which has a potency of meaning beyond the written word. What we see in the ink plum quatrains, and Chen Yuyi’s compositions from his sojourn in Kaifeng in general, are a sharpened awareness of the boundaries between art and reality and a concomitant understanding that those boundaries are not static or clear-cut but can be crossed or transcended. Recognizing both aspects is something that sustains his compositional practices across periods. For Chen, the fundamental question is: What does it mean to be a poet, and how should he, as a poet, situate himself in a demanding and uncertain world? In Chen’s early works, he constantly strives for balance and perspective but he often struggles to get a grasp on his personal identity and his destination. The Kaifeng sojourn gives him a precious opportunity to think about those questions. He will eventually find his answers, but not until a traumatizing experience has shattered all his assumptions.

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Notes 1. A Chinese league, or li 里, is approximately one-third of a mile. I use “league” to refer to the li throughout this book. Unless otherwise noted, distances are calculated based on Yuanfeng jiuyu zhi 元豐九域志 (Gazetteer of the Nine Regions of the Yuanfeng period) by Wang Cun (1023–1101), a succinct gazetteer of Northern Song administrative geography completed during Shenzong’s Yuanfeng reign (1078–1085). 2. Wang was appointed grand councilor to replace Cai Jing 蔡京 (1047– 1126) in 1119. 3. Chen entered the Imperial College as a teenager in 1106 and spent seven years there before graduating and acquiring official eligibility in 1113. 4. Anna M. Shields examined a few high-profile literary comradeships in the mid-Tang: Bai Juyi and Yuan Zhen, Han Yu and Meng Jiao, Liu Zongyuan and Liu Yuxi. Shields, One Who Knows. An important difference between Chen Yuyi’s late Northern Song network of peer scholars and the celebrated friendship of Bai Juyi and Yuan Zhen is that the members in the Northern Song group show a greater level of homogeneity in ideology, attitude toward life, education, and skill sets. One factor that contributed significantly to the formation of this homogeneous peer network was that its members were products of the newly installed nationwide school system. On unity as an intellectual foundation underlying the late Northern Song reform agenda, see Bol, This Culture, 212–233. 5. Advancement through the official bureaucracy had become painfully slow by this time because the production of scholars and graduates had far outpaced the civil service’s capacity to employ them. Chen Yuyi’s class saw firsthand the difficulty of qualifying for government service under the new Three Hall system in the late Northern Song. Of the presumably 200 Upper Hall students in the Imperial College in 1113, only 19, including Chen Yuyi, passed and earned eligibility for government service, and immediate employment was not guaranteed for even the highest-ranked graduates. 6. Translations of official titles are based on Hucker, Dictionary. The biyong was established in the southern suburbs of Kaifeng in 1102 as the Outer Hall of the Imperial College, part of the Three Hall system. The name derives from a similar institution for educating young people of aristocratic origin in the Western Zhou. It was abolished in 1121 together

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7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

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with the Three Hall system. Chen’s waiting time before his new assignment was not unusual. As Charles Hartman wrote, “Already by 1058, this waiting time could extend up to two years, and by 1086 could stretch up to three years for executory officials.” Hartman, “Sung Government,” 70. The first number in the parentheses after the title refers to the poem’s overall position in Bai Dunren’s 1990 critical edition, CYYJJJ. The second is the poem’s page number or page range in the same work. Hu Zhi and Bai Dunren have identified most of the names that appear in Chen’s poems. I will note who they are only when the identity of the person involved is relevant to the discussion. All translations of Chen Yuyi’s poems, unless otherwise indicated, are mine. Direct borrowings or modifications from available translations are noted. Indirect influences, which are many, will not be individually acknowledged. I use the term “stanza” broadly, referring here to an originally unmarked four-line block of verse that shows some thematic cohesiveness. To get a sense of the variety and density of the references and allusions in the poem, consider the following list of all such references in the remaining twenty-eight lines (identifications are based on Hu Zhi and Bai Dunren’s commentaries): Du Fu and Han Yu 韓愈 (ll. 5–6); Jinshu 晉 書 and Beishi 北史 (ll. 7–8); Jinshu and Du Fu (ll. 9–10); Shishuo xinyu 世 說新語, Ji Kang 嵇康, and Liezi 列子 (ll. 11–12); Yang Xiong 揚雄 and Mencius (ll. 13–14); Houhan shu 後漢書, Shishuo xinyu, Kongzi jiayu 孔 子家語, Shiji 史記, and Du Fu (ll. 15–16); Jiu Tangshu 舊唐書, Han Yu, Guoshi bu 國史補, Tang zhiyan 唐摭言, and Zuozhuan 左傳 (ll. 17–18); The Analects and Huang Tingjian (ll. 19–20); The Diamond Sutra 金剛 經, Liu Zongyuan 柳宗元, Jinshu, and Meng Jiao 孟郊 (ll. 21–22); Cao Pi 曹丕 (l. 25); Hanshu 漢書 and Jinshu (ll. 27–28); Jinshu and Houhan shu (ll. 29–30); The Analects (l. 32). The majority of these allusions and references come from received literature. The only exception is in line 20, which alludes to a poem by the contemporary poet Huang Tingjian, an indication of the designated Jiangxi school patriarch’s profound influence on Chen Yuyi at the beginning of his career. For a general review of Chen’s use of allusions, see McCraw, “Poetry,” 222–230. Zhao, Cao Zhi, 393–394. Xiao Difei, Du Fu, 1200; Owen, Poetry, 2:53. I use Stephen Owen’s recent complete translation, The Poetry of Du Fu, for poems quoted in this book. Modifications and differences of interpretation are noted.

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14. Chen’s diction and syntax are more straightforward and relatively unadorned compared with the style of his late Northern Song counterparts. David McCraw came to a similar conclusion. See McCraw, “Poetry,” 180–197. 15. In “Nine Arguments” 九辯, discussed later in the chapter, Song Yu laments that everything is in decline in autumn. 16. Tao Qian in the preface to his poem “Living in Retirement on Double Ninth” 九日閑居 describes a situation in which, lacking wine, he turns to composing poems to match the luxuriantly blooming autumn chrysanthemums in his garden. 17. The Western Jin statesman Zhang Hua 張華 (232–300) was famous for his love of books. He once required thirty carts to carry all of his books when moving to a new place. 18. Shao Ping 召平 was the former Marquis of Dongling in the Qin. After the fall of his country, he chose to become a commoner and grew melons for a living outside the Eastern Gate of Chang’an. 19. According to the “Treatise on Official Selection and Appointment” 選 舉志 of the Songshi 宋史 (History of Song), in the first year of the Chongning reign, 1102, “The Grand Councilor requested that government schools be established across the country in all counties and prefectures and that each prefecture establish two preceptors” 宰臣請天下 州縣并置學, 州置教授二員. Tuo Tuo, Songshi, 157.3662. 20. Bai, Nianpu, 38. 21. Guo Qingfan, Zhuangzi, 493; Watson, Complete Works, 154, slightly modified for stylistic coherence. 22. I am not suggesting that Chen invented this syntax; in classical Chinese, as an anonymous reviewer pointed out, verb coordination frequently points to the first action being the cause of the second. Chen is perhaps unconsciously using prose syntax for poetry, a tendency that was gaining popularity during this period. 23. Chaves, “Not the Way,” 199; emphasis in the original. 24. This is the same word Du Fu uses to describe the onward movement of the rushing waters of the Yangzi in “Climbing the Heights” 登高: “Endless trees shed their leaves that descend in the whistling wind, / Unending, the long River comes on surging” 無邊落木蕭蕭下, 不盡長江滾滾 來. Xiao Difei, Du Fu, 5092; Owen, Poetry, 5:273, with minor modifications. Chen has a particular fondness for the word. In “Autumn Rain” 秋雨 (#42/95), he uses it to contrast the sojourning poet’s depressed status: “In the land of prosperity and surging glory, / The western winds

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25. 26.

27. 28.

29.

30. 31. 32.

33.

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blow on the sojourner’s clothes” 袞袞繁華地, 西風吹客衣 (ll. 7–8). In “Matching the Rhymes of My Uncle” 次韻家叔 (#62/127), he uses it to describe the incessant activities of the lords and gentlemen in the city: “Amid the surging dust of the lords and gentlemen’s galloping coaches, / Your lonely song, Sir, rises in broad spring sunlight” 袞袞諸公車馬塵, 先生孤唱發陽春 (ll. 1–2). Ding and Cong, Bao Zhao, 457–462. Master South of Market 市南子 said to the Marquis of Lu 魯侯: “In South Yue there is a city and its name is The Land of Established Virtue. Its people are foolish and naive, few in thoughts of self, scant in desires” 南越有邑焉, 名為建德之國. 其民愚而朴, 少私而寡欲. Guo Qingfan, Zhuangzi, 671; Watson, Complete Works, 211, with minor stylistic modifications. “The Fair One bequeathed me a sable robe; / How shall I return the love? A pearl of shining moonlight” 美人贈我貂襜褕, 何以報之明月珠. Lu Qinli, Xianqin, 181. Sturman used the phrase to discuss Su Shi’s style of calligraphy in the two Cold Food Festival poems written in 1082 during his Huangzhou exile. Sturman, Mi Fu, 45. Su Shi, “Rain on Cold Food Day: Two Poems” 寒食雨二首. Su Shi shiji, 1112–1113. Symbolizing material hardship, “green sandals” is borrowed from Du Fu’s “Song for the Painted Landscape Screen of Liu Dan, Sheriff of Fengxian” 奉先劉少府新畫山水障歌: “Green sandals and homespun stockings will begin from this point on” 青鞋布襪從此始. Xiao Difei, Du Fu, 528; Owen, Poetry, 1:221. Bending and bowing to please his superiors. Three years was the regular length of an official appointment. Du Fu received his “reminder” 拾遺 post in the fifth lunar month of 757 after escaping through rebel lines and making his way to Suzong’s court in Fengxiang. Dates of Du Fu’s life are based on his chronology in Xiao Difei, Du Fu, 6511–6577. Both lines in the ending couplet derive from Du Fu’s “Respectfully Presented to Vice-Director of the Left, the Senior Wei: Twenty-Two Couplets” 奉贈韋左丞丈二十二韻. The “scholar’s cap” is from Du Fu’s opening statement: “Those in fine silk pants don’t starve to death, / But a scholar’s cap often ruins a man” 紈袴不餓死, 儒冠多誤身 (ll. 1–2). The Mount Zhongnan reference is from a later moment in the poem, where Du Fu expresses his hesitation at leaving Chang’an: “Still I will cherish Mount Zhongnan, / And turn my head to the banks of the clear Wei” 尚

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34.

35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45.

46.

Writing Poetry, Surviving War 憐終南山, 迴首清渭濱 (ll. 39–40). Xiao Difei, Du Fu, 277; Owen, Poetry, 1:51–53, with slight modifications. Analects 7.15. Zhu Xi, Sishu, 96; Lau, Analects, 88. Sima Qian in his biography for Bo Yi and Shu Qi famously questions Confucius’s comment by reaffirming Bo Yi and Shu Qi’s virtue and “sense of right,” and by revealing the “bitterness of spirit” the two brothers had kept to themselves. Sima Qian, Shiji, 61.2121–2129; Owen, Anthology, 142–144. As Huang Tingjian commented, this opening statement “establishes the theme of the entire poem” 一篇立意也. Fan Wen, Qianxi, 399–400. Huang’s overall purpose was to show the poem’s sophisticated “structural design” (buzhi 布置), a major interest of the Jiangxi poetics. Xiao Difei, Du Fu, 669; Owen, Poetry, 1:215. “Guan” 觀 is a hexagram in the Classic of Changes. “Guests of the realm” is an archaic reference to examination candidates. Yang Xiong (53 BC–AD 18) was a famous writer of the Western Han who excelled at composing the fu, or rhapsodies. Cao Zhi, courtesy Zijian, was a famous poet of the early third century. Li Yong (678–747) was a famous scholar and calligrapher of an earlier generation. Wang Han (687–726) was a famous poet of the older generation. Owen adopts the variant reading of “thirteen years” in the translation but keeps the reading of “thirty” in the Chinese text. Although the number thirteen matches the actual situation better, an argument can be made that descriptive and narrative accuracy were not necessarily major goals for Du Fu in the poem. Zhongnan is a mountain range south of the capital that is traditionally associated with a hermit’s withdrawn life, used here synecdochically for Chang’an. The Wei is a river that flows from west to east, past Chang’an, into the Yellow River. The Western Han general Han Xin 韓信 (231–196 BC) in his early years was given a meal by a washerwoman when he was in desperate need. Later, when he rose to prominence, he lavishly repaid that small kindness. Du Fu is famous for his long, five-syllable, ancient-style verse. “Journey North” 北征, the second longest of all his poems, runs for 70 couplets or 140 lines (for discussion, see chapter 4). Up to the point of the Wei Ji poem, there is only one other poem that has reached the length of twenty-two couplets, or forty lines. This is “Presented to the Prince

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47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

52.

53.

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of Ruyang, Lord Specially Advanced: Twenty-Two Couplets” 贈特進 汝陽王二十二韻, written around the same time of the Wei Ji poem. Xiao Difei, Du Fu, 126–135; Owen, Poetry, 1:36–41. The first poem that breaks the 50-couplet, 100-line, 500-word mark is the one that features the aforementioned “crimson gates” and “bones of the frozen dead” contrast, “Going from the Capital to Fengxian County, Singing My Feelings: Five Hundred Words,” written in 755 on the eve of the An Lushan Rebellion. Xiao Difei, Du Fu, 669; Owen, Poetry, 1:215. The longest poem, “Writing My Feelings in Kui on an Autumn Day, Respectfully Sent to Director Zheng and Li, Adviser to the Heir Apparent: One Hundred Couplets” 秋日夔府詠懷奉寄鄭監李賓客一百韻,as indicated by its title, has a hundred rhymed couplets. Xiao Difei, Du Fu, 4834–4837; Owen, Poetry, 5:192–211. I want to thank an anonymous reviewer for correcting a misidentification by me in an earlier version of the manuscript. His “Going from the Capital to Fengxian County” is the best example of these internal, unresolvable tensions. For discussion and analysis, see Yu, Bol, Owen, and Peterson, Ways with Words, 146–172. This was before the invention of the civil service examination system, when recruitment was based mainly on recommendation and reputation. Ji Kang, “Letter to Shan Tao Cutting off the Relationship” 與山巨源絕 交書. Xiao Tong, Wenxuan, 600–603. For a translation and analysis of the letter, see Jansen, “Art.” For letters as a literary genre in the early medieval period, see Richter, Letters. Ji Kang and Shan Tao are both members of the famous group “Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove” 竹林七賢. When Wang Sheng, a reclusive Huang-Lao scholar, was summoned and arrived at court, he publicly commanded Zhang Shizhi, the eminent chamberlain for law enforcement 廷尉, to straighten his socks. Zhang obliged without taking offense. “When people of the world heard of it, they considered Wang worthy and held Zhang in high esteem” 諸公聞 之, 賢王生而重張廷尉. Sima Qian, Shiji, 102.2756. Another example of this delicate balancing act is “To My Uncle at Xinxi” 寄新息家叔 (#38/91): “Although the pledges of the Bamboo Grove must be kept, / Family prosperity also needs to be taken care of” 竹林雖有約, 門戶要人興 (ll. 7–8). Xinxi was a county in Caizhou 蔡州 on the upper Huai. Dong was a recognized expert on the Spring and Autumn Annals, one of the Five Classics officially approved by the Western Han government.

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54. Jia’s New Book 新書 is a collection of political treatises on the practical matters of government. Here, kaihe 開闔 (lit., “opening and closing”) describes both Jia Yi’s style of argument and the policies discussed in his book. Traditional Chinese political economy has a major concern with opening and closing avenues of profit for the government. 55. Qian Zhonglian, Han Changli, 560. 56. For this reason, the poem was traditionally interpreted as a metaphor for the degeneration and futility of human life. Further, some commentators read the lamentation of lateness as a political allegory, a portent of the decline and eventual fall of the Tang empire. 57. Su Shi, Su Shi shiji, 2159–2160. 58. For the Northern Song discourse on beauty as an intrinsic value, see Egan, Problem of Beauty. My emphasis on the particular contribution of the late Northern Song to the notion that hardship is a necessary condition for success does not mean similar views were not expressed in earlier periods. The question is the idea’s prominence in the general culture of the period and its extensive application in literary and cultural theory and practices. See Yugen Wang, Ten Thousand Scrolls, 40–43, 53–56. 59. The second line of the couplet alludes to a passage in the Analects, where Confucius asks: “Has it not been said, ‘Hard indeed is that which can withstand grinding?’ Has it not been said, ‘White indeed is that which can withstand black dye?’” 不曰堅乎, 磨而不磷; 不曰白乎, 涅而不緇. Zhu Xi, Sishu, 177; Lau, Analects, 144. 60. Chen used several slightly different terms, including shuhuai (“expressing my feelings”), shuhuai 述懷 (“an account of my feelings”), and ganhuai 感懷 (“touched by my feelings”). To simplify things, I use the generic “expressing my feelings” for all of them. The two sets of fourteen poems written to his friends are all “expressing my feelings” poems. 61. Here “takes advantage of” is my translation of qi 欺 (lit., to bully, to torture), borrowed from Stephen Owen’s translation of the word the Southern Song lyricist Wu Wenying 吳文英 (ca. 1212–1260) uses in the opening line of his famous “Oriole Song Prelude” 鶯蹄序 to describe the bullying effect of the early spring chill on the speaker: “Just now the lingering chill takes unfair advantage of me, ill from too much wine, / And I close the finely wrought door of aloeswood” 殘寒正欺病酒, 掩沉香繡 戶. Owen, Remembrances, 115. For a translation and discussion of Wu Wenying’s whole lyric, see Owen, Remembrances, 114–130; Fong, Wu Wenying, 110–114; Shuen-fu Lin, “Space-Logic.”

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62. The Northern Song Neo-Confucianist Cheng Hao memorably describes ding 定 (the modifying adjective in the phrase) as a state in which, in A.C. Graham’s translation, “one is stable in movement as well as in stillness; it is the state in which we do not follow things as they withdraw nor go to meet them as they come, and there is no distinction of internal and external.” Graham, Two Chinese, 102. 63. From the Supporting Verse of the “Colors of Things” chapter in the Wenxin diaolong. Huang, Li, and Yang, Wenxin, 567; Owen, Readings, 286. 64. The Eastern Han Chuci scholar Wang Yi 王逸 (89–158) interpreted bian 辯 (to argue) in the title of Song Yu’s poem by way of bian 變, a homophone, meaning “to change.” “To argue,” Wang explained, “is to change, expounding morality and virtue to admonish and change the lord” 辯者, 變也, 謂敶道德以變説君也. Hong Xingzu, Chuci, 182. 65. Hong Xingzu, Chuci, 182. Hawkes, Songs, 209. 66. Hawkes, Songs, 208. 67. Hong Xingzu, Chuci, 183. The translation of these two lines is mine. Hawkes’s version elegantly conveys the pathos of the situation: “Afflicted: the poor esquire has lost his office and his heart rebels”; “Desolate: on his long journey he rests with never a friend.” Hawkes, Songs, 209. 68. Hong Xingzu, Chuci, 183–184; Hawkes, Songs, 209–210. The translation is by David Hawkes. 69. Ouyang, Ouyang Xiu, 256; emphasis added. For a translation and discussion, see Egan, Literary Works, 127–132; James T.C. Liu, Ou-yang Hsiu, 139–140. 70. Liu Shangrong, Huang Tingjian, 403; Owen, Anthology, 656, slightly modified. The Southern Song commentator Ren Yuan 任淵 saw in the second line the poet’s desire to withdraw. 71. Owen, Anthology, 656. 72. The idea of transformation lies at the heart of Huang’s poetics. “Snatching the embryo and changing the bone” (duotai huangu 奪胎換骨) and “transforming iron into gold” (diantie chengjin 點鐵成金) are called by Peter Bol the two “basic precepts” in his writings. Bol, “Culture and the Way,” 522. 73. Owen, Anthology, 656. Qian Zhongshu, Songshi, 60. 74. Ye Mengde, Shilin shihua, 5–6. Ye’s purpose was to criticize Huang Tingjian’s alleged “fondness of oddity” (haoqi 好奇) and his habit of “searching for poetry in his head” (yisuo 意索). For Ye, poetry should be the result of unplanned encounters, with the poet and the scene “acci-

56

75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

Writing Poetry, Surviving War dentally bumping into” (shi xiangyu 適相遇) each other. He famously commented on Xie Lingyun’s acclaimed couplet “Spring grasses grow on the pond’s banks, / In the willows of the garden, the birds have changed their songs” 池塘生春草, 園柳變鳴禽 from his “Ascending the Tower by the Pond” 登池上樓: “The skillfulness of this description lies in the poet’s encountering the scene unknowingly, without the intention to do so. A poem should be completed without the assistance of the carpenter’s chopping axe and marking lines. This could not be achieved by lesser minds” 此語之工, 正在無所用意, 猝然與景相遇, 借以成章, 不假繩削, 故非常情所能到. Ye Mengde, Shilin shihua, 19. For the Xie Lingyun poem, see Gu, Xie Lingyun, 95. The carpenter’s chopping axe and marking lines (shengxue 繩削) was a common metaphor for poetic craftsmanship. Chaves, “Not the Way,” 199. Owen, Anthology, 656. Su Shi, Su Shi wenji, 370–371. For a full translation of the account, see Hargett, “Some Preliminary Remarks,” 74–76. Harrist, Painting, 89; emphasis in the original. Longmian Mountains 龍 眠山 is near Li Gonglin’s hometown in modern Tongcheng 桐城, Anhui Province. “Pure and Bright: Two Quatrains” 清明二絕 (2 of 2) (#145/278), l. 1. “Northern Winds” 北風 (#35/83), ll. 1–2. “Traveling to the Suburbs to Take Care of Business, To Be Shown to a Friend” 以事走郊外示友 (#53/113), l. 3. “Tenth Month” 十月 (#54/117), ll. 1–2. Yoshikawa, Introduction, 18. Meng Yuanlao’s Dongjing meng hua lu 東京夢華錄 (A dream of splendors past in the eastern capital), was finished in 1147, about three decades after Chen wrote his lines about the city’s yellow dust. The book describes life in Kaifeng between 1117 and 1125. For urban nostalgia as a means of cultural memory and political resistance in the Southern Song, see Levine, “Stages of Decline.” West, “Recollection,” 405. Zhang Guichen was the brother of Zhang Juchen and another of Chen’s maternal cousins. Hu Zi, Tiaoxi, 360. Zhu Xi, Zhuzi, 3330–3331. For a brief discussion of Zhu Xi’s comment, see Mo, Zhu Xi, 172. CYYJJJ, 101n1.

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90. Ibid. As pointed out by an anonymous reviewer for the manuscript, other contemporary poets, such as Zou Hao 鄒浩 (1060–1111) and Xu Jingheng 許景衡 (1072–1128), also liked and wrote poems on Zhongren’s painting. 91. Liu Shangrong, Huang Tingjian, 679. Huang was on the way to his exile in Yizhou 宜州 (in modern Guizhou) when he stopped at Hengzhou 衡 州 in Hunan 湖南 (“south of the lake”) to pay respects to the famous monk. From there he traveled to Lingnan 嶺南 (“south of the ranges”). Zhongren was known popularly as Master Benevolence of Blooming Light 花光仁老 because of his term as head of the eponymous temple in Hengzhou. 92. This is a description of the painting’s content, the main features of which are also outlined in the poem’s title: “Blooming Light Painted Several Branches of Plums for Me, as Well as Distant Mountains beyond the Mist” 花光為我作梅數枝及畫煙外遠山. Because of the climatic differences separating the northern and southern slopes of the Nanling Mountains, flowers on the northern side start to bud when those on the warmer southern side have already bloomed and withered. 93. Lou Yue, “Inscribed on the Ink Plum Painting of Zhao Xiyuan” 題趙晞 遠墨梅. Gong kui ji 攻媿集, juan 10; CYYJJJ, 101n1. Jianzhai is a style name Chen first adopted in 1127 in Dengzhou (see chapter 5). 94. Hu Zhiyu, “Painted Plum” 梅圖. Zishan daquanji 紫山大全集, juan 7; CYYJJJ, 101n1. Fuweng, “The Old Man of Fu,” is a style name Huang adopted while in Fuzhou 涪州 of modern Sichuan. 95. Zeng Minxing, Duxing zazhi 獨醒雜志, juan 4; CYYJJJ, 100n1. 96. Han Yu used “Jade Ladies” to describe falling snowflakes. Su Shi applied it to plum blossoms. 97. Luoyang 洛陽 was the capital of the Eastern Han. 98. Lu Ji, “Written on Behalf of Gu Yanxian and Presented to His Wife” 為 顧彥先贈婦二首 (1 of 2). Yang Ming, Lu Ji, 295. The translation of the second couplet is by Knechtges, in “Sweet-peel Orange,” 57. 99. Knechtges, “Sweet-peel Orange,” 57–58. 100. Xie Tiao, “In Reply to Wang Deyuan, Magistrate of Jin’an” 酬王晉安. Cao Rongnan, Xie Xuancheng, 203. Mather, Age of Eternal Brilliance, 2:144; slightly modified. 101. It was loved especially by the late Tang poet Li Shangyin. Li’s “Peonies” 牡丹 starts with the flower’s gorgeous, ethereal beauty, comparing the moment when the peony’s luxuriant petals first open to the legendary Lady of Wei rolling up the curtains and revealing her face: “Brocade curtains just rolled up, the Lady of Wei” 錦緯初卷衛夫人. Liu and

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102. 103.

104. 105.

106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111.

112.

Writing Poetry, Surviving War Yu, Li Shangyin, 1724. The Lady of Wei was so beautiful that to avoid sending wrong messages to her visitors, she received people, including, allegedly, a visiting Confucius, from behind her curtains. Li Shangyin’s genius here is to boldly imagine what that face would look like when the curtains are rolled up, and to use that idea to describe the peonies when their blossoms first open. Qian Zhongshu, Tanyi lu, 22. Zhongli Chun 鍾離春, a woman from the Wuyan district of Qi, had an ugly face but a virtuous character. Because of her virtue she later became the primary consort of King Xuan of Qi. Her name is used here on the literal level, because of her unattractive looks. The li 李 used in the last line is a variety of plum. I recognize the awkwardness of the translation here. Chen was suffering from an eye ailment during this period. See “Eye Illness” 目疾 (#52/111). Chen Xuan 陳玄, “Old Black,” is a fictional character who represents ink in Han Yu’s humorous “Biography of Master Brushtip” 毛穎傳. Liu and Yue, Han Yu, 2718. A textual variant reads bingyan 病眼 for bingjian 病見 in the first line. CYYJJJ, 102. CYYJJJ, 104n1; Hua, Chinese Clothing, 32–33; Zong-qi Cai, How to Read, 295. Hua, Chinese Clothing, 33. When the legendary horse evaluator Bo Le 伯樂 got old, he recommended Jiufang Gao as his successor because of Jiufang’s excellent techniques for seeing a horse’s inner traits. For the theoretical implications of this couplet in painting criticism of later periods, see Bush, Chinese Literati, 110–111. Ronald Egan discusses this new understanding by way of the Song literati’s changing attitude toward human intervention. Egan, Problem of Beauty, 109–161. Wang Xiulin, Qiji, 310. Qiji’s friend Zheng Gu 鄭谷 (ca. 851–ca. 910) allegedly changed the original wording in the last line from shuzhi 數枝 (“several branches”) to yizhi 一枝 (“a single branch”) to highlight the early plum bloom’s stunning solitary beauty. Because of this, Zheng earned the epithet “one-character teacher” 一字之師 for Qiji. The example illustrates the late-Tang understanding of the importance of poetic craftsmanship in describing our experiences of nature. Lin Bu, “Little Plum Blossoms in Hill Garden: Two Poems” 山園小梅 二首 (1 of 2). Lin Bu, Lin Hejing, 2.14b. Red Pine has translated the

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first poem of the set. Red Pine, Poems, 453. My translation has benefited from his. Zhao Qiping analyzed the poem in great detail. Zhao Qiping, Songshi, 77–98. Lin’s description has a dominating influence on later poetic and artistic representations of the flower; the Southern Song lyricist Jiang Kui 姜夔 (ca. 1155–ca. 1221) composed two lyrics and named them, respectively, for the first two Chinese characters in each of Lin Bu’s couplet’s two lines: “Scattered Shadows” (shuying 疏 影) and “Hidden Fragrance” (anxiang 暗香). Xia, Jiang Baishi, 48. For a translation and discussion of “Hidden Fragrance,” see Shuen-fu Lin, Transformation, 137–141.

Chapter 2

Life’s Splendid Blossoms Compared with the more than two years Chen Yuyi spent, from 1116 to 1118, waiting in Kaifeng for a new appointment after his Kaide preceptorship, the following six years, from his appointment as registrar in the Outer Hall of the Imperial College in 1118 to his Chenliu exile at the end of 1124, saw more movement and activity in both his personal and his political life. Because of this, his poems from this period demonstrate an apparent richness of sentiments and emotions. In the happy moments that dotted these six years, we see the optimist in him on full display. At other times he was deeply saddened by his perceived lack of success in his political career. The relationship between nature and poetry remained a persistent thread in his writing, but it started to gain an intimate personal dimension unseen in the earlier period. Not only was he gradually finding his own style; poetry was becoming for him an emotionally consoling and intellectually fulfilling tool with which to counter the myriad, unpredictable forces in the political and physical world. James Hargett considered this Chen’s period of “experimentation,” out of which emerged “a more personal, intimate, reflective, and quiet type of lyricism.”1 My purpose in this chapter is to examine the formulation of this intimate personal style by focusing on the aesthetic and technical

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aspects of its development. I continue to follow the chronological order and biographical approach that helped us navigate the manifold forces and tendencies in the first five years of Chen’s creative life.

The Chessboard and the Lamp Sparks The pressing question is always, how to situate the poet’s person in the changing and often uncooperative world—a world that for Chen had gotten increasingly out of sync with the classical poetic model of facile reciprocity and spontaneous response? In the following poem, written in the fall of 1118 before his appointment to the registrar position in the Imperial College, Chen provides a classical iteration of that concern. His primary response—to stay in the moment, to enjoy what the world has to offer—is commonplace, and the message’s conventionality is also illustrated in the form in which the poem is written. A regulated verse with the seven-syllable line (qiyan lüshi 七言律詩), the poem is only the second such composition in Chen Yuyi’s collection, the first being the qiuhuai poem to Preceptor Zhou discussed in the previous chapter. Night Rain 夜雨 (#50/108) 經歲柴門百事乖 Throughout the year, at my rustic gate, a hundred things have gone awry,2 此身只合臥蒼苔 2 The only thing fitting for me is to lie down on the green mosses.3 蟬聲未足秋風起 The calls of the cicada have not crescendoed, but the autumn winds arose; 木葉俱鳴夜雨來 4 The leaves of the trees all whistling, the night rain arrived. 棋局可觀浮世理 On the chessboard, the principles of the floating world can be observed; 燈花應為好詩開 6 The lamp sparks must be blossoming for good poetry.

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獨無宋玉悲歌念 Devoid of the sad sentiments of Song Yu’s songs, 但喜新涼入酒盃 8 I rejoice at the new cool entering my wine cups. Profusely used by Du Fu and further honed by later poets such as Li Shangyin, the seven-syllable regulated verse enjoyed great popularity in the Northern Song and served as the gold standard against which a novice’s progress and an established poet’s fame and legacy were measured.4 Comparing it with its shorter five-syllable sibling, the change from five to seven Chinese characters in a line, or forty to fifty-six characters in a poem, represents a significant 40 percent increase in a poem’s text. The increase affects prosodic, syntactical, and thematic complexity at both the couplet and the poem level, and the added length also facilitates profound thought and quiet contemplation on the part of the poet, who may be encouraged to take stock of his general beliefs and come to terms with particular events in his personal life in a more elaborate and leisurely fashion. That “Night Rain” is followed in the collection by another fourteen seven-syllable regulated verses (#51–64), one after another, is perhaps not totally accidental; here, in the form’s accommodating length, the poet’s contemplative mind finds an ideal platform for self-expression and consolation. The longer seven-syllable format is also uniquely suited for what McCraw calls the “double or triple perspective” that is richly demonstrated in Chen’s poems, an artful construction of expanded time and space that concerns not only the poet’s close environment but also history and the larger physical universe.5 A brief return to the qiuhuai poem to Preceptor Zhou, the first sevensyllable regulated verse in the collection, will refresh our memory about the poet’s typical mode of response to stimulation coming from the outside. Classical writers and theorists used phrases such as “ten thousand paths compete to arise” (wantu jing meng 萬塗競萌) to describe the lively world facing the poet at such moments.6 Other expressions, such as the “the mind surges to ten thousand yards” (xin you wanren 心遊 萬仞), refer to the poet’s capacity to rise to the challenge and match

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the vibrant phenomenal world with their free-wheeling imagination.7 In the Preceptor Zhou poem, the speaker deals with all the stimulation coming his way through a series of increasingly outward moves, turning centrifugally from contemplations of his immediate personal situation to the larger picture illustrated by the historical examples. The same pattern of response is on display in “Night Rain,” with the second couplet (ll. 3–4) forming the poem’s experiential core—in that the thoughts and occurrences in the other three couplets can be read as deriving from and depending on these two lines for their reference and meaning. This is the couplet that can be most securely tied to the poem’s title, which is usually the most experientially verifiable part of a poem, in terms of its relationship with the poet’s lived experience. In the current example, it is the relentless onslaught of autumn in the form of a night storm that sets all other modes and acts of thought and feeling in motion. The second couplet also helps move the scene from outside to inside, from natural and physical events to their emotional and cognitive processing in the poet’s mind. With the menacing forces of the physical storm being locked outside, the domestic night environment sets in and everything begins to calm down for the poet, prompting him to recognize and make sense of the objects close at hand (most notably the lamplight and the chessboard, although the latter’s appearance in the poem does not necessarily connote its physical presence in the room). The poet’s initial concern expressed at the start of the poem, that everything seems to have gone wrong in his life, is replaced when the poem concludes by positive thoughts and sentiments that arise from the expectation of nicer things to come with the autumn rain (“good poetry” 好詩, l. 6; “new cool” 新涼, l. 8). This is a familiar internal transformation we have seen in “Wind and Rain,” a thematically related poem discussed in chapter 1. The phrase “lamp sparks” 燈花 in line 6 of “Night Rain” is borrowed from Du Fu’s “Pouring Ale Alone and Completing a Poem” 獨酌成詩: “Why are lamp sparks taken as such a joy?— / Right now I feel kinship with the green lees of ale. // When drunk I don’t care being a traveler; /

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When a poem is done I feel there was some divine being at work. // The clash of arms is still before my eyes; / How can one make a living with a scholar’s arts? // I suffer being tied down by a minor post, / Lowering my head, I am shamed before men of the wilds” 燈花何太 喜? 酒綠正相親. 醉裏從為客, 詩成覺有神. 兵戈猶在眼, 儒術豈謀生. 苦被微官縛, 低頭媿野人.8 Although Chen appropriates from Du Fu the general association between lamp sparks and poetic production, the image in his poem stops being a dispensable random object whose function in Du Fu’s poem it is to evoke other thoughts and feelings, about war and the poet’s undesirable status. In Chen’s poem, the image is integrated into the poem’s narrative, embedded in the environment as part of the domestic night landscape. Poetry as an outcome of the sparking lamplight is only vaguely suggested in Du Fu’s poem; in Chen’s poem, the connection acquires an explicit level of causality, with poetry becoming, in the circumstances, a necessary or expected result (ying 應, l. 6). The strong coupling of the two is also facilitated by Chen’s relating “natural principles” (li 理) to the game of chess in the previous line of the couplet (l. 5). Through this act, the frustration depicted in the first half of the poem is transformed into joyful anticipation of the new autumn cool and new poetic production that end the poem on the positive note. The Qing dynasty commentator Ji Yun 紀昀 (1724–1805) criticized the lamp sparks and chessboard couplet for wandering too far from the poem’s title, saying that “although a poem does not need to adhere to the title in every line, the fifth and sixth lines have ventured too far off” 詩 固不必句句抱題, 然如此五六, 亦太脫.9 Ji Yun’s remark is misguided, because he fails to recognize the couplet’s key role in facilitating the positive emotional transformation that lies at the core of the poem and the power of the chessboard and lamp spark images in countering the force of the physical storm that is temporarily blocked outside.

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Life’s Splendid Blossoms That poetry is given a similar role in anchoring the poet’s experience in the “floating world” 浮世 (l. 5) should not be surprising. In the larger context of Chen’s poetry, the concern with the act of writing and the ontological significance of poetry is a persistent underlying theme that frequently emerges to the surface. According to David McCraw, more than 160 of Chen’s poems, about a quarter of his total output, “refer to the chanting, writing, joys, and sorrows of versification.”10 Chen Yuyi infuses the interest with a sense of personal urgency. Poetry is a pillar of not only his intellectual life but also his very being. “All my life, I am spellbound by poetry, / Pulse-leaf food filling my belly” 平生詩作祟, 腸 肚困藿食 (ll. 1–2), he wrote to a friend.11 “It helps me forget my worries, / I have indeed taken advantage of its power. // I sure understand it to be but a trivial obsession, / I’ll use it to while away my day anyway” 使我 忘隱憂, 亦自得詩力. 絕知是餘蔽, 且復永今日 (ll. 3–6). In “Life’s Splendid Blossoms” 年華 (#39/92), a five-syllable regulated verse, Chen starts by recalling his Kaide days but quickly turns from reminiscences to the early spring scene delightfully unfolding before his eyes: “After leaving the capital, the year changed several times, / Taking office has not saved me from hunger. // Spring arises from beyond the remaining snow; / The wine cups are emptied in the falling of plum blossoms. // A white sun shines over the mountains and plains; / Under the blue sky, the trees and grasses are primed for growing. // Life’s splendid blossoms do not betray the sojourner, / One by one, they enter my poems” 去國頻更歲, 為官不救飢. 春生殘雪外, 酒盡落梅時. 白日 山川映, 青天草木宜. 年華不負客, 一一入吾詩. As the speaker pulls back from contemplating his employment status, every object in the awakening natural landscape seems to fall into place, perfectly coordinated with the progression of the season and in sync with the poet’s impulse for poetry. The speaker positions himself optimally in relation to these splendid springtime objects, expresses his confidence in poetry’s capacity to bring the scene into order, and actually performs

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the task by putting those objects in their respective spot in the natural scenery and in the flow of the poem. Chen’s compositions from this period show a wide range of moods and sentiments, but the concern with poetry stands out as a stabilizing force that he routinely falls back on to fight his depressed thoughts and emotions as the wait for reappointment dragged on. On New Year’s Eve of 1118, he lamented that “Sentiments of office wane together with the ending year” 宦情吾與歲俱闌 (l. 1).12 In another poem, we see him firm up, buoyant with the conviction that the human will is the ultimate counterforce against the surging sense of natural decline. “How can an iron inkstone be worn out by worldly affairs?” 世事豈能磨鐵硯 (l. 5), he asks Zhang Juchen, invoking a popular metaphor associated with the Five Dynasties minister Sang Weihan 桑維翰 (898–947).13 Sang in his youth determined to pursue a jinshi 進士 (advanced scholar) degree by whatever means it took, vowing that only after his iron inkstone had worn out would he change his mind. For Chen Yuyi, poetry, because of its imperishability, belongs in the same category of Sang’s iron inkstone, one of the few things that do not ebb and flow with life’s vicissitudes: “Sentiments of poetry do not wane along with feelings of the ending year, / Vapors of spring still carry vapors of the chilling water” 詩情不與 歲情闌, 春氣猶兼水氣寒 (ll. 1–2).14 Peer sympathy and peer support find a most reliable partner in poetry, which, like metal, remains incorruptible in the ups and downs of worldly affairs. Chen’s feelings of optimism received a big blow in early 1120 when his mother died. He left his position in the Imperial College and moved to Ruzhou to carry out his mandatory three-year mourning obligations there. “Four years of cold office at old Sangpu, / Three years riding a haggard horse in the imperial capital” 四歲冷官桑濮地, 三年羸馬帝 王州 (ll. 1–2), he wrote to his cousin Zhang Guichen and his younger brother Chen Yuneng 陳與能, reflecting on his seven-year-long official career before his relocation to Ruzhou.15 In addition to “haggard horse,” he uses a series of other depressing metaphors to describe his mental

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state: “A sick crane about to take flight, but lingers on; / A lone cloud hesitates before leaving” 病鶴欲飛還躑躅, 孤雲將去更遲留 (ll. 3–6). In another poem, written to an uncle, he borrows two Buddhism-inspired metaphors to describe the futility of the official pursuit: “This floating life’s ten thousand things, an ant on a revolving millstone; / Ten years of cold office, a fish climbing up the pole” 浮生萬事蟻旋磨, 冷官十年 魚上竿 (ll. 3–4).16 These feelings of being stuck and having been left behind by the incessant turning of events in the world were apparently not soothed by the beautiful spring scenery as Chen traveled back to Kaifeng via Luoyang in 1122 after the mourning period ended.17 On the Way Back to Luoyang 歸洛道中 (#122/244) 洛陽城邊風起沙 Beside Luoyang city, winds swirl up the sand, 征衫歲歲負年華 2 Year after year, in the traveler’s robes, I have betrayed life’s splendid blossoms. 歸途忽踐楊柳影 On my return road, suddenly I step into the willow’s shadow— 春事已到蕪菁花 4 Spring’s affairs have already reached the turnip flowers. 道路無窮幾傾轂 The path is endless, how many tripped carriages? 牛羊既飽各知家 6 Bellies full, the cattle and sheep all know their way home. 人生擾擾成底事 This hustle-bustle of human life, what indeed can be achieved? 馬上哦詩日又斜 8 As I compose the poem on horseback, the sun has sunk further west. Chen would write many more road poems in the future, in a variety of forms and situations. Although not all of them are explicitly marked as such with the phrase “on the way” (daozhong 道中) or “on the

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road” (luzhong 路中), on-the-road poems would become one of his favorite motifs and modes of writing. They offered him an opportunity to take in what the natural landscape presented and to take stock of his thoughts and feelings as he moved through the world’s variegated terrain. Indeed, the entire corpus of his post-1126 compositions could be read collectively as one single “on the road” poem, written as he tried to cope with the grand political and personal challenges facing him after the Jingkang Catastrophe. Here and in the next chapter, I examine several of his early road poems to lay out the basic parameters for later discussion. A host of images both conventional and experientially identifiable can help us correlate the thoughts, emotions, and events described in this seven-syllable regulated verse with the poet’s lived experience as a traveler on the road. What triggers the chain action can be found in the second couplet, the moment when the poetic persona accidentally steps on the shadow of the willow trees, the experiential core on which all the poem’s subsequent images and emotions are centered. As the traveler is touched by the splendid happenings in nature, his sense of time also awakens. The world has moved on in his absence: without his knowledge, the exuberant peach and plum blossoms in early spring have given way to the flowering turnips that now fill the landscape (l. 4).18 The steady progression of the natural world does not hinge on the poet’s individual life experience; the road is long and filled with hazardous bumps (l. 5); the animals all know their own way without being prompted (l. 6). As befits the road-traveling genre, there is a lot of movement in the poem, both physical and mental. We see the familiar image of winds swirling up the sand; we are informed of the treading on the shadows of trees, of the danger of tripping the carriage, of animals heading home, poetry composed on horseback, and the sun sinking into the horizon. There are also subtler, less physical, less noticeable changes, such as the fading of springtime splendor, the maturing of the season, the endless extending of the road, the filling of the bellies of cattle and sheep. Unlike

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the domestic scene in “Night Rain,” here we have an open and moving landscape that is tied minutely to the progress of the traveling poet. The poem’s many “downward” tropes of fading, sinking, descending, and tripping significantly outweigh the few uplifting or upbeat movements, such as the rising of winds, the blossoming of flowers, and the composing of poetry. As a whole the poem expresses feelings of futility and guilt, the thought that one has missed the target, has “not lived up to,” “let down,” or “betrayed” (fu 負, l. 2) what life or the world has to offer. This degraded state is measured against the implicit ideal of a perfect match between expectation and reality, between mind and scene, as occurs in “Life’s Splendid Blossoms” (“Life’s splendid blossoms do not betray the sojourner, / One by one, they enter my poems”) and “Night Rain” (“The lamp sparks must be blossoming for good poetry”). The feeling in “On the Way Back to Luoyang” is almost the opposite of the strong positive pulse that ends those two earlier poems. Even poetry, that most reliable medium between the human and the natural world, turns out to be ineffective, no match for the emotional tumult the late-spring scene has stirred up in the traveler. As the poet performs the very task of composing the poem on horseback, the sun has already furthered its western descent, continuing nonchalantly on its own course, oblivious to what is going on inside the traveler’s mind. At this anxious moment in the late spring of 1122, when Chen Yuyi was on the road heading for Kaifeng after an extended hiatus away from the capital, he allows all of his intense feelings of failure and unfulfilled destiny to emerge and occupy his thoughts. Both the landscape and his internal world open up to him as he moves through the terrain, in the same fashion as the earlier traveler in the city, weathering the dustfilled Kaifeng streets, but now he is on the uncertain and hazardous, albeit thriving, willow-and-turnip-lined road from Ruzhou to his native Luoyang.

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The Permanence of the Physical World “Taking office has not fulfilled my youthful ambitions; / A hundred woes converge on the traveler’s saddle” 一官違壯節, 百慮集征鞍 (ll. 7–8), Chen wrote before arriving at Luoyang.19 His preponderant concern with public service, which has been in his poems since the start of his career, was especially acute at this moment before his official reinstatement. It is characterized by the same feelings of falling short, unfulfillment, and failure seen in “On the Way Back to Luoyang,” now expressed by the word wei 違 (to run counter to, to go against, to fail to fulfill). It was a main concern in the qiuhuai poem to Preceptor Zhou. It was explicitly expressed in a 1118 poem before his registrar appointment: “Twentynine years of my life I know are all in vain, / This year again, my youthful ambitions remain unfulfilled” 二十九年知已非, 今年依舊壯心違.20 Chen stayed in Luoyang for a few months before continuing on to Kaifeng in the summer of that year. In poems written immediately before and after his relocation to Ruzhou, he was obsessed with words and phrases that indicated his depressed emotional state, including “sick crane” (binghe), “lone cloud” (guyun), “haggard horse” (leima), “ant on a revolving millstone” (yi xuan mo), “fish climbing up the pole” (yu shang gan). Traveling through the familiar roads and landscapes leading back to Luoyang refreshed him with new images and heartwarming memories that helped lift him out of his psychological and emotional slump. The iconic cliffs of Dragon Gate at the city’s southern entrance, carved with Buddha images and rising up on both sides of the road to welcome travelers into the storied city, offered a chance for recuperation. In the seven-syllable regulated verse “Dragon Gate” 龍門 (#125/247) written on the occasion of his return to Luoyang, the setting sun acquires a different meaning, offering itself as a force of constancy against the changes in the human world. “Having not come to Dragon Gate for ten years long, / The precipitous cliff is still hung with the setting sun” 不到龍門十載 強, 斷崖依舊掛斜陽 (ll. 1–2), he describes the familiar hanging tableau that greets his eyes as he enters the place.21 Although he continues to

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use depressing metaphors in the poem, such as “haggard horse” (leima, l. 5) and “wandering oriole” (liuying 流鶯, l. 6)—the latter borrowed from Li Shangyin, who uses the image to describe an insuppressible sense of aimless movement that resulted from an itinerant life that has taken him from place to place—the warm and serene beauty of the sun setting against the Dragon Gate cliffs serves as a powerful confirmation of the stability of the natural world, a sympathetic pat on the back of the anxious traveler returning home at this charged moment in his life.22 Participating in an ongoing literary and cultural system of meaning provided another outlet for expression when a friend gave Chen a rock as a gift. On receiving a rare or special rock as a gift in the late Northern Song, as in other periods, the recipient was expected to recognize the importance of the occasion and also to articulate the symbolic meaning of the object.23 Chen was versed in these conventions and used the opportunity skillfully to advance his understanding of the relationship between material reality and artistic representation, and of the role of the rock in maintaining our sense of permanence. He recounts the specific occasion in the title of his poem, in which he also provides the rationale behind the rock’s naming. “A Friend Kindly Gave Me a Rock, Whose Twin Peaks Rise Solitarily into the Air; Based on Du Fu’s ‘The Paired Peaks of Jade Mountain Rise Up High in Cold,’ I Named It Little Jade Mountain” 友人惠石, 兩峰巉然, 取杜子美 玉山高並兩峰寒之句, 名曰小玉山 (#127/250). The Du Fu line is from “At Cui’s Villa in Lantian on the Double Ninth” 九日藍田崔氏莊, in which the poet-speaker observes the Jade Mountain rising up next to the meandering Lan River, both landmarks near Chang’an: “The Lan River comes from afar, falling from a thousand mountain streams, / The paired peaks of Jade Mountain rise up high in cold” 藍水遠從千澗落, 玉山高並兩峯寒.24 “Little Jade Mountain” thus derives its name from both the rock’s miniature size and its physical resemblance to the actual mountain described in Du Fu’s poem.

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The two middle couplets of Chen’s poem are devoted to describing the rock and expounding on the symbolic meaning it supplies: the rock creates and offers a self-contained world of freedom and unbridled pleasure that is always present and always available for the taking. “Since ancient times people can only dream of the Great Locust Kingdom; / Now I can go and hide my body in Little Jade Mountain. // Amidst evening mist and morning rays, I will live out my life there; / Between lofty skies and thick earth, your twin peaks stand undisturbed” 從來作夢大槐國, 此去藏身小玉山. 暮藹朝曦一生了, 高天厚地兩峯閑 (ll. 3–6).25 Chen ends the poem by invoking the powerful voices of his two illustrious late Northern Song predecessors on the topic, Su Shi and Huang Tingjian. “The Nine Splendors poems resonate loudly in the universe, / Comparing them carefully with my rock, they are true peers” 九華詩句喧寰宇, 細 比真形伯仲間 (ll. 7–8). Nearly three decades before, in 1094, when Chen Yuyi was only four years old, Su Shi passed by the middle-Yangzi River town Hukou 湖 口 (in modern Jiangxi Province, at the mouth to Poyang Lake) on the way to his southern exile, and he saw an unusual rock. Delighting in its great potential as a symbol for his unfulfilled dreams, he named it Nine Splendors in a Jug 壺中九華, inspired by the same ideas of freedom and personal enjoyment in a controllable miniature world that would later motivate Chen Yuyi’s poem. Unable to carry the rock with him, Su Shi left it there in Hukou and wrote a poem commemorating the encounter. Eight years later, in 1101, he passed by the same spot on his return from his Lingnan exile and found that the rock had been taken by someone, prompting him to write a second poem in which he mourns the rock’s loss but finds consolation in the idea that its true form, the “shape of the true mountain” (zhenxing 真形) is preserved in a painting.26 “This most lovely creature is gone with the end of those clear dreams,” he wrote, “But still the shape of the true mountain remains in paintings” 尤物已 隨清夢斷, 真形猶在畫圖中.27 The following year, 1102, Su Shi’s junior colleague and friend Huang Tingjian passed the same place on the way to his own southern exile in modern Guizhou. On hearing the story and

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being presented with Su Shi’s poems, he wrote a poem lamenting the loss of both the rock and his friend (Su Shi died a year earlier, in 1101 while still en route to his new post). “Now tell me,” Huang asks, having been informed of the rock’s acquisition by a rich local collector, and of Su Shi’s death—“is resting in unconcern set in a splendid chamber / The equal to lying, fallen and lost, amid the wild clouds?” 試問安排華 屋處, 何如零落亂雲中?28 Whereas Su Shi finds comfort in the painted image’s capacity to preserve the lost rock’s “true form,” and Huang Tingjian compares the rock’s different fates—secured “in a splendid chamber” of a collector’s house or rotting lonely “amid the wild clouds”—Chen Yuyi’s focus lies elsewhere. By saying that his own Little Jade Mountain is a “true peer” (bozhong 伯仲, lit., “elder and younger brother”) of Su Shi’s legendary Nine Splendors in a Jug, he invokes a series of implicit comparisons: between Su Shi and Huang Tingjian’s poetic representations of Nine Splendors in a Jug and his Little Jade Mountain; between their poetic representations of Nine Splendors in a Jug and the rock’s “true form”; and between the now absent, only poetically accessible true form of Nine Splendors in a Jug and the true form of his own Little Jade Mountain, not to mention the original comparison of his miniature rock with the actual Jade Mountain depicted in Du Fu’s poem that set off all these chain reactions in the first place. There is yet another layer to these comparisons. In a note, Chen reveals that “I have in my possession a copy of the stone inscription of the Nine Splendors poems” 家有壺中九華石刻.29 Chen’s naming of the rock and composition of the poem are contingent on a series of prior events and compositions. It is through this ongoing process and the corresponding network of meaning and symbolism that the physical object now in his possession is both confirmed and transformed. The poetically represented world of Su Shi and Huang Tingjian’s Nine Splendors in a Jug is reincarnated in the so-called true form of Little Jade Mountain, which proudly proclaims and demonstrates its physical

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existence before his eyes. Little Jade Mountain’s physical presence and the poet’s secure possession of it provide an opportunity for him to both commemorate the marvel of Nine Splendors in a Jug of an earlier era and match in his own poem the loudly resonating, “globe-rousing” (xuan huanyu 喧寰宇, l. 7) verse by his illustrious predecessors.

Flames of Hope The flames of hope started to burn again in Chen’s heart with his reinstatement and promotion to the Imperial College in the summer of 1122, the first real upward movement in his official career in a decade. The two short quatrains in “On the Way to Zhongmou” 中牟道中二首 (#132– 133/259–260), written while passing by the suburban county seventy leagues west of Kaifeng on his way back to the capital—having probably already heard the news of his appointment—can serve as a barometer for the poet’s rising emotional state.30 Qian Zhongshu included eleven poems by Chen Yuyi in his influential 1958 anthology Songshi xuanzhu 宋詩選注 (Selected poems of Song with commentary), including both poems in this Zhongmou set.31 The popularity of the set is also reflected in the fact that both Yoshikawa and Hargett included the first poem in their studies; McCraw included both poems.32 “The rain was about to fall but didn’t after all, / The returning clouds accompany the traveler on his way back” 雨意欲成還未成, 歸雲却作伴人行 (1 of 2, ll. 1–2).33 The air is filled with happy expectancy; everything seems to be in perfect accord with the poet’s intentions: “The outer ramparts of Zhongmou County remain as broken as before, / The thousand-foot pagoda takes charge of greeting and sending off the travelers” 依然壞郭中牟縣, 千 尺浮屠管送迎 (ll. 3–4). The lightheartedness of the poet’s mood spills over to his description of the physical landscape, extending from the clouds overhead to the high-rising pagoda that fills up the middle of the view, all the way down, as we get to the second poem in the set, to the trees and insects in close proximity to the mounted traveler himself. “The willow branches beckon

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me without waiting for a matchmaker, / Dragonflies approach my horse, and pull back immediately in surprise” 楊柳招人不待媒, 蜻蜓近馬忽相 猜 (2 of 2, ll. 1–2).34 The poet maintains his composure and his control of both the scene and his reaction to the flirtatious momentum in the landscape. He conscientiously scans the space from all angles and in all aspects, from up in the sky to the trailing willow branches below, from the grand movements of clouds to the surprising actions of the dragonflies. At this moment, a bold idea comes to his mind. “How can I make an agreement with the cool breezes, / So that they will not come together with the dusty sands?” 如何得與涼風約, 不共塵沙一并來? (ll. 3–4). The swirling sands outside Kaide—and, earlier, near Luoyang—are now solicited as a potential partner in the poet’s effort to take command of the events happening around him. Although his rank was still low, Chen’s further promotion a year later in the summer of 1123 from erudite of the Imperial College to assistant editorial director in the Imperial Library brought him a step closer to the center of political power, despite the new position’s lack of real clout. Emotionally, the approximately two and a half years he spent at court from the summer of 1122 to the end of 1124 were among the happiest in his life. And Chen does not withhold his feelings in poems he wrote during these two years. In “Autumn Rain” 秋雨 (#134/260–261), a seven-syllable ancient-style verse (qiyan gushi 七言古詩), a torrential downpour that in other times might have evoked feelings of sadness now conveys hope. The physical sight and sound of the rain arouse the speaker to action: “The sick man forced himself to his feet and opened the door, standing, / Ten thousand silver bamboo poles shocked even King Yama of Senluo. // Grand spectacles like this were so rare in the human world, / Leaning on my staff, I didn’t realize the mud had climbed up to my boots” 病夫強 起開戶立, 萬箇銀竹驚森羅. 人間偉觀如此少, 倚杖不覺泥及靴 (ll. 7– 10).35 The exuberance of the speaker’s response is remarkable. The poet’s typical reservation is gone, overpowered by the grandeur of the view that

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greets his eyes, which are filled with the dense and quickly falling threads of the powerful rain, amplified into the image of “ten thousand silver bamboo poles” 萬箇銀竹 (l. 8). The observer’s senses are so numbed by the visual scene that he does not feel anything else. The poem ends with the speaker envisioning a prosperous future of “thirty thousand vegetables” (l. 14) growing in the garden nurtured by the propitious rain. This sense of spectacle transcends specific occasions; it also fills the poet’s mind, for example, at the year’s Double Ninth Festival. “The yellow chrysanthemums do not betray autumn, / Shining brilliantly with the season in full sync” 黃花不負秋, 與秋作光輝 (ll. 1–2), he writes in “Appreciating Chrysanthemums on Double Ninth” 九日賞菊 (#136/265). “The night frost keeps playing its evil tricks, / The morning sun immediately relieves the siege. // Isn’t today the Double Ninth Day? / The festive air fills the most secluded places” 夜霜猶作惡, 朝日為解圍. 今晨豈重九? 節意入幽菲 (ll. 3–6). This is another idealistic moment of fulfillment, of “nonbetrayal” (bufu 不負, l. 1), when the poet finds a perfect object in the opportunely blooming flowers and the autumn landscape willingly joins in the happy chorus playing in the poet’s mind. This optimistic mindset underlies even some truly depressing situations, as in “The Moon Was Nowhere to Be Found on Mid-Autumn Night” 中 秋不見月 (#135/262), for instance.36 “Last year on mid-autumn night, the moon was round and bright, / Shining upon my lapels soaked with ten thousand stripes of blood” 去年中秋端正月, 照我霑襟萬條血 (ll. 1– 2), he starts the poem, recalling the time when he was still in Ruzhou mourning for his mother. “Thinking that Heng E was withholding her smile for this year, / I carefully cleaned my gold goblets, and gazed into the Silver Palaces and waited” 姮娥留笑待今年, 淨洗金觥對銀闕 (ll. 3–4).37 What greets him, however, is not the anticipated full moon but blanking darkness, which leads the poet to speculation: “I suspected that Scholar Zhou had carried the moon away in his chest, / It was as dark as before when midnight arrived” 却疑周生懷月去, 待到三更黑如故 (ll. 9–10).38 The darkness is so overwhelming that even the magpie in Cao Cao’s 曹

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操 (155–220) well-known “Short Song: A Ballad” 短歌行 is frightened and has perched on a branch.39 “The magpie on the southern branch dared not make a sound; / Leaning on my staff, I heaved out three sighs, the wind-blown branch slanted” 南枝烏鵲不敢譁, 倚杖三嘆風枝斜 (ll. 13–14), the poem continues. The bending branch, presumably caused by the breath of the poet’s sighs, is the only movement in this still moment. In spite of the inhibiting atmosphere, the poet tries to see beyond the darkness of the current landscape into the future, ending the poem by making a pledge: “Next year, if I am hale and strong, I will again arrange to meet you, / And will see the Golden Toad in the woods” 明年 強健更相約, 會見林間金背蟇 (ll. 15–16).40 The reference to “next year” derives from the same poem by Du Fu that also inspired Chen’s Little Jade Mountain poem. “At this gathering next year, I wonder who will be hale?” 明年此會知誰健, Du Fu asks. “Drunk, I take the ailanthus in hand and look at it carefully” 醉把茱萸仔細看.41 Du Fu leaves his question open, turning instead to the conventional wisdom of taking care of the moment by looking at the ailanthus spray, a token of longevity and familial love, that he holds in his hand.42 Chen Yuyi subtly changes the emotional outlook of his poem, by turning Du Fu’s question into a statement and by conjuring a potential future meeting with the moon. Structurally, that forward-looking mindset is underlined by an overall temporal framework that pushes the poem’s narrative along. The poem starts from memories of “last year” 去年 (ll. 1–2), elaborates on what happens “this year” 今年 (ll. 3–14), and ends by anticipating “next year” 明年 (ll. 15–16).

Preserving Authenticity Chen’s methodical and pragmatic progression of thought and narrative makes him stand out as a poet. We have already seen the economy and clarity of his structural design in several poems discussed thus far, including the short wuyan gushi “Wind and Rain” (see chapter 1). I now turn to another five-syllable ancient-style poem, this one composed in late 1122 on a visit to the Palace of Preserving Authenticity and Layered

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Blossoms 重華葆真宮, located on the southern outskirts of Kaifeng. Although the palace name strongly suggests its Daoist denomination, the idea of “preserving authenticity” (baozhen 葆真) was universally cherished in premodern China, across religious and intellectual persuasions and historical periods. The poem starts with the speaker arriving at the palace. After the visitor settles down, we see him spending the day by an idyllic pond, quietly watching the ducks swim and the late-season landscape unfold. Visiting Preserving Authenticity Pond 遊葆真池上 (#137/266) 牆厚不盈咫 A wall that was not even a foot in thickness 人間隔蓬萊 2 Separated the human world from Penglai.43 高柳喚客遊 The tall willows beckoned to the visitor, 我輩御風來 4 And here we came, riding on the wind.44 坐久落日盡 I sat for a long while, until the last rays of the sun were gone, 澹澹池光開 6 As a glowing pond calmly opened itself. 白雲行水中 White clouds traveled in the water; 一笑三徘徊 8 One burst of laughter, three steps back. 鴨兒輕歲月 The ducks took lightly of the months and days, 不受急景催 10 Unhurried by the season’s quickening pace. 試作弄篙驚 I tried to surprise them with a bamboo pole, 徐去首不迴 12 They slowly swam away, not looking back. 無心與境接 Without thinking, the mind meets with the scene: 偶遇信悠哉 14

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The free-wheeling, relatively unregulated wuyan gushi can accommodate a wide range of themes, moods, and styles, from the highly descriptive to the highly meditative. Chen was a master of the form and brought significant innovations to it. He relied on it especially heavily after the Jingkang Catastrophe, using it to chronicle his journey and his emotional turmoil as he traveled from place to place. It helped him gradually reestablish his sense of order and reconstitute his broken identity. The line’s shorter length and the form’s inherent affinity for straightforward expression were fully utilized to give his poems both narrative fluidity and a sense of emotional intimacy. This latter trait was a main reason why the nineteenth-century literary critic Liu Xizai 劉熙 載 (1813–1881) used the word qin 親 (close, intimate, kin) to describe the five-syllable line’s most distinctive feature compared with its longer and more syntactically complex seven-syllable siblings.45 In “Wind and Rain” we saw the disturbances created by the autumn storm being stilled and calmed through both the poet’s mental strength and the poem’s steady internal narrative structure. We also saw in “Miscellaneous Thoughts Presented to Chen Guozuo and Hu Yuanmao: Four Poems” (1 of 4) how the underlying narrative structure helps drive the poem toward a conclusion that is based on the poet’s personal situation more than on his moral obligation to preserve Du Fu’s original position. “Visiting Preserving Authenticity Pond” is another example of the fivesyllable ancient-style verse’s innate tendency toward personal expression and how it perfectly harmonizes with the poem’s explicit theme of unplanned encounters and leisurely freedom. The scenes and ideas in the poem have a pristine, authentic beauty of their own; the poet displays careful control, releasing the objects, images, and events one by one as the poem unfolds. The poem’s four evenly distributed stanzas, each four

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lines in length, push the narrative slowly and incrementally forward. The first stanza narrates the entrance into the palace, the quiet, sequestered symbol of Daoist paradise. This is followed in the second stanza by the visitor’s prolonged idyll, sitting, observing the tiny movements in the landscape—the effect of the sunset on the pond; the reflections of the clouds in the water. In the third stanza, static observation is replaced by more proactive acts initiated on the part of the poet-observer to test the authenticity of the observed phenomenon; specifically, to see if the poise and composure demonstrated by the pond’s residents, the ducks, is real or feigned. After the probing, with the authenticity of the ducks’ actions seemingly confirmed, the poet-observer steps out of the narrative in the last stanza, offering his reading and interpretation of the scene. Despite the intentional meddling with the scene (disturbing the movement of the ducks as a way of checking its authenticity), the poem’s conclusion, that authenticity is predicated on spontaneous and unprompted encounter, is unsurprising. It is internally driven from the very beginning of the poem. It might sound counterintuitive to say that Chen’s narrative is controlled, and its pace carefully choreographed, in a poem that explicitly advocates spontaneity and natural encounters. Calm and careful control, however, is Chen’s trademark. The stage is set from the start. The poem begins with a narration of the poet’s entrance into the Daoist palace, beckoned by the willows and helped by the winds. After this, the narrative slows down, movement stops, the theater is quieted, and all eyes are focused centerstage, on the glowing pond in the darkening twilight. As the light from the sun dims, the surrounding landscape recedes, and the pond as the new source of light is revealed, becoming the center of attention. All the poem’s subsequent events and actions are centered on the pond. The personified laughter of the reflected clouds is followed by the apparent casual inattention of the ducks. Then the speaker casts off his behind-the-scenes status and steps onto the stage, transforming himself from a choreographer into a performer. He executes a series of small tasks

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in this new role. First, as a lab technician testing an implicit hypothesis: “I tried to surprise them [the ducks] with a bamboo pole, / They slowly swam away, not looking back” (ll. 11–12). Then, as a philosopher musing on the relation between mind and scene: “Without thinking, the mind meets with the scene: / A random encounter gives all the pleasure” (ll. 13–14). Finally, as a literary theorist contemplating the difficulty of poetic composition: “Coming again, do I know what it will look like? / The ideas are so hard to cut into lines of poetry” (ll. 15–16). Despite the speaker’s apparent doubt about the possibility of duplicating the experience, Chen visited the place again, and more than once.46 The five-syllable ancient-style verse that resulted from his second visit was also highly acclaimed by Chen’s colleagues and later commentators. Together with the ink plum quatrains discussed in the previous chapter, these Preserving Authenticity Pond poems helped secure Chen’s fame and position in literary history.47 The second Preserving Authenticity Pond poem is another example. It was composed in the summer of 1123, after Chen Yuyi’s promotion to assistant editorial director in the Imperial Library, and it clearly illustrates his happy mood after having received two promotions in less than a year.48 The circumstances of the poem’s composition are detailed in its title: “Gathering on Preserving Authenticity Pond on a Summer Day, Using Lü Yin Sheng Zhou Jing [Green Shade Begets Daylight Quietude] as Rhyme Words, and I Got Jing [Quietude]” 夏日集葆真池上以綠陰生 晝靜賦得靜字 (#148/281). Thematically, the poem, like the first, is a full manifestation of the word jing 靜 (“quietude”), Chen’s assigned rhyme.49 The line chosen for the rhymes comes from a couplet by the Tang poet Wei Yingwu 韋應物 (ca. 733–793): “Green shade begets daylight quietude, / The lone flower shows off spring’s remnant” 綠陰生晝靜, 孤花表春餘.50 Chen’s Southern Song contemporaries were not alone in expressing their admiration for the poem’s success. The late-nineteenth-century scholar Chen Yan also praised it highly, calling it the “crowning piece” 壓卷之作 in all of Chen Yuyi’s five-syllable ancient-style poems. This

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was no casual praise. As the widely respected theoretical guru of the Tongguang 同光 Song poetry revival of the late Qing, Chen Yan’s words carried a lot of weight.51 “Chen Yuyi’s compositions in the ancient-style, five-syllable line,” he continued while commenting on Chen’s general success with the form, “were nearly matchless among Song poets” 陳 簡齋五言古, 在宋人幾欲獨步.52

Catch Me If You Can “Visiting Preserving Authenticity Pond” is not the only poem where Chen expresses the fleeing nature of poetic thought. Take the following poem as an example: Spring Day: Two Poems 春日二首 (1 of 2) (#146/279) 朝來庭樹有鳴禽 Since morning, in the courtyard trees are birds singing, 紅綠扶春上遠林 2 Red and green help the spring rise up to the distant forest. 忽有好詩生眼底 Suddenly a good poem appears before my eyes— 安排句法已難尋 4 As I arrange the lines, it is already nowhere to be found.53 Written in the spring of 1123, this seven-syllable quatrain (qiyan jueju 七言絕句) is an illustration of precise observation and description.54 The heightened perception, both aesthetic and cognitive, is facilitated by the poet’s eager, fresh mind as he arises from sleep. What Chen does masterfully here is use exact words and syntax that, through sound, color, and movement, convey the beauty and subtle stirring that he sees and feels in the early morning scene. Chen’s long interest in the act and art of poetic composition is on display in this highly self-aware verse. The concluding message, that ideas of poetry defy self-conscious, time-consuming effort at craftsmanship, was a familiar one for Chen’s late-Northern Song readers. The conflict between poetic craftsmanship

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and the transitory nature of ideas for poetry was an age-old trope that prominent poets both before and after him amply utilized. Su Shi, for example, famously described the predicament through an innovative analogy: “Writing a poem is like a sheriff chasing a fugitive, / Once lost, the pristine scene is hard to capture again” 作詩火急追亡逋, 清景一失 後難摹.55 Huang Tingjian expressed a similar idea by resorting to a more conventional passage-of-time metaphor: “I want to search for some fine couplets, but I fear spring would get old, / So I make do for now, sending you this little seven-syllable quatrain requesting a single branch” 欲搜 佳句恐春老, 試遣七言賒一枝.56 Chen’s statement was interpreted by some in the Southern Song as a criticism of the Jiangxi school’s technique-centered approach toward poetry that placed great emphasis on deliberate thought and strenuous effort. “Poetry being poetry,” Wei Qingzhi 魏慶之 (died after 1244) asked, “how can it be made with deliberate thought?” 詩之為詩, 豈可以作意 為之耶?57 Recognizing the transient nature of poetic inspiration and emphasizing the importance of effort and technique, however, were not viewed as conflictual by the Jiangxi poets, or by Chen himself. Their theory is based on an understanding that poetry is a multistage, multifaceted endeavor, and that its success relies equally on spontaneous ideas and highly technical stages and processes of embellishment and revision. Like his Jiangxi school predecessors, Chen Yuyi showed a deep commitment to both. “Spring Day” perfectly illustrates how technique can be fully employed to craft a beautiful poem that feels like an instant, effortless creation.

Flying Flowers, Motionless Clouds The rapidity with which the poem “Spring Day” progresses from description to thought is to an extent the result of the quatrain form’s inherent tendency to go beyond the immediate and the concrete and arrive at the abstract and the general.58 Seven-syllable quatrains such as this are the kind of poems that prompted literary historians to see Chen Yuyi

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as a trailblazer in initiating the intelligent and efficient quatrains of the Yang Wanli generation in the midtwelfth century. To see this tendency more clearly, let me digress a bit and look at an earlier seven-syllable quatrain written in the spring of 1118, when Chen was about a year and a half into his Kaifeng sojourn. This is also the first seven-syllable quatrain in his collection. On the Way to Xiangyi 襄邑道中 (#37/89) 飛花兩岸照舡紅 Flying flowers on both banks shine on the boat, an abundance of red; 百里榆堤半日風 2 A hundred leagues of elm-studded dikes in half a day’s breeze. 臥看滿天雲不動 Lying down, looking up at the sky, the clouds are all motionless— 不知雲與我俱東 4 I did not know that the clouds and I are both traveling east. Xiangyi was a county on the Bian Canal under the administration of Kaifeng, located 170 leagues southeast of the capital, a geographical feature that the poem’s first couplet conscientiously alludes to.59 According to Bai Dunren, Chen probably traveled there to visit a friend. The sudden realization at the end of the poem of the perfect synchronicity between the moving clouds and the moving boat is created through the experience of traveling on the canal by boat and the poet’s careful control of information, which is released gradually to achieve the effect of a revelation. Like a snapshot in modern photography, “On the Way to Xiangyi” captures one fleeting instant of enlightenment when the poet was on his way to visit his friend, on a beautiful spring day inundated by a sea of resplendent red blossoms.60 The poet’s experience and view were restricted by the particular circumstances of the canal and traveling by boat, but at the same time those constraints also enhanced his perception of the beauty of the moment. Traveling by boat frees him up, and all his

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senses, to fully embrace and be embraced by what surrounds him; it also channels and augments his vision and how he sees. The poem as a whole is a perceptive, witty recognition of the effect of that channeling and his heightened experience from his limited perspective on the boat. The final revelation, that the illusion that the clouds are motionless is caused by the concurrent movement of the boat, not only provides an outside-the-box perspective on his immersive experience on the boat but also highlights the boat’s movement relative to the embankment and the clouds. All the sights, feelings, perceptions, and understandings are experienced and expressed through the poet, who is securely situated in the protected space of the boat. The poet keeps his senses and perceptions open to the instantaneity and liveliness inherent in the early spring landscape but maintains careful oversight of the subtle process of interacting and communicating with them. The objects and actions are completely present, unfolding and occurring around him in the moment. This “livestreamed” visual feast, however, is unable to distract his mental focus; it is enacted and processed by the speaker, the center of the poem’s physical, cognitive, and aesthetic universe. The speaker exerts his presence gradually. In the first half of the quatrain he allows himself to be steeped in the springtime splendor and its rich promise of symbolic meaning. His role as the anchor of the experience is not revealed until the second half, when his thinking self takes over and he becomes the main force driving the reader’s understanding of what is taking place. The eventual realization relies as much on his stilled mind as on his body lying in the boat and looking up at the sky. The poem, in the end, is a crash course not on the principles of physical movement but on the importance of positionality and perspective for observing and understanding.

The Poetics of Precision “Spring Day,” to which we now return, offers another masterclass on this precision poetics of careful observation and description. The poet’s

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mastery of the aural and visual cues in the scene and the process of their gradual unfolding in the early morning is mechanically illustrated. The dawn chorus of the chirping birds in the trees first brings the speaker’s attention to the courtyard, awakening his body and senses to the joyous celebration of the colorful spring world outside. As the sounds give way to the tender visual signs of spring red and green, his eyes are led away from the courtyard to the woods in the distant background. Conventional poetic techniques usually treat the profuse and entangled beauty of springtime not as a cognitive phenomenon but a holistic aesthetic experience. As a result, the descriptions of spring scenes sometimes intentionally obscure more than they reveal, with obscurity becoming an aesthetic objective in itself. Chen Yuyi is a different poet. The two other springtime poems we have analyzed, “Life’s Splendid Blossoms” in chapter 1 and “On the Way Back to Luoyang” in this chapter, both have an obvious descriptive element but both take a less precise approach to the scenery. The second line of the “Spring Day” poem, “Red and green help the spring rise up to the distant forest” (Honglü fu chun shang yuanlin) skillfully but unobtrusively captures spring’s profound, abiding association with color, creating a feeling of rippling movement, a continuum of red and green that cascades from the nearby courtyard to the forest on the horizon. The description pivots on the verb fu 扶 (to help with, to support) in the third position in the line. That word, together with the other verb shang 上 (to rise up, to climb) in the fifth position, plays a key role in establishing the depth of the view and the gradualness of the visual movement. The use of fu especially shows Chen’s exquisite ability to choose the most semantically accurate and poetically expressive word (the eye of the line) to describe what he sees and feels. The word maintains its colloquial usage, as in the popular saying “A red flower needs the green leaves to help it along” 紅花還須綠葉扶, but now it is not the leaves helping the flowers along but the green leaves and red flowers together

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helping the spring that is off in the distance. The line’s transitive syntactic structure, in which the grammatical object of fu becomes the subject of the next verb shang, pushes the motion continuously onward, and helps transform and realize the subjective feelings stirred by the lush spring colors, linearly, and spatially. At the same time, the commotion and excitement created by the chirping birds is quieted and yields to visual manifestation. The poem is an early example of what Qian Zhongshu sees later in Yang Wanli’s nature poems, in which precise descriptions are used to capture the “instantaneous, fleeting moments when they are about to disappear but have not yet disappeared, when they are about to change but have not yet changed.”61 The abrupt but rich dynamic between the two couplets of “Spring Day,” with the first couplet describing the physical view and the second contemplating its abstract implications, also manifests itself between the two poems in the set. In the second poem (#147/281), the neatly described moment is situated in a larger temporal framework that includes not only past memories but also contemplations that point to a potential future. The transition from the present to the past is facilitated and clearly marked at the start of the poem by the conventional word yi 憶 (to remember, to recall): “I recall looking at the courtyard whitened by plum and snow; / In the turn of an eye, numerous greens have formed on the tips of the peach branches. // Among ten thousand things, with graying temples, this lone body of mine / Reclines by the bamboo grove counting the window lattice” 憶看梅雪縞中庭, 轉眼桃梢無數青. 萬事 一身雙鬢髮, 竹林欹臥數窗櫺 (ll. 1–4). After the brief flashback in the opening line, the poem’s attention returns to the present in the second line, in the image of the fruiting peach trees. The poet initiates another shift and invokes an imagined future time frame in the second couplet, in which we see the speaker in a stylized posture reclining by the proverbial bamboo grove and counting. The bamboo grove in the courtyard, which an instant before was a possible target of his gaze, now becomes the base and launchpad for

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his new gaze toward the window. This new gaze, however, stops right at the window, not seeking to enter it, counting its wooden lattices.62 Through this highly symbolic posture the poet restores the tipped balance between the multitudinous affairs of the world and his solitary and weary existence in it (l. 3), and reasserts his centrality as the observer of the scene and the craftsman of the poem. We will see this posture of symbolically mastering a situation by seeking out, recognizing, and enumerating the physical objects in it in Chen’s future works. He uses the approach to express entangled and deep thoughts both articulately and visibly. A range of objects can serve as the targets of his enumeration, including trees and perching crows. “Ten years of affairs, all rendered obscure and blank; / Leaning on my staff, I count the roosting crows” 茫然十年事, 倚杖數棲鴉.63 “Let me just bring this worried mind, / And count out the trees west of the bridge one by one” 聊將憂世心, 數遍橋西樹.64

The Responsibility of a Poet We have observed how Chen Yuyi attempts to transcend a scene by venturing into the future or the abstract, where thought and feeling, observation, imagination, and physical reality are consolidated in a unified site primed for aesthetic and poetic production. Further examples include the rewriting of a line by Du Fu in “Stopping by to See Su Duan in the Rain” 雨過蘇端, where he writes: “Staff in hand, I went into springtime mud” 杖藜入春泥.65 In his poem “Matching the Rhymes of the Gentleman for Enlightened Achievement Zhang’s ‘Spring Day’” 次韻張 迪功春日 (#56/120), Chen Yuyi changes Du Fu’s description of an actual occurrence (stepping into the mud) into an imagined and anticipated event that is to happen down the road, extending the temporal framework likewise from the current moment into the future. “From now on, I shall not worry about the afflictions of the snow blizzards,” he writes, building on the cue that the poem is celebrating the start of spring. “Staff in hand,

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I will go stopping by Su Duan as often as I please” 從此不憂風雪厄, 杖 藜時可過蘇端 (ll. 7–8; emphasis added). Another example is “Night Duty in the Imperial Library” 道山宿直 (#150/289–290), in which the poet calmly constructs a case by moving from the current scene at night in the library to its abstract potential for poetic production. The poem was written after his appointment to the Imperial Library, where, as a new junior fellow, he was required by regulation and protocol to take night duty in the library (known as suzhi 宿直). “The magpies in the luxuriant trees are suddenly startled into flight, / An old bamboo staff in hand, I stand alone, in this boundless moment of night. // A thousand-yard empty hallway harbors the brilliant moon, / The marvelous happenings must be followed by new poems” 離離樹子 鵲驚飛, 獨倚枯筇無限時. 千丈虛廊貯明月, 十分奇事更新詩 (ll. 1–4). At this expansive, quietly productive time, only the generation of new poetry can match the physical spectacle and all its creative possibilities. “The Rain Clears” represents another step in this direction. Here, the poet elevates the work of seeking out “striking lines” of poetry to a moral responsibility, the only way to repay nature’s generous bequest: The Rain Clears 雨晴 (#151/292) 天缺西南江面清 The sky breaks in the southwest, the face of the river is clear, 纖雲不動小灘橫 2 A chunk of cloud, not moving, hangs over a small patch of sand on the ground.66 牆頭語鵲衣猶濕 Atop the wall, the chattering magpies’ feathers are still wet; 樓外殘雷氣未平 4 Beyond the tower, the lingering thunder is not yet calmed. 盡取餘涼供穩睡 I thoroughly accept the slight coolness that provides sound sleep; 急搜奇句報新晴 6 And urgently seek striking lines to repay the new clearing. 今宵絕勝無人共

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This night is utterly marvelous, but there is no one to share it with, 臥看星河盡意明 8 As I lie down, the stars and the Milky Way are as bright as I could want.67 Chen uses active, positive words, concentrated in the second half of the poem—such as wen 穩 (sound, l. 5), xin 新 (new, l. 6), sheng 勝 (marvelous, l. 7), and ming 明 (bright, l. 8)—to describe the fresh energy he feels when the sky clears up after a messy thunderstorm and the natural world is poised for new marvels. The poem vividly captures and celebrates the thrill of anticipation in the wake of this natural self-cleansing. The poet finds a focal point in the new cycle of birth and creation. As in previous examples, the clarity of the situation and the poet’s enthusiastic responses depend on his steadied position and his calm mental state, from which he embarks on an exhaustive but controlled mapping and reckoning of the poststorm landscape and an imaginative expedition into the star-lit night. He “thoroughly accepts” (jinqu 盡取, l. 5) the storm’s resultant coolness; he “urgently seeks” (jisou 急搜, l. 6) striking lines of poetry to repay nature for the new clarity. As the perfect harmony and regenerative momentum lead to the thought and act of writing poetry, the poem’s timeframe extends from the present into a prospective future, when the poet trains his eyes upward to the sky: “As I lie down, the stars and the Milky Way are as bright as I could want” (l. 8). This last moment of “lying down and looking up” (wokan 臥看) is elongated to match the magnitude and inexhaustibility of the poet’s imagination and his positive state of mind. Qian Zhongshu has commented that the fifth line of the poem represents a “reworking of the title of a poem by Du Fu” 採用杜甫一個詩題 裏的字面.68 Du Fu’s title details the situation that prompted him to write the poem: “After Noon on the Third Day of the Seventh Month, the Heat Withdrew a Bit; By Late in the Day It Got a Little Cool; Sleeping Soundly I Then Got a Poem, and in It I Talk about the Joys of the Years of My Prime; Playfully Shown to Vice-Minister Yuan” 七月三日亭午已後校熱退晚

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加小涼穩睡有詩因論壯年樂事戲呈元二十一曹長.69 The difference in Chen Yuyi’s poem is illustrated not only by its optimistic emotional outlook, but also by its underlying structure of meaning: he repositions the central event in Du Fu’s poem and embeds it in a larger narrative that leads ultimately to the elongated moment of exhilarated stargazing.

Poetry as Means of Ordering the Mind and the World Chen is the favored poet in the modern Chinese scholar Zhao Qiping’s modest but influential Songshi yishuo 宋詩臆說 (Interpretive essays on Song poetry), a collection of twenty-nine essays on fourteen Song poets. Six of the essays are devoted to poems by Chen Yuyi (for comparison, there are four on Su Shi’s poetry and three on Lu You), starting with one on “The Rain Clears.” Zhao reads the poet’s eagerness, in the sixth line, to seek out striking poetry as repayment for the clearing of the rain allegorically, as a “natural manifestation of the poet’s awakening political ambitions” 政治上躍躍欲試的心態的自然流露.70 I would not go so far as to connect the poem directly to Chen’s hidden political intentions, but this seems to be a perfect note on which to end the exploration of Chen Yuyi’s early development as a poet. For him, the emotional disturbances and struggles resulting from the ups and downs of his political career are often resolved and brought to a new level of balance and equilibrium through the writing of poetry. In navigating and renegotiating the difficulties in his life, the role of poetry as a means of ordering his mind gains increasingly explicit and self-conscious recognition. Consider the following list of his explicit contemplations and thoughts on the topic, garnered from poems written during this early period. The comments vary in terms of the efficacy assigned to poetry in each example. The passages are arranged according to a hypothetical spectrum, from the most conventional, in which Chen is nonchalantly searching for poetic lines to while away the day (as in the first example), to the most radical, in which poetic composition is cast as a moral duty, as repayment for nature’s gracious gift (as in the last example).

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1. “The sick man searches for poetic lines to bring the season to an end; / In the little studio, I burn the incense and pray for no conflicts” 病夫 搜句了節序, 小齋焚香無是非.71 2. “In this hustle-bustle of human life, what indeed can be achieved? / As I compose the poem on horseback, the sun has sunk further west.”72 3. “Today’s weather is gorgeous and great, / Suddenly I think of composing a new poem. // Spring light carried by the colors of a sunny day, / Comes hand in hand on the blossoming peach branches” 今日天氣佳, 忽思賦 新詩. 春光挾晴色, 併上桃花枝.73 4. “Life’s splendid blossoms do not betray the sojourner, / One by one, they enter my poems.”74 5. “As I approach old age, poetry becomes an addiction” 投老詩成癖.75 6. “The lamp sparks must be blossoming for good poetry.”76 7. “Suddenly a good poem appears right before my eyes.”77 8. “And urgently seek striking lines to repay the new clearing.”78 The balance that poetry helps Chen achieve, however, is precarious, vulnerable to unexpected turns of events. In the following chapters I explore how, once broken, the balance is restored and reestablished for Chen Yuyi, and how poetry strenuously maintains its status as the most dependable source of the poet’s inner strength. Two events that were waiting just around the corner for Chen will provide a particular opportunity to witness poetry’s healing and regenerative powers at work, in a most dramatic manner and in agonizing detail. These events will also push Chen’s life and poetry into uncharted territories. The first was his demotion and banishment to Chenliu before the Jingkang Catastrophe, and the second, his long southern journey after that political debacle.

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Notes 1. Hargett, “Poetry,” 124. 2. Rustic gate (chaimen 柴門, chaifei 柴扉, jingfei 荊扉) is a traditional symbol of humble living. According to David McCraw, the image and its variations appear more than a dozen times in Chen’s poems. McCraw, “Poetry,” 248–249. 3. Lying down on green mosses indicates a hermit’s life. For this and other traditional references to Chinese eremitism, see Vervoorn, Men of the Cliffs. 4. For Du Fu’s role in the historical development of the seven-syllable regulated verse, see Ye Jiaying, “Lun Du Fu,” 55–71; Chen Jing, Tang Song, 55–59. 5. McCraw, “Poetry,” 148–157. 6. Liu Xie, “Spirit Thought” 神思, in Wenxin diaolong. Huang, Li, and Yang, Wenxin, 369. 7. Lu Ji, “The Poetic Exposition on Literature” 文賦. Yang Ming, Lu Ji, 7. 8. Xiao Difei, Du Fu, 922; Owen, Poetry, 1:321–323. 9. Li Qingjia, Yingkui, 698. 10. McCraw, “Poetry,” 273–274. 11. “Expressing My Feelings and Presented to My Friends: Ten Poems” (3 of 10) (#24/68). 12. “Another Composition Expressing My Feelings on New Year’s Eve, Using the Same Rhymes” 又和歲除感懷用前韻 (#57/121). 13. “The Court Gentleman for Enlightened Achievement Zhang Visited Me with Poems; I Matched His Rhymes to Thank Him: Two Poems” 張迪功 攜詩見過次韻謝之二首 (1 of 2) (#58/123). 14. “Composed Extempore at the Banquet, Pledging to Come Visit Again: Two Poems” 即席重賦且約再遊二首 (2 of 2) (#61/126). 15. “My Younger Brother Ruozhuo Says Ruzhou Is Livable and That He Has Made Arrangements to Purchase a Piece of Land There; Sent to Yuandong Using the Same Rhymes” 若拙弟說汝州可居已約卜一丘用韻寄 元東 (#72/142). Ruozhuo was Chen Yuneng’s courtesy name. Yuandong was the courtesy name of Zhang Guichen. Ruzhou was about 160 leagues south of Luoyang. Sangpu is an old name for Kaide. Chen’s three-year Kaide preceptorship covered four calendar years, 1113 to 1116, hence “four years of cold office.” His waiting in Kaifeng for a new appointment

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18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

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spanned three calendar years, from 1116 to 1118, hence “three years riding a haggard horse.” “Expressing My Feelings and Presented to My Seventeenth Uncle” 述懷 呈十七家叔 (#115/227). The stipulated length of mourning for a deceased parent in Tang and Song times was twenty-seven months. After twenty-five months, a former official was allowed to leave the mourning place in preparation for his reinstatement. Chen started his mourning in the early spring of 1120 and returned to Luoyang in the late spring of 1122. In Chinese poetry, turnip flowers usually mark the transition from early to late spring. As Han Yu wrote, in the second of “Touched by Spring: Three Poems” 感春三首: “The yellow turnip flowers are shining brightly, / The affairs of peaches and prunes have faded” 黃黃蕪菁花, 桃李事已退. Qian Zhonglian, Han Changli, 980. “Cold Food Festival on the Road” 道中寒食二首 (1 of 2) (#123/245). “Traveling to the Suburbs to Take Care of Business, To Be Shown to a Friend” (#53/113), ll. 1–2. Chen was born in the sixth lunar month of 1190 and in traditional Chinese reckoning was twenty-nine years old in the fall of 1118, when this poem was written. Chen had last visited the city after graduating from the Imperial College in 1113, hence “ten years.” Li Shangyin’s poem “The Wandering Oriole” 流鶯 starts by describing the uncontrollable movement of the bird, creating a sense of helplessness embedded in the verse lines’ very rhythm and semantic structure: “Wandering oriole, floating, drifting, now here, now there— / Crossing the roads, overlooking the streams, unable to hold onto himself” 流鶯漂 蕩復參差, 渡陌臨流不自持 (ll. 1–2). Liu and Yu, Li Shangyin, 979. Poems on fantastic rocks have a long history reaching back to at least Bai Juyi and the Tang. The early Northern Song poet Mei Yaochen 梅 堯臣 (1002–1060), for example, had a poem on an unusual looking rock, in which he contemplates the arbitrary nature of our notions of beauty and ugliness. See Zhu Dongrun, Mei Yaochen, 1137; Chaves, Mei Yaoch’en, 195. Xiao Difei, Du Fu, 1174; Owen, Poetry, 2:51, with modifications. The Great Locust Kingdom was an imaginary political entity that existed fantastically inside an anthill under the southern branch of a locust tree, in the Tang tale “An Account of the Governor of the Southern Branch” 南柯太守傳. See Nienhauser, Tang Dynasty, 1:131–187.

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26. This was seven years later, by modern reckoning. The Chinese traditionally counted spans of years inclusively, incorporating both the starting and ending years. 27. Su Shi, Su Shi shiji, 2454. The translation is by Stephen Owen, in Traditional Chinese, 155. 28. Liu Shangrong, Huang Tingjian, 596; Owen, Traditional Chinese, 146. For a translation and discussion of all three poems by Su Shi and Huang Tingjian, see Owen, Traditional Chinese, 143–162. 29. CYYJJJ, 250. 30. According to Hu Zhi, Chen might have learned of his new appointment before he set off from Luoyang. CYYJJJ, 259n1. 31. In addition to the two Zhongmou verses, I discuss two other Qian Zhongshu selections later in this chapter: “On the Way to Xiangyi” and “The Rain Clears.” Four more (poems 331, 365, 455, 551) are discussed or referenced in later chapters. Qian also included an undated poem from the Outer Collection, “Traveling in the Early Morning” 早行 (see David McCraw’s translation in “Poetry,” 94). That Qian chose a relatively large number of Chen’s poems for Songshi xuanzhu is an indication of his general fondness for him; by comparison, Qian chose only five poems by Huang Tingjian. Lu You has the largest number in the volume, with twenty-seven, which is not surprising given his elevated status as the “great patriotic poet” at the time the selections were made. For discussion, see Yugen Wang, “Passing Handan,” 49–54. 32. Yoshikawa, Introduction, 140; Hargett, “Poetry,” 148; McCraw, “Poetry,” 134, 273. 33. I want to thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting the translation of the opening line. 34. The thin, tender branches of Chinese willows are often described in Chinese poetry as the flirting arms of lovers. 35. Senluo is the palace of King Yama, lord of the Buddhist underworld. Chen is fond of using the phrase yizhang 倚杖, “leaning on a staff.” According to David McCraw, the supporting or walking staff, including its many variations, such as the bamboo staff (qiongzhang 筇杖) and thornwood staff (lizhang 藜杖), appears at least sixty-six times in his poems. McCraw, “Poetry,” 247. 36. Mid-Autumn is a traditional festival held on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month. 37. Heng E is another name for Chang E 嫦娥, the moon goddess. “Silver Palaces” refers to the moon.

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38. The Daoist master Scholar Zhou, a fictional figure, showed off his remarkable skills to a group of intrigued onlookers on a mid-autumn night. He allegedly “carried and transported the moonlight into his bosom and sleeves” 挈月致之懷袂, “turning Heaven and Earth completely dark” 天地曛晦. Li Fang, Taiping, 472. 39. In Cao Cao’s poem, the magpie deliberates over which branch to perch on but is unable to decide: “The moon is bright, the stars are sparse, / The magpie is flying south. // Circling the tree thrice, he wonders— / ‘On which branch shall I perch?’” 月明星稀, 烏鵲南飛. 繞樹三匝, 何枝可 依? Lu Qinli, Xianqin, 349. For translation and discussion of the poem, see Tian, Halberd, 359–361; 338–343. 40. The Golden Toad is a mythical companion of Chang E on the moon. The ending line alludes to a fantastic story told in Duan Chengshi’s 段成式 Youyang zazu 酉陽雜俎. During the Changqing reign (821–824) of the Tang, someone on a mid-autumn night saw “moonlight pouring into the woods like cloth hanging down” 月光屬於林中如疋布. When he went to take a look, “he found a golden-back toad there, suspected to have escaped from the moon” 見一金背蝦蟆, 疑是月中者. CYYJJJ, 265n13. 41. Xiao Difei, Du Fu, 1174; Owen, Poetry, 2:51. Ailanthus is used here to translate the Chinese plant zhuyu 茱萸, which has several different varieties. The one traditionally used on the Double Ninth Festival, the occasion for Du Fu’s poem, is believed to be Wu zhuyu 吳茱萸 (Tetradium ruticarpum), whose strong, bitter-tasting fruit was considered useful for dispelling evil spirits. 42. A favorite activity on the Double Ninth Festival was climbing heights. The elevated position facilitates thoughts about faraway places and about absent family members or friends. 43. Penglai was one of the three fantastic islands off in the eastern seas where the Daoist immortals resided. 44. This alludes to the Daoist master Liezi’s alleged ability to ride the wind. 45. Liu Xizai, Yigai, 2.18b. 46. There are four poems resulting from three separate visits to the pond in three different times: other than this one from the first visit in 1122 and the one discussed in the next paragraph written from a second visit in 1123, there are two additional poems from a third visit, which are dated by Bai Dunren to 1124. 47. CYYJJJ, 290-291n1. For contemporary Southern Song accounts of the importance of these works for Chen’s ascendance, see Hong Mai, Rongzhai suibi, 804–805; Chen Zhensun, Zhizhai, 569.

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48. He had been promoted to erudite of the Imperial College in the summer of 1122. 49. Unlike the essentially unadorned text of the first poem, and befitting the poetic conventions of fenyun fude 分韻賦得 (splitting rhymes among participating poets), an important function of which was to showcase a participant’s composition skills to his peers, the second poem is filled with textual references and historical allusions. 50. Wei Yingwu, “Visiting Kaiyuan Monastery” 游開元精舍. Tao and Wang, Wei Yingwu, 456. The popularity of Wei Yingwu’s this couplet among Song poets can be gauged in a comment by Ye Mengde, who called it “the most insightful and most inspiring in Wei Yingwu’s collected poems” 韋 蘇州集中最為警策. Ye Mengde, Shilin shihua, 14–15. 51. See Kowallis, Subtle Revolution, 153–231; Shengqing Wu, Modern Archaics, 14–24. 52. Chen Yan, Shiyishi, 560. 53. My translation is slightly modified from Fuller, Drifting, 172. See also Hargett, “Poetry,” 151. 54. According to James Hargett, Chen exhibits “an overwhelming preference” for the seven-syllable quatrain during this period; of the 19 quatrains composed between 1122 and 1125, only three are in the five-syllable meter. Hargett, “Poetry,” 147. 55. Su Shi, “On the Eighth Day of the Twelfth Month, I Visited Gushan Mountain [of Hangzhou] Looking for the Two Monks Huiqin and Huisi” 臘日遊孤山訪惠勤惠思二僧. Su Shi shiji, 318–319. 56. Huang Tingjian, “Edict Drafter Wang Caiyuan Pledged Peonies in Exchange for My Poems” 王才元舍人許牡丹求詩. Liu Shangrong, Huang Tingjian, 334. 57. Wei Qingzhi, Shiren yuxie 詩人玉屑, juan 3; quoted in CYYJJJ, 280. 58. Zhou Xiaotian makes a related point that the popularity of the quatrain as a form lies in its combination of economy of expression and rich potential for abstraction. See Zhou Xiaotian, Tang jueju, 1–8. 59. Not taking Xiangyi’s location, and the poem’s obvious aquatic content, into consideration likely led Hu Zhi to mistakenly date the poem to a later time in 1122, when Chen was on his way back to Kaifeng from Luoyang after the end of the mourning period for his mother. The modern scholar Zheng Qian inherited Hu Zhi’s mistake in his 1975 chronology. Bai Dunren, following Liu Chenweng in the Southern Song, has convincingly argued for the poem’s earlier date in 1118.

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60. I am borrowing a term used by Qian Zhongshu to describe Yang Wanli’s extraordinary ability to capture the fleeting moments in nature in his quatrains. “Chengzhai’s poems are like snapshots of modern photography,” Qian wrote. “Whether it is a jumping rabbit, a swooping falcon, a flying hawk, or a leaping fish, with a superb clarity of mind and alacrity of hands, like the shooting of an arrow or the blowing of the wind, he is able to capture all these instantaneous, fleeting moments when they are about to disappear but have not yet disappeared, when they are about to change but have not yet changed. Chengzhai’s capabilities in doing this are without match” 誠齋則如攝影之快鏡, 兔起鶻落, 鳶飛魚躍, 稍縱 即逝而及其未逝, 轉瞬即改而當其未改, 眼明手捷, 蹤矢躡風, 此誠齋 之所獨也. Qian Zhongshu, Tanyi lu, 118. Chengzhai was Yang Wanli’s style name. For a recent study on Yang’s technique, see E, “Beyond the City Walls.” 61. See previous note. 62. The traditional Chinese latticed window was fashioned of carved wood. Highly decorative and artistically appealing, this type of window was used widely from the Five Dynasties. The Song’s spirit of experimentation, according to Daniel Sheets Dye, was illustrated in its window-lattice design. See Dye, Chinese Lattice, 30–39. 63. “Expressing My Feelings in the Examination Compound” 試院書懷 (#166/314), ll. 7–8. 64. “Pacing on the Dike at Night: Three Poems” 夜步隄上三首 (2 of 3) (#208/382), ll. 9–10. 65. Xiao Difei, Du Fu, 809; Owen, Poetry, 1:275. 66. As Qian Zhongshu expounded the meaning of the line: “A small chunk of cloud in the sky resembles a small patch of sand on the ground” 天空 一小塊雲像江面一個小灘. Qian Zhongshu, Songshi, 134. 67. Hargett, “Poetry,” 142; Fuller, Drifting, 173. My translation is modified from Fuller’s. 68. Qian Zhongshu, Songshi, 134. 69. Xiao Difei, Du Fu, 3633–3634; Owen, Poetry, 4:181–185. Written in 766, when Du Fu had just arrived at the Yangzi River town Kuizhou. 70. Zhao Qiping, Songshi, 251. 71. “Tenth Month” 十月 (#152/293), ll. 5–6. This is a different poem from an earlier one with the same title noted in chapter 1 (#54/117). 72. “On the Way Back to Luoyang” (#122/244), ll. 7–8. 73. “A Spring Clearing in the Examination Compound” 試院春晴 (#165/313), ll. 1–4.

100 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

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“Life’s Splendid Blossoms” (#39/92), ll. 7–8. “Expressing My Feelings in the Examination Compound” (#166/314), l. 3. “Night Rain” (#50/108), l. 6. “Spring Day” (1 of 2) (#146/279), l. 3. “The Rain Clears” (#151/292), l. 6.

Chapter 3

Exile The awakening of his inner poetic self helped Chen Yuyi reestablish the balance and equilibrium in his relationship with the world, as he waded through a range of situations in his official career and personal life. The stagnation in his official employment, interruptions caused by the mourning period for his mother, and the uptick in mood after his reinstatement and promotions were admittedly all normal undulations in the life of a scholar-official of the day. The larger political picture had so far figured only marginally or indirectly in his creative work. That situation changed at the end of 1124, when he was dismissed from his position in the Imperial Library and sent out to Chenliu to be director of the wine monopoly office there. Almost all of Chen’s official biographies agree on the reason for the demotion. Zhang Nie 張嵲 (1096–1148) succinctly summarized it in his tomb inscription for the poet, who was his maternal uncle: “At the beginning, when he was appointed to the Imperial Library, his fame in literature was such that whenever a composition of his came out, it would cause a stir in the capital, and those in power competed to patronize him. The person then serving as Grand Councilor was perverse and wanted to take him under his wings by force; a denial would bring disaster to him.

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So he accepted the offer and rose up in rank. When the Grand Councilor fell, he was implicated and punished accordingly” 始公為學官, 居館下, 辭章一出, 名動京師, 諸貴要人爭客之. 時為宰相者橫甚, 強欲知公, 不 且得禍, 公為其薦達. 宰相敗, 用是得罪.1 The unnamed grand councilor was Wang Fu, who served in that position from 1119 to 1124 as Cai Jing’s replacement.2 Chen Yuyi was only indirectly involved in Wang’s downfall, and from historical hindsight his demotion and banishment were perhaps no more than a standard measure following precedents and established protocol, but it was the first real intellectual and emotional crisis in his life. “Only three days remaining in the old year, / Not even ten people in my whole family” 舊歲有三日, 全家無十人.3 His despair at having to relocate his family, however small, just three days before the new year was acutely felt. In works written during his one-year exile in Chenliu, we see the same unresolved tension at play as in poems from earlier periods, between contemplating his position in the world and actually interacting with it. As a careful and self-conscious chronicler of his inner life, Chen both accepted the reality of banishment and quietly interrogated the conventional understanding of what it meant to be in exile.4 Also as in previous periods in his life, out of this depressing yearlong experience emerged a new sense of balance, in which things were again back in order and he was again able to show his usual calm optimism through the writing of poetry. The Chenliu exile in a way emotionally and psychologically prepared him for his longer journey in the future.

A Dream Comes to an End What was different was that, the rational pragmatism in his previous works was pushed beyond its limit and he was able to conjure up a bolder world based on both imagined and observed reality. .

Exile Traveling to Chenliu: Two Poems (1 of 2) (#185/353) 草草一夢闌 Hastily a dream has come to an end, 行止本難期 2 Moving or stopping, the paths are always hard to predict. 歲晚陳留路 At year’s end, off on the road to Chenliu, 老馬三振鬐 4 My old horse shakes up his mane thrice. 自看鞭袖影 He looks at the shadow of the whip all by himself,5 曠野日落遲 6 In the empty countryside, the sun sets slowly. 柳林行不盡 The willow trees extend without an end, 想見春風時 8 I imagine seeing them when the spring breezes sweep. 點點羊散村 The sheep are scattered, dotting the villages; 陣陣鴻投陂 10 Groups of wild geese fly toward the ponds. 城中那有此 How can there be scenery like this in the city? 觸處皆新詩 12 Everywhere my eyes turn there are new poems. 舉手謝路人 Raising my hand, I take leave of the passersby on the road: 醉語勿瑕疵 14 “Do not blame me for these drunken words.” 我行有官事 I am traveling on official business, 去作三年癡 16 Going to fulfill my three years of foolishness. 遙聞辟穀仙 I’ve long heard of the Grain Avoiding Immortal, 閱世河水湄 18 Watching the world on the river’s edge.

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Writing Poetry, Surviving War 時從玩木影 From time to time, he went to play with the trees’ shadow, 政爾不憂飢 20 Not at all worried about the hunger in his stomach.

The poet resorts to the free five-syllable ancient style to document his travel and express his frustration, a form that has a unique advantage for him when writing about being on the road. As he moves along the physical topography, the poet performs the familiar roles of an observer and contemplator, and through this process the shock and sadness of his personal situation are gradually dispelled. Meanwhile, the reader is guided through the process by following the eyes and mind of the poet. “Traveling to Chenliu” also demonstrates another advantage of the wuyan gushi: its ability to accommodate different modes of discourse. In the poem we find not only narration and description but also argument, monologue, and even imagined dialogue. The poet begins by comparing his recent appointment in the Imperial Library to a dream hastily coming to an end (l. 1). The situation of having to deal with this painful awakening is quickly amended by repositioning the banishment in the larger scheme of life: the travel into exile is normalized as being an aspect of the general human situation; the unpredictability of the exiled one’s path is accepted as a basic premise of life (l. 2). Next we see that the horse “shakes up his mane thrice” (l. 4). Is the horse’s action taken by the poet as a gesture of sympathy or a sign of indifference to its rider’s suffering? We are left with no answer because the poem quickly moves on and turns to the animal’s predictable and willing movement in the natural landscape (ll. 5–6). After this point, everything in the animal and the human worlds falls into place along the beaten track, as the narrative proceeds in tune with the natural flow of the journey. Toward the end of the poem the road into exile is rationalized as nothing more than routine “official business” (ll. 15–16). Having made sense of the abrupt change of fortune that puts him on the road at year’s end, the poet feels free to venture from the physical into the imaginary and the fantastic. The deeds of the Han general Zhang Liang 張良 (ca.

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250–186 BC), the “Grain Avoiding Immortal” referenced in line 17, who had a shrine dedicated to him in Chenliu, are invoked and projected imaginatively on the actual landscape before the traveler’s eyes.6 Both “watching the world on the river’s edge” 閱世河水湄 (l. 18) and “playing with the trees’ shadow” 玩木影 (l. 19) can be read as imagined activities of Zhang Liang and, the anticipated actions of the poet himself. Chen Yuyi characteristically looks beyond the present time frame and the surface of the physical landscape, summoning every bit of the latter to mitigate the impact of the travel. If his philosophical musing at the beginning of the poem sets a reconciliatory tone, and the imaginary anticipation at the end of the poem keeps his mood upbeat by relating his personal situation to the historical past, the middle section (ll. 5– 16), the bulk of the poem, consolidates his emotional outlook by fully exploring the road’s multiple dimensions and possibilities. After shaking off its sympathetic grief and protest (to adopt the more likely, stronger reading of the horse’s action), the old horse quickly lifts itself out of his sunken state, forging ahead without being urged, while the evening sun willingly lends its moral support by not hastening its descent (ll. 5–6). The sadness of exile is aesthetically transformed into an appreciation of the late-winter landscape’s barren but tranquil beauty. Everything in the natural world follows its own course while providing a reliable reference point for the briefly disoriented poet; the contingency and involuntary nature of his journey disappear into the orderly progression of the evening landscape: “The sheep are scattered, dotting the villages, / Groups of wild geese fly toward the ponds” (ll. 9–10). Typical of his early writings, the poet imagines seeing what the leafless willow forest will look like when spring comes (l. 8) and sees “new poems” arising everywhere in the serene physical landscape (l. 12). The inner power we witness in “Traveling to Chenliu,” by which the poet gets himself out of his dejected mental state and sees positive events in the natural world, continues to manifest itself in the poems written after his arrival at Chenliu. He opens the poem “Arrived at Chenliu”

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至陳留 (#187/355) by the agonizing question, “That tall tower up there covered in mist, / Are you able to summon the banished soul back?” 煙際 亭亭塔, 招人可得回? (ll. 1–2). Standing on the unfamiliar ground that is now his new home, the poet looks up toward the high-rising tower, his mind, like the tower, shrouded in uncertainty, is tortured by the thought of a possible return. The tower not only leads his view up to the sky but also brings his mind to the past, to an ancient point in time when the Chu nobleman and poet Qu Yuan was banished and wandered in the marshes at the edge of that southern kingdom. As he imagines, the poet himself morphs into the persona of the banished poet, contemplating his fate and the possibility of being summoned back by the court one day. The literary critic and Southern Song loyalist Liu Chenweng 劉辰 翁 (1232–1297) saw immense emotion in Chen’s gaze, remarking that Chen “was very much not freed of his worldly concerns” 甚未忘情, a comment that also aptly described Liu’s own loyalist sentiments for his old country after the fall of the Southern Song.7 Chen Yuyi could not have imagined that he would soon be driven much farther away and that he would never return to the court in Kaifeng. At this moment when he has just arrived at Chenliu with that future journey still completely beyond the horizon, the Chenliu exile looks to him like nothing less than a yuanyou 遠遊, a “faraway journey,” a notion that is also closely associated with Qu Yuan.8 But here we see a subtle change in Chen’s mindset: he displays his longing for home by turning his gaze toward the tower, but resolves the longing by turning away from it, to the ground, the current locality of his existence. “All my life’s ideas of a faraway journey,” he ends the poem, “Reside here, wherever I am, in this pacing back and forth” 平生遠遊意, 隨處一徘徊 (ll. 7–8).9

The Traveler’s Mind Was Suddenly Stirred Chen’s reimagining of the traditional yuanyou discourse in pragmatic, realistic terms will stay with him on his epic future journey and redefine him as a poet. The acceptance of new localities as home by directly

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confronting their alienness through such stylized moves as “pacing back and forth” (paihuai 徘徊) was a gradual process and would play a key role in repairing his wounded inner self. As David McCraw has observed, “Chen Yuyi’s poetry often conveys the poignancy of a man making a painful attempt to harmonize with a wider world.”10 The pacing here, and the intense posture of counting the window lattice discussed in chapter 2, is an embodiment of such painful attempts, a trite traditional trope starting to acquire visceral meaning. As the topography and conditions of that wider world radically and constantly changed after the Jingkang Catastrophe, his mode of response and methods of negotiation would also change. The one-year stay in Chenliu laid down the basic parameters of those future patterns of response. The following poem represents the most performative of his works thus far, and displays a strong internal propensity for order in the face of uncertainty and turmoil. The poem’s narrative and text embody this by mapping out the physical landscape. The constantly changing visual images are received and anchored by the poet’s internal sense of space and position. The poem captures the beauty of early morning travel and affirms poetry’s role in consolidating and perpetuating it. Its sevensyllable line structure slows down the pace, giving the reader more time to enjoy the minute shifts in color and light as they gradually unfold before the traveler’s awakening eyes. Rising Early, Traveling to the County, Having Just Arrived at South Town of Chenliu 初至陳留南鎮夙興赴縣 (#189/358) 五更風搖白竹扉 At fifth watch, the winds shook on the white bamboo gate,11 整冠上馬不可遲 2 I straightened my cap, mounted my horse, not to be late. 三家陂口雞喔喔 At the mouth of Three Families Reservoir, the roosters crowed, 早於昨日朝天時 4 It was earlier than in the past when I had a morning audience. 行雲弄月翳復吐

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Writing Poetry, Surviving War The moving clouds were playing with the moon, covering it then spitting it out, 林間明滅光景奇 6 Now lit up, now dark, the changes of light and shadow were marvelous in the woods. 川原四望鬱高下 Looking out, I saw the dark silhouettes of fields and plains scattering everywhere, 蕩搖蒼茫森陸離 8 Rocking and swaying in undifferentiated masses, not revealing their shape. 客心忽動羣烏起 The traveler’s mind was suddenly stirred, a group of ravens arose,12 馬影漸薄村墟移 10 The shadow of my horse became increasingly thin as the villages passed by. 須臾東方雲錦發 After a while, brocade clouds emerged in the east, 向來所見今難追 12 What was visible previously was now hard to chase. 兩眼聊隨萬象轉 I will just let my eyes turn with the ten thousand images, 一官已判三年癡 14 Having been sent here to this office for another three years of foolishness. 只將乘除了吾事 I will live out my days by means of multiplication and division,13 推去木枕收此詩 16 Push aside the wooden pillows and take in this poem.14 寫我新篇作畫障 Inscribing the words of my new composition on a screen, 不須更覓丹青師 18 No need to find a master of blue and vermilion pigments.

South Town was the location of Chen’s office at the wine monopoly and his residence in Chenliu for the next year. The poem recounts his early morning trip to the county seat to report for duty. This experiential core animates the poem’s narrative, anchoring the kaleidoscopic procession of

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changing patterns and perceptions of light and shadow as the poet’s eyes and mind engage, process, and move with the physical landscape. Other than the two mildly obscure allusions in the penultimate couplet (ll. 15– 16) that required explanation, the poem is plainly worded and firmly situated in the present as the poet casts his gaze around him while the predawn darkness gradually yields to early morning light. The poem’s elegant and beautifully crafted couplets are ideally suited for recording the numerous shifts of color and shape in the outside world in relation to the changing thoughts and feelings on the poet’s mind. More than in the other road poems we have discussed, the metaphorical dawning in the poet’s mind closely parallels the one that is unfolding concurrently in the natural world. The sense of uncertain movement the poem creates reflects both the poet’s position on horseback and the waking process the predawn traveler’s body and mind experience. As the poem progresses from the first to the second half, the physical waking up is transformed into an intellectual awakening and a resolution. The first eight lines are driven by the traveler’s particular task at hand: to arrive in time at the county seat for the official morning session, which in imperial China usually started very early.15 The sense of rhythm and motion that governs these lines is established at the very start with the winds shaking the gate (l. 1). The effect of the shaking carries over to what the speaker sees and hears and feels in the next seven lines, bestowing a sense of unsteadiness on everything around him. After the initial commotion is over and the traveler has readied himself (l. 2), the poem starts to settle into its own pace. The identification of the specific location (“At the mouth of Three Families Reservoir”; l. 3) and point in time (“earlier than in the past when I had a morning audience”; l. 4) helps steady the scene and launch the poem into its extended description, in four consecutive lines (ll. 5–8), of the sights that greet and stimulate the traveler’s slowly wakening body and senses. The poet’s first attempt at clarity and order turns out to be unsuccessful. He tries to establish some depth of vision by looking toward the outlying

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fields and plains, but he cannot make out anything. Everywhere he turns, he is greeted by the same mass of formless topography: “Looking out, I saw the dark silhouettes of fields and plains scattering everywhere, / Rocking and swaying in undifferentiated masses, not revealing their shape” (ll. 7–8). The feelings of shapelessness and topographical turmoil are so striking that the poet heaps four consecutive adjectives into a single line (l. 8): yaodang 搖盪 (rocking, rolling, swaying), cangmang 蒼 茫 (blank, vast, obscure), sen 森 (dense, dark), and luli 陸離 (dispersed, unfocused). Visual and mental clarity is eventually achieved in the poem’s remaining ten lines, with the help of the startled flight of the ravens in line 9. That action sets the poet’s mind and the outside world on concurrent paths toward clear definition when things finally start to take shape. As the predawn darkness and ambiguity are dispelled by the colorful glow of the imminent sunrise, the poet is lifted from his earlier status as a recipient of sensory input to that of an enlightened participant in the dawning of the natural world. The thinning of the horse’s shadow on the ground and the looming contours of the villages passing by (l. 10) help the traveler identify the source of the change as the rising sun on the horizon (l. 11). With the murky shades and shadows vanishing, the poet regains his role as a thinker and asserts his reasoning over the chaos that has so far occupied his mind and his senses. At this point, a resolution is reached in his mind. Encouraged by the physical dawning in the natural landscape, the poet becomes determined to cope with the political realities of his demotion and banishment by going along with it (ll. 13–16). The poem could have ended at line 16 with the reaffirmation of poetry’s role in providing emotional anchorage, as previous poems have ended. This poem, however, continues with two additional lines (ll. 17–18), creating a rare uneven stanza distribution (four four-line stanzas plus an odd couplet of two additional lines). The sense of volition expressed in strong action verbs such as tuiqu 推去 (push away, push aside) and shou 收 (take in, possess) is carried over to

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the added concluding couplet with four more verbs positioned in quick succession: xie 寫 (inscribe, compose), zuo 作 (make, use as), buxu 不須 (do not need), mi 覓 (look for, seek out). “Inscribing the words of my new composition on a screen, / No need to find a master of blue and vermilion pigments” (ll. 17–18): the imagined extension of poetry from newly composed text to a screen inscription adds an additional layer of security to preserve the poet’s resolution.

Coming to Terms A key psychological step in coming to terms with the demotion and political exile for Chen Yuyi was to recognize the intrinsic equality of localities, accepting suichu 隨處 (“wherever I reside,” “wherever I am”) as home. In the poet’s effort to make sense of his exile, he constantly affirms the validity of his current position and status. “In my youth, I entered the literary arena to contend for fame; / Now, staff in hand, I stand here sending off the setting sun” 少日爭名翰墨場, 只今扶杖送斜陽.16 “From now on this traveler will have nothing to regret, / In the Dou family garden come the songs of the orioles” 客子從今無可恨, 竇家園裏有鶯 聲.17 This positive mindset, reflected in such forward-moving temporal expressions as zhijin 只今 (now) and congjin 從今 (from now on), is the starting point for his full acceptance and appreciation of the new place. In the poem “Facing Wine” (#192/263) Chen writes, “The spring colors at Chenliu provoke thoughts of poetry, / I search through my entrails a hundred times a day. // The swallows have come back, but the winds are unsettled; / The peach trees are about to bud, but the rain keeps coming” 陳留春色撩詩思, 一日搜腸一百迴. 燕子初歸風不定, 桃花欲 動雨頻來 (ll. 1–4). The newly returned swallows are waiting for the winds to calm down to start their work; the peach trees are on the verge of blossoming but delayed by the rain—these uncertainties in the early spring scenery are not feared but are taken as sources of new growth and new excitement. The poet’s self-indulgence, in the image of searching for words to describe the beautiful tension in the scenery, “a hundred times

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a day,” is not a posture of desperation, either, but a sign of proactive devotion and poetic activism. The affinity between the poet’s mind and the natural scenery can reach such a fine reciprocity that a tiny move on one side may tip the balance and result in responses or changes on the other. This is what happens at the end of “Visiting Eight Passes Temple in Early Summer” 初夏遊 八關寺 (#203/375). As the visitor is ready to exit the scene, he freezes, halted by a new event unfolding. “My hands are already on the saddle, but I am unable to mount— / A crescent moon rises in the pond” 扶鞍 不得上, 新月水中生 (ll. 11–12). The astonishing beauty of the moonrise reflected in the pond not only halts the poet’s action but also leaves the image permanently registered in his mind. Mind and scene, time and space are instantly unified in this moment of unadulterated natural beauty and aesthetic creation. As his year in Chenliu went on and spring changed to summer and autumn, the poet’s sense of uncertainty intensified; we see him start to explicitly revisit the notions and themes of identity, sojourning status, and home. It is not surprising that words for worry and regret, such as you 憂 (worry), chou 愁 (sorrow), lü 慮 (concern), hen 恨 (regret), and words for home, such as guyuan 故園 (old gardens), appear with a high frequency in poems written in the latter half of the year, and that the two categories of terms are often used side by side.18 There will be a point down the road when even the thought of returning home would be rendered impractical or unperformable. At this moment, however, in the fall of 1125 in Chenliu, Chen’s longing was both legitimate and real. The “thousand worries” (qianyou 千憂) and “hundred woes” (bailü 百慮) of the sojourner’s regret are so intense that he takes all kinds of ameliorative measures to help mitigate their impact. “Pacing on the Dike at Night” 夜步堤上, the title of a set of three poems written in the late autumn of the year, acutely demonstrates this worried state of mind. The second poem in the set (#208/382) begins, “In the human world the sounds of sleep arise, / This solitary soul is pacing the dikes

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alone” 人間睡聲起, 幽子方獨步 (ll. 1–2). Later in the poem: “The myriad things in the world grow chaotically, / Thinking of this, I am burned by a hundred woes” (ll. 7–8). The solution, which we already saw in chapter 2, represents the poet’s desire to maintain symbolic internal control of the chaos in the world, by enumerating individual objects in it: “Let me just bring this worried mind, / And count out the trees west of the bridge one by one” (ll. 9–10).

Stepping Out The following poem, “Evening Stroll,” represents a similar approach to restoring the poet’s peace of mind by means of physical action. Unlike the other five-syllable ancient-style poems I have discussed, this poem’s narrative does not push for a resolution at the end. Instead, the poem starts with a resolution and uses the rest of the narrative to illustrate and enact it. Evening Stroll 晚步 (#211/385) 手把古人書 Holding a book by authors of ancient times, 閑讀下廣庭 2 I read it casually and step down into the wide courtyard. 荒村無車馬 The remote countryside has no wagons and horses coming, 日落雙檜青 4 In the sunset, the twin cypress trees become darker. 曠然神慮靜 Cleared of concerns, my mind remains still and spacious, 濁俗非所寧 6 With no murky, vulgar thoughts to disturb the peace. 逍遙出荊扉 Carefree and unfettered, I come out of my rustic gate, 竚立瞻郊坰 8 Standing still, I gaze off into the outlying suburbs. 須臾暮色至

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Writing Poetry, Surviving War Shortly thereafter the colors of evening descend, 野水皆晶熒 10 The wild waters are all glistening in the dimming light. 却步面空林 Taking a step back, I turn my face to the empty forest, 遠意更杳冥 12 My faraway thoughts become even more remote. 停雲甚可愛 The hovering clouds are so very lovely, 重疊如沙汀 14 Piling upon one another like the sandbars on the beach.19

The qualities celebrated in this poem—xian 閑 (casualness, leisureliness) (l. 2), jing 靜 (calm, quiet) (l. 5), ning 寧 (peace, tranquility) (l. 6), and xiaoyao 逍遙 (carefree and unfettered) (l. 7)—are traditional ones, and together they set the poem’s thematic and emotional tones. These qualities are also what the speaker summons to dispel the “murky, vulgar” (zhuosu 濁俗; l. 6) thoughts that remain in his mind. After the opening couplet that kicks off the process, and the ensuing four lines (ll. 3–6) that internally prepare the speaker’s mind, the remaining two stanzas of the poem (ll. 7– 14) turn to the speaker’s moves and actions, through which the evening country landscape is visually surveyed and symbolically owned. The poem begins by portraying an idyllic image of the speaker holding and reading a book. We see the character enter into the picture performing the triadic role of actor, observer, and poet from the very first couplet. This composite poet-observer-actor moves his body and eyes slowly through the evening landscape; the poem’s words, lines, couplets, and stanzas appear one after another as if following each of his progressive steps. The seemingly natural but deliberate, planned nature of the stroll differentiates it from the practical road travels discussed earlier. The strolling action is initiated when the character steps from the interior of the compound “down into the wide courtyard” (xia guangting 下廣庭, l. 2). Following his stepping-down motion is further stepping-out four lines later, from the courtyard into the open landscape (chu jingfei

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出荊扉): “I come out of my rustic gate” (l. 7). Once there in the open, the speaker performs three additional moves. First, “Standing still, I gaze off into the outlying suburbs” (l. 8). Second, “Taking a step back, I turn my face to the empty forest” (l. 11). And in the third, he looks up: “The hovering clouds are so very lovely” (l. 13). Each of these moves is followed by a period of stationary looking, observing, and contemplation, and with each move his gaze extends farther into the distance, until it eventually blends with the clouds in the sky. In aggregate, these acts of stepping out, stepping down, stepping back, and looking up provide a thorough and comprehensive survey of the evening landscape. The stepping back and the shift of view from the ground to the sky at the end of the poem especially demonstrate the seemingly casual but methodical deliberateness that is a hallmark of Chen’s general mode of looking and writing. By leading the reader’s eye from the ground to the sky, it also reveals the vertical dimension and the depth of the space. As evening descends, the clouds cooperatively halt their movement, their layered shape merging indistinguishably with the shadows on the ground as darkness finally engulfs everything in between. Liu Chenweng commented on the last couplet of “Evening Stroll,” saying, “It gives the look of happening accidentally” 看似偶然.20 The natural feel of the ending couplet, however, and of the poem as a whole, does not negate the careful control the poet exerts in the poem. The poem’s smooth narrative flow and multiple, cumulative acts of looking, thinking, and surveying are the product of deliberate thought and craftsmanship. They represent the poet’s elaborate but perhaps unconscious effort to explore and map the multilayered space in the natural landscape that mirrors the interior of his mind. The process described in “Evening Stroll” whereby the poet’s “murky, vulgar” thoughts are cleansed is emblematic of Chen’s general mode of poetry. Through performative action and the calming power of nature, the poet’s “thousand worries” and “hundred woes” are dispelled. As we have observed in the first three chapters, the resilience of this mode

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of response gained importance as Chen’s feelings of frustration and anxiety accumulated. In almost every case, the poet successfully resolves his depressing thoughts and situations through his interaction with the fresh, regenerative forces in the natural world. “Rising Early” 早起 (#214/389) offers another example (this is a different poem from the traveling-to-the-county-seat poem analyzed earlier). Again in this verse, the epiphanic moment—“The dust-covered mind suddenly brightens and becomes spacious” 塵心忽昭曠 (l. 7)—is achieved through a series of routine acts of cleansing and clarification, including “opening up my rustic gate” 開柴扉 (l. 3) and standing in the empty courtyard in the early morning chill, watching the “tall trees” 喬木 (l. 4). As the poet performs these tasks, the world around him awakens, frolicking with the promises of a pristine new day: “Misty vapors slowly rise from the well, / The sky has tidied up its calm appearance” 濛濛井氣上, 澹澹 天容肅 (ll. 5–6). As in earlier examples, the level of concentration that enables the poet to make these minute, exquisite observations depends as much on the intense focus of his mind as on his secure footing in relation to the objects. The groundedness of his footing will soon be severely challenged, both physically and symbolically. And this time the poet’s arc of response and the restoration of his broken sense of balance would take much longer than the brief one-year Chenliu experience had prepared him for. Eventually, however, the proven ways, modes, and habits of life and writing emerge as the foundation and new staging ground on which his personal survival and internal reconstitution are realized.

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Notes 1. Zhang Nie, “Chengong,” 983. 2. Both Wang and Cai were indicted and died soon after the Jingkang Catastrophe, becoming the first scapegoats for the imperial disgrace and national disaster. 3. “Traveling to Chenliu: Two Poems” 赴陳留二首 (2 of 2) (#186/354), ll. 5–6. 4. In premodern China, “exile” in the broader sense meant being demoted for political reasons and involuntarily sent out of the capital to a remote or minor post. 5. Buddha once remarked that a good horse runs at the shadow of the whip. 6. CYYJJJ, 354n6. Zhang Liang “wished to abandon human affairs” 願 弃人閒事 after the founding of the Han and allegedly studied “grain avoidance” 辟穀 and other breathing and stretching techniques with the Daoist master Red Pine 赤松子. See Sima Qian, Shiji, 55.2048. 7. CYYJJJ, 356. Liu wrote a commentary on Chen’s poems in fifteen juan, known as Xuxi xiansheng pingdian Jianzhai shiji 須溪先生評點簡齋 詩集, which survives through a Japanese recut of a Korean blockprint edition. Liu’s brief but often incisive comments are very helpful for understanding Chen’s emotional struggles. The comments are quoted and integrated by Bai Dunren into his own commentary. I will cite directly from Bai Dunren’s work. Writing after the Mongol conquest as a determined Song loyalist, Liu was obviously reading a lot of his own experience and feelings into Chen Yuyi’s poem, as Chen himself did to Du Fu’s poems after the Jingkang Catastrophe. For an account of Liu’s life and literary and scholarly activities as a Song loyalist, see Gerritsen, “Liu Chenweng.” 8. Qu Yuan’s “Encountering Sorrow” features elaborately described journeys into imaginary realms and terrains. The Chuci also includes a poem with the title “Yuanyou” (Faraway wandering) attributed to Qu Yuan. See Hong Xingzu, Chuci, 163–175; Hawkes, Songs, 191–203. 9. The whole poem reads: “That tall tower up there covered in mist, / Are you able to summon the banished soul back? // Without reason, the making of a dream came to a close; / Riding on the momentum, the travel out of the pass was completed. // In the setting sun, the ice on the river remained strong; / As the day lengthened, the geese were sad. // All my

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10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

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life’s ideas of a faraway journey, / Reside here, wherever I am, in this pacing back and forth” 煙際亭亭塔, 招人可得回? 等閑為夢了, 聞健出 關來. 日落河冰壯, 天長鴻鴈哀. 平生遠遊意, 隨處一徘徊. McCraw, “Poetry,” 344. The white bamboo gate symbolizes an unpretentious way of life. The connotation probably derives from a line in Li Shangyin’s “Dreaming of Academician Linghu” 夢令狐學士: “The mountain station was remote and desolate, with only a white bamboo gate” 山驛荒涼白竹扉. Liu and Yu, Li Shangyin, 897. The correlation between the traveler’s stirred mind and the flying birds derives from a story in the Liezi. A young man who loved seagulls went to the beach every day to play with them, but when he agreed to bring one back for his father to play with the next day, the seagulls, sensing the young man’s motives, just hovered above him and would not come down. The arithmetic processes of multiplication and division represented a popular metaphor in this period for life’s routine patterns of change, its rise and fall, glory and decline. Wooden pillows were a symbol of a minimalist lifestyle. Here, Chen proposes to discard even these humble objects of comfort to devote himself fully to poetry. Office hours for provincial and county administrators followed those of the imperial court and usually started at 5:00 or 6:00 a.m. Taking the travel time into consideration, Chen obviously needed to start off even earlier. The fifth watch corresponds to 3:00–5:00 a.m. For the management of time and rhythms of official life in imperial China, see Liensheng Yang, “Schedules.” “Touched by Feelings” 感懷 (#195/366), ll. 1–2. “Drunk in the Dou Garden: Five Quatrains Composed at Different Times” 竇園醉中前後五絕句 (1 of 5) (#196/367), ll. 3–4. “Visiting Eight Passes Temple in Early Summer” (#203/375): “Grasses and trees remain good as the season moves on, / The traveler’s regret turns out to be hard to assuage” 草木隨時好, 客恨終難平 (ll. 7–8). “Moon on an Autumn Night” 秋夜詠月 (#205/379): “The trees in the courtyard are getting sparser every day, / Reminding me of the night moon’s gradual growth. // Pushing out, ending this bolt of sorrow inside me, / I roll up the curtains of all three of my rooms” 庭樹日日疎, 稍覺夜月添. 推愁了 此段, 卷我三間簾 (ll. 1–4); “Stomping to tatters this land of a thousand worries, / I become tired of myself as I get old” 踏破千憂地, 投老乃自嫌

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(ll. 9–10). “Pacing on the Dike at Night: Three Poems” (2 of 3) (#208/382): “The myriad things in the world grow chaotically, / Thinking of this, I am burned by a hundred woes” 物生各擾擾, 念此煎百慮 (ll. 7–8); “Let me just bring this worried mind, / And count out the trees west of the bridge one by one” (ll. 9–10). “Coming to the City” 入城 (#206/380): “I long for life in the wide forest; / My old gardens are no longer there for my return” 思生長林內, 故園歸不存 (ll. 9–10). “Staying Temporarily in the Official Residence of Revenue Director Liu, Visiting Revenue Director Zheng on the Terrace by Foot at Night” 寓居劉倉廨中晚步過鄭倉 臺上 (#217/393): “The grasses circle to sky’s west, a boundless expanse of green; / Thoughts of returning to my old gardens turn into proppedup cheeks” 草遶天西青不盡, 故園歸計入支頤 (ll. 7–8). “All three of my rooms” alludes to a story about the Western Jin scholar Lu Ji and his younger brother Lu Yun 陸雲, who lived in a simple three-room house when they first arrived in Luoyang. “Wide forest” is the natural habitat Ji Kang’s caged beasts long to return to. “Propped-up cheeks” is a traditional image for deep thought. 19. The description here of the correspondence between the clouds and the sandbars echoes a similar description in the opening couplet of “The Rain Clears,” discussed in chapter 2. “Hovering clouds” 停雲 is the title of a poem by Tao Qian, where the poet uses the imagery to lament that his thoughts for a friend go nowhere. Yuan, Tao Yuanming, 1; Hightower, Poetry, 11–12. 20. CYYJJJ, 386.

Part Two

The Journey

Chapter 4

The Path Forward Chen Yuyi was about a year in Chenliu when news broke of the Jurchen invasion and the siege of Kaifeng. Living and working only fifty Chinese leagues away from Kaifeng, the danger for him was real. It took the Jurchen armies only a few days from capturing Xiangzhou 相州 (modern Anyang 安陽), a strategic town on the north side of the Yellow River and virtual last defense for Kaifeng, to their arrival at the Northern Song capital. Although the siege was lifted about a month afterward, the success of the Jurchen military’s advance through the flat but vast territory of north China and the rapid crumbling of the Northern Song defense exposed the ineptitude of the court and its military apparatus and sent shockwaves throughout the area and the country. When the siege started, Huizong had already abdicated the throne to his son, the future Qinzong.1 The reign title accordingly was changed from Xuanhe 宣和 (Proclaiming Harmony) to Jingkang 靖康 (Tranquil Prosperity).2 We do not know just when and under what circumstances Chen Yuyi abandoned his post in Chenliu and fled. It was probably around the time that Huizong fled south for Bozhou 亳州. Huizong’s panicked flight under the darkness of night a few days before the Jurchen soldiers’ arrival

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opened the floodgates to “close attendants and court officials fleeing for their lives without the court’s knowledge” 侍從百官往往潜遁.3 We also do not have exact information about the situation in Chenliu, although it can be inferred from later sources that it was really bad.4 We may also extrapolate the severity of the situation in the larger Kaifeng area from what happened a year later during the second siege of the city. The disturbances and destruction to the surrounding suburbs, and the entire Jingdong 京東 and Hebei 河北 circuits, were deep and widespread. Under the first day of the fourth month of 1127, Li Xinchuan wrote: “Earlier, the enemy allowed their soldiers to loot wantonly in all directions. The harm spread from Yi and Mi prefectures in the east to Cao, Pu, Yan, and Yun in the west, from Chen, Cai, Ru, and Yin in the south all the way to the Heshuo area in the north. They killed people like cutting down hemps, and the stench could be smelled for hundreds of leagues. The area between the Huai and the Si Rivers was also devastated” 初, 敵縱兵四 掠, 東及沂密, 西至曹濮兖鄆, 南至陳蔡汝穎, 北至河朔, 皆被其害. 殺 人如刈麻, 臭聞數百里. 淮泗之間, 亦蕩然矣.5 What we do know is that Chen, joining many of his fellow officials, abandoned his post and fled for refuge. He first traveled straight south to the neighboring prefecture of Chenzhou 陳州 and then southwest to Dengzhou 鄧州 on the north bank of the Han River, about 700 leagues from Chenliu.6 The hilly topography of Dengzhou might have given him some sense of safety, as it offered a natural defense against further Jurchen military advancement.

The Landscape Opens Wide There is no record of the initial stops of Chen Yuyi’s fleeing. When we see him again in his poems, he is already preparing to leave the county of Shangshui 商水. Shangshui was 80 leagues to the southwest of Chenzhou, its prefectural seat, which was itself 245 leagues south of Kaifeng. How he managed to get to Shangshui from Chenliu, and under what conditions, like many events in the chaotic immediate aftermath of

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the Jingkang Catastrophe, is not recorded. The next part of his itinerary, from Shangshui to Dengzhou, however, is recorded in his poems. The following poem, a five-syllable regulated verse, is Chen’s first post-Jingkang composition in the collection. Setting Out from Shangshui 發商水道中 (#220/397) 商水西門路 On Shangshui’s West Gate road, 東風動柳枝 2 Eastern winds stir the willow branches. 年華入危涕 Life’s splendid blossoms enter into endangered tears;7 世事本前期 4 The affairs of the world are indeed predetermined. 草草檀公策 Hastily, I follow Master Tan’s strategy;8 茫茫杜老詩 6 Blank and vast, I recall Du Fu’s poems.9 山川馬前闊 Mountains and streams open wide before my horse, 不敢計歸時 8 I dare not reckon the time of returning. A reader of Chen Yuyi’s poetry from cover to cover might be justly surprised to find this poem here, unheralded, about one-third of the way into the collection. The change of scene and mood from his Chenliuperiod work is abrupt. In the thirty-five poems written during his oneyear stay there, he adopts a variety of postures, pacing at night on the dike, strolling on the country road in the evening, or summoning a friend to appreciate the remnants of snow in the “empty courtyard” (kongting 空庭) on yet another “no-happening” (wu shishi 無時事) day.10 In the last two from that group, we see him take shelter from an unexpected rain at the local Eight Passes Temple on a winter evening, contemplating the deep quiet and solitude that suddenly falls upon him; and him make fun of the son of a Huang family, describing the boy’s jade-white skin

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and expressing his hope that the son, when grown up, will bring the family out of their poor, thatched-roof status.11 With the Shangshui poem, everything changes, not only the poem’s theme but also its ideological and emotional outlook, as if the rawness of his emotions, the directness of his locution, and his sense of purpose are all of a sudden shocked out of their hibernation. “Setting Out from Shangshui” is driven by forces very different from the familiar monotony that characterizes many of Chen’s early works. Gone is the sense of certainty and the leisurely pace with which poems such as “Evening Stroll” move forward. No resolution is reached or in sight. No peace of mind is expected. “Life’s splendid blossoms” (nianhua 年華), which in earlier times had willingly entered into his poems, now enter into “endangered tears” 危涕 (l. 3).12 The willingness of natural objects to serve as the poet’s faithful advocates disappears, replaced by the pressing contingencies of the travel. The begrudging allowance for predictability, illustrated in the phrase qianqi 前期 (can be expected, predetermined) in line 4, is quickly negated by the obvious irony of a complete lack of certainty in the personal situation. For the first time in his life, Chen endows his poems with a real sense of urgency. Poetry reacquires a dimension of physicality that goes beyond the terse, abstract tenet “Poetry articulates aims” (shi yan zhi 詩言志) that the classical tradition had taught him, and starts to have a visceral impact on his existence. His poetic language begins to vibrate under the tension and trauma of the political situation. The inherent intensity of emotions in “Setting Out from Shangshui” prompted the critic Liu Chenweng to say, about a century and a half later after the fall of the Southern Song: “What the poet describes is so vividly fresh I cannot bear reading it one more time” 經歷如新, 不可更讀.13 Chen’s awakened sense of urgency provides objects around him with a particular power to emerge and dominate the poem’s emotional landscape and its linguistic expression. Here, the open vista of mountains and streams (l. 7) does not lead to an imagined spring scene in the future as in

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the past. The landscape is fixed in moment, points in space and time that have lost their function of leading to another point down the road. The path forward is shrouded by feelings of danger (wei 危, l. 3), hastiness (caocao 草草, l. 5), opacity (mangmang, l. 6), and dread (bugan 不敢, l. 8). The idea or time of returning (guishi 歸時) is impossible to contemplate. Grasping and comprehending the present is all that he can do, all that is left and can provide a dimension of simultaneity and coherence. What awaits the poet, unbeknownst to him at this moment, is a lengthy, tormenting five-and-a-half-year odyssey, as he stumbles about from place to place, sunken low, at the end of his tether. His journey would carry him away over thousands of miles, across boundless expanses of mountains, plains, and rivers, beyond what he could ever have seen and thought of in this moment as he left the West Gate of Shangshui. In the larger picture, Chen Yuyi was joining a massive Northern Song diaspora that would gradually emerge and consolidate in the southern provinces. At this moment in Shangshui, however, he was alone, and loneliness would accompany him for much of the early part of his journey. His hopes of returning home were cruelly shattered by the unfolding political events, which he and his fellow scholar-official refugees felt so powerless to prevent. His prolific poetic production during his long travels will help us understand not only those larger events but also, and more important for our purposes, the minute and gradual psychological and emotional transformations he experienced both as a traveler and as a poet. From this point until the end of his journey, Chen’s moral compass was full of conflicts, torn between an unacceptable present and a future that he could not clearly see, with memories of the past slipping further away and the up-close, instantly changing view “before my horse” (maqian 馬前) gradually dominating his thoughts and emotions. The horseback positionality is inherited from his pre-Jingkang road poems, with the inherent sense of uncertainty worsened by the political situation.

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Temporally, Chen’s journey covered almost the full length of Emperor Gaozong’s struggle for survival, overlapping with events from the first siege of Kaifeng in early 1126 through the last large-scale Jin southern campaign of 1129–1130. Spatially and geographically, however, Chen’s route was different from that of Gaozong’s retreat. His journey took him, first, from Chenliu southwest to Dengzhou, then further south to Hunan and, via the Nanling Mountains and Guangdong, along the Fujian coast, eventually to Zhejiang. Gaozong’s fledgling imperial court, on the other hand, followed a more straightforward route south, from Kaifeng to the Song southern capital of Yingtian 應天, then Yangzhou 揚州 on the Yangzi River, and finally across the Yangzi all the way to Hangzhou 杭州, which was renamed Lin’an 臨安 (“Temporary Peace”) and a few years later officially proclaimed the capital of the Southern Song.14 The importance of the poems Chen wrote on his long and winding road to rejoin the imperial court, from “Setting Out from Shangshui” to “Entering Qiancang by Boat” 泛舟入前倉 (#511/782), the last poem written before his arrival in Zhejiang five and a half years later, can be measured by comparing his output before and after the Jingkang Catastrophe.15 Of the 565 poems in his main collection, 219 are from the thirteen years (1113–1125) before Jingkang and 346 were written in the thirteen years after (1126–1138), representing 39 and 61 percent of his work, respectively. Considering that during the seven years after his arrival in Zhejiang until his death in early 1139 he wrote only 54 poems, we can say that his five-and-a-half-year road compositions play a pivotal role in shaping our knowledge of him as a poet, as that period was responsible for 292 poems, or 52 percent, of his total production.16 Clearly Chen Yuyi would have been a different poet had his compositional habits and tendencies continued from the pre-Jingkang period without interruption, following the patterns and trajectories discussed in the first three chapters. But that was not the case. Beginning with “Setting Out from Shangshui,” the 292 poems he wrote while on the road not only chronicle in minute detail his physical travels but also

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provide rich information about his internal, emotional struggles and, to a lesser extent, those of the large but mostly invisible Northern Song diaspora, whose stories are otherwise left untold, buried in the grand, broad-stroke historical narratives about dynastic death, rebirth, and national survival. Poetry, politics, history, and nature are forced into an intertwined, entangled relationship with one another. The traditional dynamics and tensions between emotion and nature, especially, will emerge as a dominant duality with deep literary-historical consequences.

Streaming Tears The next documented stop for Chen was Wuyang, about a hundred leagues farther west of Shangshui, on the border between Yingchang 穎 昌 and Caizhou 蔡州 prefectures. Stopping at Wuyang 次舞陽 (#221/399) 客子寒亦行 The traveler forged ahead in spite of the cold, 正月固多陰 2 In the first month the skies were expectedly overcast with clouds. 馬頭東風起 From the head of my horse, eastern winds arose, 綠色日夜深 4 The green colors deepened with every passage of the day. 大道不敢驅 I dared not to gallop by the high roads, 山徑費推尋 6 Pushing, looking for small mountain paths. 丈夫不逢此 A grown man not experiencing this, 何以知嶇嶔 8 How could he know the world’s steeps and bumps? 行投舞陽縣 Stopping at Wuyang County for the night, 薄暮森眾林 10

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Writing Poetry, Surviving War The groves were all darkened as evening descended. 古城何年缺 In what year did the ancient city walls get cracked? 跋馬望日沉 12 Turning my horse around, I gazed into the sun as it sank. 憂世力不逮 Worrying about the world, I lacked the strength, 有淚盈衣襟 14 Tears streamed down, soaking the lapels of my clothes. 嵯峨西北雲 Those high, craggy clouds in the northwest— 想像折寸心 16 Thinking of them broke my heart into pieces.

From “Mountains and streams open wide before my horse” to “From the head of my horse, eastern winds arose” (l. 3), the horse continues to serve as the poet’s guide, framing his interaction with the landscape. What is also carried over from the earlier poem is the sense of uncertainty, emphasized here by the changing weather, rising winds, and deepening spring vegetation. At the same time, however, in the short distance between Shangshui and Wuyang subtle changes have occurred, and these changes provide important early signs of the new development in Chen Yuyi’s poetry and in the patterns of his responses to the world. The natural landscape stops being a mere metaphor for his thoughts and emotions and starts to acquire more realistic details. To use an analogy taken from the two poems themselves, the generically described “mountains and plains” unfolding before the speaker’s horse in “Setting Out from Shangshui” are fleshed out with concrete physical details: the “steeps and bumps” (quqin 嶇嶔, l. 8) on the “small mountain paths” (shanjing 山徑, l. 6) the speaker encounters. It is an understatement to say that Chen Yuyi’s poetically rendered description in “Stopping at Wuyang” does not catch the full ferocity in the actual situation.17 The increased intensity of his emotions, however, is in full display in the poem’s terse and vivid words. This is especially so

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in the poem’s second half, when the urgent demands of the day’s travel loosen, and the traveler finally has a moment for thought and reflection. At this moment, the expression becomes more direct. The series of small moves the speaker performs in line 12, when he halts, turns around his horse, and gazes into the setting sun, ushers the poem from descriptive narrative to contemplative thought and imagination. This moment at the end of a day’s hectic travel, when his destination is in sight and the traveler pauses to scan the landscape and gather himself, also serves as the poem’s poetic present, in that the events prior to and after this point, actual or imagined, can be taken as recalled or anticipated from this anchoring, contemplative posture. As the poet pauses and gazes into the darkening silhouette of the forest surrounding him and the rays of the evening sun, these usual objects of consolation turn out to be insufficient to suppress the intense emotions surging inside him. Not only is the beautiful evening scenery unable to cleanse his mind; his pain is actually augmented by it: “Worrying about the world, I lacked the strength, / Tears streamed down, soaking the lapels of my clothes. // Those high, craggy clouds in the northwest— / Thinking of them broke my heart into pieces” (ll. 13–16). The poem’s narrative has been dominated by Chen Yuyi’s own perspective, devoid arguably of virtually any historical allusions or references to the past, until this last stanza, which despite its deceptively plain and conventional language, represents a total domination by Du Fu. The invocation of Du Fu is so complete and it so amazed Liu Chenweng that he was rendered almost speechless, uttering only four brief words of comment: “Fabulous! Like after Kuizhou” 好! 似夔後.18 Du Fu’s arrival at the tranquil, sequestered upper Yangzi River town Kuizhou 夔州 in 766 ushered in one of the most productive periods in his life.19 The poems composed there helped secure the Tang master’s legacy and status as China’s greatest poet; the art he perfected there is celebrated as the highest model for later generations.20 Huang Tingjian, one of Du Fu’s fiercest admirers and emulators, succinctly summarized

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the place’s significance for Du Fu: “Du Fu in his poems after his arrival at Kuizhou, and Han Yu in his prose after his return to the court from his Chaozhou exile, reached such a rarefied status of perfection that they did not deliberately seek to follow the rules but were naturally in accord with them” 觀杜子美到夔州後詩, 韓退之自潮州還朝後文章, 皆不煩繩削 而自合矣.21 Chen Yuyi’s concern for the world in line 13 and his feelings of heartbreak in line 16 of “Stopping at Wuyang” are directly borrowed from Du Fu.22 As a matter of fact, the poem’s underlying thematic and emotional apparatus, as well as his general mode of thinking and posture, bears Du Fu’s clear imprint. Chen seems not merely to borrow Du Fu’s language and imagery; he tries to impersonate him. It is not surprising that Chen Yuyi, who had grown up and learned his craft under the influence of the Du Fu obsessed culture of the late Northern Song, would willingly and wholeheartedly submerge himself in the brilliance and perfection of Du Fu’s poems at this moment in his life. If his earlier borrowings were largely technical, in that he was generally emulative but his references lacked a real sense of purpose, the situation had radically changed. His post-Jingkang compositions show an awakened sense of purpose that is tightly pegged to Du Fu’s wartime experiences and writing.23 Reviewing Chen Yuyi’s pre-Jingkang works, we find that although he invokes and uses Du Fu extensively, the references are routine borrowings, direct, straightforward, and they operate primarily on the lexical and technical level or through imagery. There is in some cases a deliberate playfulness in them as Chen tries to mock, challenge, subvert, or even outperform Du Fu. In the “scholar’s cap” poem, he draws on Du Fu’s lament but does not fully endorse his specific position and argument. Chen is sympathetic to Du Fu’s pain but does not identify completely with his particular choices; rather, he remains skeptical and even implicitly critical of some of them. Another example is the mid-autumn moon poem in which he borrows a line from Du Fu to express his confidence in the moon’s appearance next year and shifts the focus of attention from the

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present to a more positive picture of what is going to happen in the future. In these cases, he uses Du Fu to serve a specific local goal in his own poems; Chen looks to his Tang icon for inspiration and material but maintains his own distinct perspective and ideological beliefs. The playfulness and critical mentality disappear in his relationship with Du Fu after the Jingkang Catastrophe. In the poems written during the early stages of his travel, he is willing to adopt not only Du Fu’s terms and themes but also their entire ideological and emotional construction and the very identity of Du Fu’s poetry and person. In “Setting Out from Shangshui” he employs the word mangmang (far and wide, vast, blank) and also weaves the whole set of emotional associations the word invoked for wartime Du Fu into his own poem’s thematic fabric. In “Stopping at Wuyang,” Chen pushes his impersonation of Du Fu further, extending his borrowings from the poem’s theme and emotionality to include Du Fu’s particular postures and ways of looking. When Du Fu had settled and was finally able to appreciate the quiet beauty of Kuizhou, he habitually cast his eyes back to Chang’an, the “splendid imperial capital” (jinghua 京華) he had left a decade before, now separated from him by hundreds of leagues and layers of mountains and clouds, reachable apparently only by the birds or in his thoughts and dreams. The two Du Fu poems Chen Yuyi references in the last stanza of “Stopping at Wuyang” are both from the Kuizhou period. Although the words and emotions derive conspicuously from these two particular poems, Chen Yuyi’s posture and the directionality of his gaze are influenced more by Du Fu’s “Stirred by Autumn: Eight Poems” 秋 興八首. This well-known set of eight seven-syllable regulated verses represents not only Du Fu’s highest achievement in the art but also his most strenuous, painful, and futile effort to reach Chang’an—his “former gardens” (guyuan 故園) and “former country” (guguo 故國)— through poetry.24 The conventionality of the direction of “northwest” in Chinese poetry is traceable to the early days of five-syllable poetry, well before Du

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Fu’s time. The fifth of the anonymous “Nineteen Old Poems” 古詩十 九首 opens with the classic couplet “In the northwest there was a tall tower, / Rising up to meet the floating clouds” 西北有高樓, 上與浮雲齊.25 This tower’s prominent northwesterly location might have been totally fortuitous at the time of the poem’s composition, but it subsequently became deeply established as an iconic “poetic direction.”26 Cao Pi 曹 丕 (187–226), for example, used it in one of his “Unclassified Poems” 雜詩: “In the northwest there was a floating cloud, / Tall and upright like the cover of a carriage” 西北有浮雲, 亭亭如車蓋.27 The influence of this conventional poetic direction is arguably still detectable when Du Fu relies on the Big Dipper 北斗, a fixture in the northern sky, to lead his gaze back to Chang’an: “Then always I trust the North Dipper to lead my gaze to the splendid capital” 每依北斗望京華.28 Despite its heavy symbolic heritage, Du Fu’s northbound gaze is also experientially verifiable, determined by Chang’an’s actual relative position to Kuizhou. It does not seem to matter so much to Chen Yuyi that the target of his gaze, his “splendid imperial capital,” Kaifeng, is neither to his northwest (Kaifeng was in actuality to the northeast of Wuyang; see the note at the end of this paragraph); nor is it separated from him by layers of craggy mountains or thousands of miles of misty clouds. His gaze, however, is nonetheless cast in that symbolic direction, the direction of Du Fu’s Chang’an: “Those high, craggy clouds in the northwest— / Thinking of them broke my heart into pieces” (ll. 15–16). He gazes Du Fu’s gazes, sheds Du Fu’s tears, breaking his heart following Du Fu’s script, in Du Fu’s manner and language.29 Despite his apparent efforts, the particular circumstances of Chen’s travel and the ways of looking and writing in which he had been trained as a poet end up playing a much larger role in determining the poet he becomes. As I suggest in the first three chapters and will continue to show, Chen’s view of and engagement with reality were launched from a more pragmatic and materially grounded position that prevented his voluntary impersonation of Du Fu from actually being realized. Chen

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wrote and acted consistently from the perspective of a realistic road traveler, whereas Du Fu constantly tried to shake off and transcend that status, which he considered had been only temporarily imposed upon him. Some important aspects of Chen’s old relationship with Du Fu changed in the post-Jingkang period, but, more important, his basic ways of looking and writing and his own unique emotionality and positionality eventually emerged to become the dominant force moving him forward.

“Over a Thousand Leagues I Came” From Wuyang, Chen continued to travel southwest and pressed deeper into the hilly mountains and valleys that separated the Central Plains from the Han River region. After a brief stay at Nanyang 南陽, he arrived at the city of Dengzhou.30 Chen stayed in Dengzhou for about half a year until the summer, when temporary improvement in the military situation in Kaifeng sent him northbound to fetch his family. His journey over the next few years would take him far beyond Dengzhou, cross several geographical boundaries and cultural regions. It can accordingly be divided into several distinct periods and stages. As the first main stop in his long journey, Dengzhou provided a much-needed reprieve for the physically exhausted and emotionally depleted poet; it was a rallying point where he could gather himself after scrambling all the way there, 750 leagues from Kaifeng. The interregional and cross-cultural aspect of Dengzhou and the Nanyang area is well documented in Chinese literature. Chen Yuyi himself vividly invokes the city’s boundary-crossing and connection-making geopolitical potential in a poem on its high city walls:31 “The wall towers of Dengzhou rise a hundred feet tall, / Cliffs of Chu and clouds of Qin are no longer separated” 鄧州城樓高百尺, 楚岫秦雲不相隔 (ll. 1–2), he writes, referring to the traditional states of Qin and Chu that lie, respectively, to its north and south. That the place unites geographical regions and historical kingdoms is eulogized in Zhang Heng’s “Southern

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Capital Rhapsody” 南都賦, so named because Liu Xiu 劉秀, the founding emperor of the Eastern Han, hailed from the region and later designated it as his southern capital. “It bisects the rich territory of Zhou and Chu,” Zhang Heng wrote, in David Knechtges’s translation, “Straddles Jing and Yu, where its boundary is formed” 割周楚之豐壤, 跨荊豫而為疆.32 Chen Yuyi probably stopped here because of the area’s relatively secluded and hilly topography. Historically, the hilly terrain had provided a natural barrier that presented great difficulty for military operations, as demonstrated in the 815–817 Huaixi campaign in which the Tang government finally eradicated the entrenched military regionalism in neighboring Caizhou.33 Temporarily protected from the tumult savaging the Kaifeng area and the Central Plains, Dengzhou also provided a psychological buffer zone in which Chen could reflect on what had happened, gauge the severity of the situation, and envision his paths forward. At this moment, Dengzhou was probably the farthest point to which he would have fled. Despite the chaos that the siege and near fall of Kaifeng had created, no one would have thought at the start of 1126 that the mighty and prosperous Northern Song capital would fall so easily and rapidly, let alone the dynasty. Although the general situation in Kaifeng had much improved after the lifting of the siege in the second month of the year, the chaos that resulted from the collapse of authority in the surrounding areas continued well into the spring. A memorial on the twenty-sixth day of the third month of the year described the lack of leadership and coordination among the government agencies during the invasion and its disastrous impact on the local population: “The local people were agitated and in panic; the alarms went off several times a day” 民間洶洶, 一日數驚.34 An edict on the sixth day of the following month harshly criticized the government for its inability to curb the rampant looting and official corruption after the retreat of the Jurchen army: “Greed, theft, excesses of extortion and abuse, all remained as before” 貪吏盜攘, 苛吏掊克, 種種如故.35 These descriptions of continuing disorderliness in the larger political situation

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help put Chen’s pain and his decision to stay in Dengzhou in context. The six months he spent there provided precious time and opportunity for profound thought and reflection. “Expressing My Thoughts on Recent Events at the West Pavilion of Dengzhou” 鄧州西軒書事十首 (#224–233/405–427), a set of ten sevensyllable quatrains written over the course of his stay, portrays the variety of Chen’s thoughts and feelings during this time. Compared with the fourteen expressive shuhuai poems written a decade earlier in Kaifeng, one obvious difference in this set is that, while he is still focused on the general relationship between the self and the world, the balance starts to shift from the poet’s own person to the fate of the country and the state. There was a great void in both the physical situation and Chen’s mind that needed to be urgently dealt with. The opening poem (#224) paints the image of a helpless scholar driven to this corner of the world by events out of his control. “The day this little scholar journeyed south to flee the bandits, / His Majesty has assumed sovereignty over All-under-Heaven for the first spring.36 // Having sped to Dengzhou, no more strength was left in my legs, / In the budding peach blossoms, the rain kept me from further going” 小儒避賊南征日, 皇帝 行天第一春. 走到鄧州無脚力, 桃花初動雨留人. The poet stays upbeat, ending the poem with a heartening picture of an exhausted traveler at the limit of his wits, greeted and cheered up by the budding peach trees and the warm hospitality of the spring rain. The poet’s solitary existence and emotional struggles continue to be highlighted in the second poem (#225), now set against the sounds of the cicadas and the leafing trees as the season has progressed from spring to summer. “Over a thousand leagues I came, bringing only the shadow of me, / The white hairs on my head further hastened by the urgent calls of the cicadas. // A scholar’s fortunes now being like this, / I lean against the twelve locust trees of the Zhou family one by one” 千里空攜一影來, 白 頭更著亂蟬催. 書生身世今如此, 倚遍周家十二槐.37 Taking command of a difficult situation by enumerating the physical objects in it is not

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uncommon in Chen Yuyi’s early poems; here he goes a step further by engaging his body, however symbolically.38 Rather than resorting to the routine solution of “counting out the twelve locust trees of the Zhou family one by one” 數遍周家十二槐, he chooses the more dramatic, and physical, gesture of “leaning against the twelve locust trees of the Zhou family one by one” 倚遍周家十二槐. From early on in his career, Chen Yuyi displays a sharp sense of his personal status in the world, the question of shenshi 身世 (one’s experiences or lot in life) being a perennial concern underlying his pre-Jingkang works. The depth of his pain and solitude in Dengzhou helps shift his attention from his personal feelings to the larger political situation. This is evident in the remaining eight poems in the West Pavilion of Dengzhou set. The shift of focus is in part signaled by the term shushi 書事 (“expressing my thoughts on recent events”) in the title: he is moving away from thinking about his subjective “feelings” (huai 懷), as in the earlier shuhuai poems written in Kaifeng, to his thoughts on “events” or “affairs” (shi 事) of the world. The shift is also anticipated in the opening poem of the set, which starts by contrasting the image of the little scholar scrambling for his life, side by side with the august emperor’s grand act of “assuming sovereignty over All-under-Heaven.” The phrase “journeying south” 南征 in the first line comes from a Du Fu poem in which the speaker’s “old and sick” status is set alongside the magnificence of the “ruler’s grace.”39 After expressing his regret, in the third poem (#226), that his family did not come with him, Chen turns to the political events. The fifth poem (#228) refers to the recent “incident” 變故 and “ghostly flames” 鬼火 from the southeast, probably alluding to the Fang La 方臘 rebellion in Zhejiang a few years before.40 The sixth poem (#229) is devoted to the protracted siege of the strategic city Taiyuan 太原, which had started at the beginning of the Jurchen invasion in the winter of the previous year and had not yet been broken when the poem was written.41 The poem expresses Chen’s frustration over the lack of a modern-day duo

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like Lian Po 廉頗 and Lin Xiangru 藺相如 who could work to relieve the siege.42 “Now we need generals and ministers like Lian and Lin, / In the fifth month, the siege of Bing Gate remains unlifted” 只今將相須廉藺, 五月并門未解圍 (ll. 3–4).43 Poem eight (#231) expresses Chen’s delight at hearing the news of an imperial edict announcing a series of policies to ease the pain of the common people: “This white-haired scholar is overjoyed and cannot sleep” 白髮書生喜無寐 (l. 3).44 The last two poems venture from current events into history, indicated by the phrase “meditating on the past” (diaogu 弔古) in the concluding piece. The two poems invoke two local paragons from the distant and the recent past, respectively: the Nanyang native Zhuge Liang from the Three Kingdoms period and the mid-eleventh-century Northern Song minister Fan Zhongyan 范仲淹 (989–1052). The latter had served in Dengzhou, and the local people had erected a shrine for him after his death; his early reforms in the 1040s ushered in a long period of political activism that lasted to the very end of the Northern Song. Poem nine (#232) contrasts the current situation facing Chen Yuyi with the great prosperity under Fan Zhongyan and Emperor Renzong: “In the days when Fan Zhongyan deeply worried about the world, / The populace fully enjoyed His Majesty Renzong’s loving benevolence.45 // The temple is abandoned now, the incense and flames cold, / From time to time a gust of wind blows over the leaves, causing a brief stir” 范公深憂天下 日, 仁祖愛民全盛年. 遺廟只今香火冷, 時時風葉一騷然.46 The tenth and last poem (#233) focuses on the local hero Zhuge Liang: “Gusts of evening wind blow over the land Zhuge once walked, / In a thousand years, between Heaven and Earth, how many heroes have lived? // Meditating on the past, one does not need to lament too excessively, / In this human life, we are half sober, half dreaming” 諸葛 經行有夕風, 千秋天地幾英雄? 弔古不須多感慨, 人生半夢半醒中. In an apparently reminiscent mood, the poet’s view and frame of reference are nonetheless firmly seated in the present environment, his thoughts of the past being persistently brought back by the microscopic

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stirs and movements in the natural landscape: the gust of wind stirring among the leaves in the ninth poem; the evening winds sweeping over the paths Zhuge Liang once walked in the tenth. On the one hand, these minute physical observations keep the impulse toward remembrance, or diaogu, in check and keep the poet in the present. On the other hand, the last two lines of the tenth poem effectively empty out the landscape into abstraction, leaving the poem to stay and end that way. This dual intent in affirming the present political situation and in historical lamentation is also implied in the organization of the set as a whole, with the ninth and tenth poems serving as a powerful reminder of the persistence of history and of human life. Two phrases used in two of the West Pavilion of Dengzhou poems sum up this internal shift of focus from the personal to the state of the world; as if part of an intentional structural design, we see that the poet’s concern moves from “a scholar’s fortunes in the world” (shusheng shenshi 書生身世), which appears in the second poem, to “Heaven and Earth in a thousand years” (qianqiu tiandi 千秋天地) in the seventh. The shift is emblematic of a larger change in Chen Yuyi’s emotional expression in his post-Jingkang works as well: a turn toward direct, vigorous release of raw feelings, an increase of emotional intensity and forcefulness of linguistic description. The Ming dynasty scholar Hu Yinglin 胡應麟 (1551–1602) used “mournfully vigorous, touchingly sorrowful” (beizhuang gankai 悲 壯感慨) to describe the changing tone and intensifying emotional outlook of Chen’s post-Jingkang poems, such as this West Pavilion of Dengzhou set, considering them a match for the best of Du Fu’s similar works.47 Mo Lifeng, a contemporary scholar of Song poetry, wrote that the West Pavilion of Dengzhou set represents one of “the strongest voices pulsing through the landscape of Southern Song poetry” 南宋詩壇上最能體現 時代脈搏的強音.48 Bai Dunren would certainly agree, attributing the increased emotional power of these poems to their direct engagement with the political reality. “In reading poems like these,” he wrote, “if the reader does not have the whole picture of the Jingkang Catastrophe on

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their mind, it would be hard to truly understand their meaning” 大抵讀簡 齋此類詩者, 心目中若無一靖康之亂總體印象, 殆難於心知其意矣.49

Master Simplicity Studio In discussing Du Fu’s unmatched ability to make grand connections, Stephen Owen wrote: “Many of his best poems connect the mundane with larger ethical values and a vision of how the world works.”50 Chen Yuyi’s post-Jingkang poems start to show this same tendency. This is illustrated in the increased frequency of broad-stroke phrases and notions such as “Heaven and Earth,” “a thousand years,” “a thousand leagues,” or “ten thousand leagues.” Take the three-poem set “Striding over to the Dong Family Garden” 縱步至董氏園亭三首, for another example. The first poem (#235/429) starts with a routine description of the beautiful late-springtime scenery: “The light of the pond reaches up to the slender bamboo clusters, / An old bamboo staff in hand, I stand at the head of remnant spring” 池光 修竹裏, 筇杖季春頭 (ll. 1–2). The poem then turns to abstract thought about human life, contrasting its short span with its gigantic potential for geographic reach: “Of life’s hundred years, today is the most splendid; / Over ten thousand leagues, this floating life” 百年今日勝, 萬里此生 浮 (ll. 5–6). The mental audacity fostered by these bold phrases also manifests itself in the word zongbu 縱步 in the poem’s title—“jumping up,” “striding over,” “giving free rein to the feet.” As the months and years go by, however, Chen’s personal and the political situation got only worse, pushing him into increasingly difficult circumstances and places. Struggling through these oppressive situations, regaining poetry’s lost potency for personal and political expression, requires Chen to marshal every bit of his strength. Nature and poetry will eventually recover and continue to play the role they played throughout his early career, as the most reliable twin sources of inspiration and moral support.

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A key first step is to restore the centrality of the physically and emotionally reduced “little scholar” in his struggle with an uncontrollable world. “Of life’s hundred years, today is the most splendid”: the affirmation of the supremacy of “this day” (jinri 今日) provides the foundation for reconstituting the poet’s shaken sense of self. The adoption of the style name “Simplicity Studio” (Jianzhai 簡齋) provides necessary symbolic and moral confirmation.51 As Yunshuang Zhang indicates in a study on the literati studio, the use of a domestically constructed zhai 齋, or studio, for study or meditation became increasingly popular during the Song.52 Whether the preference for featuring indoor studios in style names over outdoor spaces in the natural landscape—examples of the latter include East Slope 東 坡 for Su Shi, Mountain Valley 山谷 for Huang Tingjian, and Rear Mountain 後山 for Chen Shidao, Chen Yuyi’s three most prominent lateNorthern Song predecessors—was related to the general inward turn of the intellectual and political culture in the early twelfth century is uncertain, but the proclamation and symbolic possession of such a space surely had important practical implications for Chen at this point of his life.53 In several of his road poems, both before and after the Jingkang Catastrophe, the open landscape helps frame the poet-traveler’s thoughts and emotions. A few of the poems discussed in the previous chapters are set indoors, but the interiority of those spaces remains quite obscure and lacks specification. As a matter of fact, other than the description of the wine monopoly office of his Chenliu exile, we have very little information about how the poet imagines or interacts with interior domestic spaces. His adoption of the name Simplicity Studio does not completely change the picture, but it helps bring some inchoate elements of his early works into focus. As the construction of this internal space will play a more prominent role toward the end of his career, I turn to a poem here that is dedicated to the event, “On Simplicity Studio” 題簡齋 (#244/435). To start with, the epithet “simplicity” can describe not only his way of life but also his writing. There is an inner affinity between the moral

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attitude denoted by the word and his lean, pragmatic, and minimalist approach to poetry. This trait becomes easier to see if we put his poems side by side with the works by Du Fu; the latter’s passionate, elaborate style represents almost the exact opposite of simplicity. The acquisition of this studio name will also have subtle impact on Chen Yuyi’s future writing. It might be hard to argue that he self-consciously aligned his writings with the value, but “simplicity” is doubtless a helpful lens for us to use in examining the increasing directness of his poetic style in the post-Jingkang period. The sixteen lines of “On Simplicity Studio” are a thorough exploration of the idea of simplicity, of valuing carefree enjoyment and internal satisfaction over material wealth. The poem considers the dedicated studio’s material simplicity to be on a par with the “grand beauty” 巨 麗 (l. 3) of the Imperial Library where the poet once worked, saying that he prefers the humble current room because from there he can hear the “sound of wind rustling through the bamboos” 風竹聲 (l. 4). The verse praises the room’s unadornedness, with no decorative paintings of “celestial maidens scattering flowers” 散花女 (l. 5), nor visitations by “fellows who can order devils” 使鬼兄 (l. 6); a crude “rope corded chair” 繩牀 (l. 8) is all that he has.54 He appreciates the genuine joy of the historical figure Ruan Fu 阮孚 (ca. 278–ca. 326), who took obsessive care of his wooden sandals (ll. 9–10), contrasting it with the laughable acts of the greedy commandant of Ye 鄴下領軍, who hoarded “a roomful of hemp shoes” 麻鞋一屋 only to have them confiscated when he was charged with corruption (ll. 11–12).55 These explicit affirmations of the value of simplicity are interwoven into an underlying descriptive framework that focuses on the natural beauty surrounding the room and the intellectual and emotional benefits of the newly dedicated studio for its occupant. The person inside the studio is protected by the walls but not isolated; through a window on the wall, he can securely and freely communicate with the outside world. And the window is in the speaker’s full possession. The poet

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demonstrates his ownership by starting the poem with the forceful phrase “My window” (wochuang 我窗): “My window is more than three feet wide, / Through which I watch the light and shadow outside” 我窗三 尺餘, 可以閱晦明 (ll. 1–2; emphasis added). The secured internal space and unobstructed path of communication between the owner and the outside landscape enable the poet to open up to all external objects and occurrences, including the “sound of wind rustling through the bamboos” already mentioned; the “shade of the locust trees” 槐陰 (l. 13); and the “brilliance of the new sunshine” 新晴 (l. 14). Although this sense of euphoria is blunted by the poem’s last line, “Simplicity Studio is truly but an empty name” 簡齋真虛名 (l. 16), the concession adds a level of self-conscious reflection without negating the poem’s main message. The affirmation of these cherished barebones values helps steady the poet’s mind. It prepares the ground for a more productive engagement with physical reality. Nature and poetry are continually certified as the poet’s most reliable allies in his fight for mental peace and survival. The two find their missions converging in “Spring Rain” 春雨 (#246/439). As with Chen Yuyi’s many other poems, from the starting stages of his travel, Du Fu provides a useful lens for comparative analysis. In this case, I employ the comparison not to show Chen’s indebtedness to the Tang master but rather to highlight his growing tendency toward independence. On the surface, “Spring Rain” seems a replica of Du Fu’s “Spring Gaze” 春望, both thematically and in terms of the implied political situation. Chen’s poem, however, differs from Du Fu’s masterpiece in obvious and characteristic ways. A major difference is that in Du Fu’s poem, written while he was trapped in rebel-occupied Chang’an, the hope and intense expectation are not only explicitly denoted by the word wang 望 (to gaze into the distance, to hope) in the title; they also spill over into the lush springtime scenery the speaker gazes into. “The state broken, its mountains and rivers remain, / The city turns spring, deep with plants and trees. // Stirred by the time, flowers splash tears; / Hating parting, the birds alarm the

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heart. // Beacon fires stretch through three months; / A letter from family worth ten thousand in gold. / I’ve scratched my white hair even shorter, / Pretty much to the point it won’t hold a hatpin” 國破山河在, 城春草木 深. 感時花濺淚, 恨別鳥驚心. 烽火連三月, 家書抵萬金. 白頭搔更短, 渾欲不勝簪.56 All elements and parties in the landscape, “mountains and rivers,” “plants and trees,” “flowers” and “birds,” share Du Fu’s sadness by unrestrainedly demonstrating their “presence” (zai 在, to remain, to exist, to be present; l. 1) in relation to the human figure, actively sympathizing with the poet. Speaker and scene constitute a single coherent ideological and aesthetic unity, a holistic experience of grieving and hoping. In Chen Yuyi’s “Spring Rain,” Du Fu’s ardent hope for the eventual recovery of kingdom and reunion of family is conspicuously absent. The sympathetic participation of nature in the speaker’s sorrow is replaced by the rainy spring season’s chilling, solitary, and indifferent presence, where the weather is out of sync with the flowers (“The flowers are over, but the spring chills stay” 花盡春猶冷, l. 1); where the startling of the mind does not transmit to the natural world (“The tethered mind of the traveler is alarmed all by itself” 羈心只自驚, l. 2); where the oriole cries singularly all day long (“A lone oriole cries all the day” 孤鶯啼永晝, l. 3); where the rain just makes things wet (“The drizzling rain wets the tall walls of the city” 細雨濕高城, l. 4). In this cold, highly aestheticized world with super-charged emotions and sensibilities, the objects do not communicate with one another or with the poet but exist and act all by themselves. Feelings and sentiments are kept within the boundaries of the individual entities (the oriole, the traveler, the drizzle, the flowers) and do not cross over. The human mind is not driven by an sympathetic cosmic order but instead follows the icy cold reality of the physical world; the poet keenly observes its proceedings but is unable to affect, move, or change it. Unlike Du Fu’s world, where inanimate plants and flowers splash tears, commiserating alongside the human actor, Chen’s is one where objects are stripped of their communicative, transitive capacity, contained, objectified, and existing by themselves.

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There is a poem by the late-Tang poet Li Shangyin that can help highlight this difference by acting as an intermediary between Du Fu and Chen Yuyi. Li Shangyin writes in the quatrain “Heaven’s Edge” 天涯: “On this spring day, at Heaven’s edge— / At Heaven’s edge, the sun again on the slant. // Were there tears in the cries of you orioles, / Please wet the flowers on the highest branches for me!” 春日在天涯, 天涯日又斜. 鶯啼 如有淚, 為濕最高花.57 The poem’s key feature is succinctly summarized by the early Qing scholars Tian Lanfang 田蘭芳 (1628–1701) and Yang Shouzhi 楊守智 (dates unknown). Tian said the poem “was written with one single breath” 一氣渾成; Yang commented that “its intention is extremely mournful, its words extremely evocative” 意極悲, 語極豔.58 The poem’s short text and deceptively simple lexicon nonetheless create an aesthetically engaging, emotionally wrenching world like no other. The difference between Li Shangyin and Du Fu is that whereas Du Fu’s thoughts and feelings are animated by concerns with family and country, Li expresses a general human situation, with the potential political motivations pushed deeply to the background.59 The poem portrays an abstract scenario of sadness in the image of a perennial traveler lamenting the declining sun at planet’s end. Like for Ruan Ji 阮籍 (210–262), the intellectual maverick from the early medieval period who allegedly wept when the road ended, there is a profound existential dilemma in Li Shangyin’s sorrow, and this differentiates him from Du Fu and his contextually enabled and deeply personal feelings.60 In terms of the poet– world relationship, Li Shangyin seems not content to passively await the natural world’s participation; he takes the initiative, releasing his “silently burning” 寂寞中燃燒 emotions, his soundless cry, by explicitly imploring the orioles to come and act on his behalf: “Were there tears in the cries of you orioles, / Please wet the flowers on the highest branches for me” (wei [wo] shi 為[我]濕).61 Whereas Du Fu’s poem assumes a firm inner connectivity between the human and the natural world, there is a crack in Li Shangyin’s conviction. By saying “Were there tears in the cries of you orioles” (ru you 如有), Li

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Shangyin demonstrates his skepticism, with an implicit understanding, like in Chen Yuyi’s poem, that he is all alone facing the world. His entreaty to the orioles is not answered, nor does he expect an answer; the plea is left hanging when the poem ends. The separation of the speaker from the natural world in Chen Yuyi’s poem is even more complete; the natural world in his “Spring Rain” is not shown even to be interested in communicating with him, with the single oriole and the drizzling rain existing and functioning all by themselves: “A lone oriole cries all the day; / The drizzling rain wets the tall walls of the city” (ll. 3–4). The main difference between Chen Yuyi and his high- and late-Tang counterparts is that whereas the coherence of the natural order in Du Fu and Li Shangyin originates in the poet, in that the lushness of the springtime vegetation in Chang’an and the sun’s slanting at world’s end are infused with an ethical meaning that is not innate in the physical objects themselves, the source of coherence of Chen Yuyi’s world lies elsewhere. In his poem, the internal logic of the natural scenery is not a direct projection of the poet’s own moral universe. The human party is there rather as witness to the natural objects and the process but he keeps a calm distance from it, refusing to let himself be drawn into the natural process or to imbue it with his own morality. In other words, he retreats from his traditional shamanic, participatory role and commits himself mainly to observing and describing the natural objects, not trying to affect or change them. Faced with the chilling indifference of the natural world, the speaker in Chen’s “Spring Rain” is not frustrated but arrives at the foreseeable conclusion determining to move along with the world: “In this chaotic world, what can be achieved? / Quietly and unhurriedly, I live out my life” 擾擾成何事, 悠悠送此生 (ll. 5–6). What anchors that determination, supplying the chaotic and uncooperative world with a sense of order and tranquility, is not only the power of natural beauty itself, but also the ubiquitous presence of that beauty and its tremendous potential for

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poetry: “The spider threads glisten in the evening sun, / Ideas of poetry arise everywhere I am” 蛛絲閃夕霽, 隨處有詩情 (ll. 7–8).

These Unending Slopes After the dust of the first Kaifeng siege had settled, Chen Yuyi managed to return to the area in the summer to get his family. But the circumstances that had brought him on that northbound journey would soon change and send him southward again when a new Jurchen invasion looked imminent. His valiant statement, “East and west, north and south, wherever I go is my hometown” 南北東西俱我鄉, written on his way south having fetched his family, shows him still grappling with his displaced identity.62 However, his willingness to come to terms with the new realities, indicated by the phrase suichu (wherever I reside, wherever I go, wherever I am), deriving from his Chenliu exile, offers new possibilities for reconciliation. The following poem describes the start of the initial northbound trip to Kaifeng in the summer: Journey North 北征 (#257/451) 世故信有力 The world’s happenings are truly forceful, 挽我復北馳 2 Pushing me once again to gallop north. 獨衝七月暑 Facing the seventh month’s heat all alone, 行此無盡陂 4 I travel through these unending slopes. 百卉共山澤 The hundred plants share the marshes and hills, 各自有四時 6 Each has its own order of the four seasons. 華實相後先 Blossoming and fruiting one following another, 盛過當同衰 8 Having thrived, they are all expected to wither.

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亦復觀我生 Then again I look back at my own life, 白髮忽及期 10 White-headed, suddenly my time is up. 夕雲已不征 The evening clouds have paused their journey, 客子今何之 12 Where is the lodge for the traveler tonight? 願傳飛仙術 I wish to be handed the techniques of the winged immortals, 一洗局促悲 14 To completely wash away this sad crampedness. 披襟閬風觀 Pulling open my lapels at Langfeng Terrace,63 濯髮扶桑池 16 Rinsing my hair at Fusang Pool.64 The title of the poem borrows from Du Fu’s poem of the same name, written in 757 when he traveled from Fengxiang 鳳翔 northeast to Fuzhou 鄜州 to visit his wife and children. In that massive 70-couplet, 140-line poem, one of the longest among all of his poems, Du Fu gives a detailed account of what he saw and thought on the road home, painting a vivid picture of the deep and widespread devastation the An Lushan Rebellion had inflicted on the countryside and the common people. Like Du Fu’s other long narrative poems, it provides a grand scrolling through epic historical struggles at both the state and the personal level. Befitting the poem’s length and grand design, Du Fu starts slowly with a stanza detailing the specific time and occasion of his homeward trip: “Our Imperial Majesty’s second year, autumn, / First day of the month, an adjusted eighth, / I, Master Du, was to set off on a journey north, / Over vast uncertain space to see my family” 皇帝二載秋, 閏八月初吉. 杜子 將北征, 蒼茫問家室.65 Chen Yuyi’s modest composition has eight couplets, sixteen lines, divided evenly into four four-line stanzas. Although he had written and would write longer ones, this length and stanzaic structure proved to

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be a sweet spot, the length and form most favored by him for his fivesyllable ancient-style compositions.66 Of the poems we have discussed or mentioned previously, “Visiting Preserving Authenticity Pond,” “Stopping at Wuyang,” and “Stopping at Nanyang” have this length and stanzaic design. The fourteen- and eighteen-liners can be considered a slight variation of it, with one couplet added or subtracted. Whatever his reason, the relative brevity of the poem works optimally for Chen’s preferred style of writing. Although the title “Journey North” might suggest heavy narration, as in Du Fu’s much longer poem, narration plays only a marginal, supporting role in Chen’s piece. To borrow Ye Mengde’s words, Chen Yuyi obviously did not aim for “thoroughness of narration” 序事傾盡 or intend to “treat his topics as exhaustively as possible” 窮極筆力.67 His poem instead describes a concise and linear mental process by which the speaker arrives at a resolution, using the physical objects and natural scenery encountered on the road as his material and ingredients. As in similar works already discussed, each of the poem’s four distinct, evenly distributed stanzas serves as a premise for the argument in the next stanza, pushing the poem methodically and incrementally to its conclusion. The difference in the poem’s emotional outlook from that of Du Fu’s poem is also obvious. “Heaven and Earth bear wounds and scars, / When will our misery ever cease?” 乾坤含瘡痍, 憂虞何時畢 (ll. 19–20), Du Fu bursts out in his indignant lamentation for the suffering of the country and the people. The speaker in Chen Yuyi’s poem controls his emotions, and his narrative is guided by a steady, intelligent, albeit irresistible force that pulls at him as well as the natural landscape. The speaker describes that power at the very beginning of the poem: “The world’s happenings are truly forceful, / Pushing me once again to gallop north” (ll. 1–2). But if we expected him to give a full account of those “world’s happenings,” we would be disappointed. Again, his is not a narrative poem; his poem is devoted to describing a cognitive process of understanding how those “world’s happenings” work, through

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what the traveler sees and feels. The mention in line 4 of the “unending slopes” leads neither to a description of the slopes nor to their unending progression, but to musings about the fortunes of their occupants, “the hundred plants” (l. 5) residing there—the understanding being that all the myriad species in nature live and exist independently of one another, following their own timetables and trajectories of prosperity and decline (ll. 6–8). These thoughts then bring the focus to the thinking subject, the status of the poet’s inner self (ll. 9–10). As the traveler scans his surroundings again, he skillfully recognizes the revealing cues in the landscape: “The evening clouds have paused their journey, / Where is the lodge for the traveler tonight?” (ll. 11–12). Thematically, the poem expresses frustration over a situation in which action in the physical and human world are driven by a force that is perceived to be rational but is out of the poet’s control; objects and events appear to be automated, oblivious to human emotion. That source of rational, cold power puts everything on a predetermined path; the traveler is bound and constrained by that power and its material manifestations, unable to take flight. Poetic imagination does not take wing until the end, when they finally burst through and soar into the heavens, entering into the mythological and the fabulous: “I wish to be handed the techniques of the winged immortals, / To completely wash away this sad crampedness. // Pulling open my lapels at Langfeng Terrace, / Rinsing my hair at Fusang Pool” (ll. 13–16). Both fantastic locations, Langfeng Terrace and Fusang Pool, as well as the bold gestures of “pulling open my lapels” 披襟 and “rinsing my hair” 濯 髮, are inherited from the literary tradition. The language and imagination in the ending stanza might not much stand out as extraordinary if encountered, for example, in Qu Yuan’s audacious “Encountering Sorrow” or in many of Du Fu’s poems. In Chen Yuyi’s essentially pragmatically and realistically perceived poetic world, however, the stanza represents a new height in terms of how far the fantastic and imaginative in him could go. We see a milder version of this in the “Traveling to Chenliu”

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poem in chapter 3, where the speaker imagines seeing the retired Han general Zhang Liang, a projected image of himself, playing with the tree shadows on the riverbanks, and we will see more fanciful versions in later poems. Here, suffice it to say, neither the description of the realistic landscape nor the poem’s rational internal logic has prepared the reader for this sudden eruption of poetic imagination at the end of the poem, although retrospectively we can feel the pressure for emancipation gradually building from its very beginning. It is also important to note that this boldness is modified, packaged as nothing more than a “wish” (yuan): “I wish to be handed the techniques of the winged immortals.” The tension between the rational realization of the physical situation and desire for transcendence and liberation can be observed in other poems from the same trip. In “Traveling Thoughts on an Autumn Day” (#258/453), Chen writes: “The Penglai Islands are imaginable, but there are no means of getting there” 蓬萊可託無因至 (l. 7). This recognition leads to a practical concession that is typical of the poet’s general mindset: “I’ll try instead looking for the thousand-yard hill in the human world” 試覓人間千仞崗 (l. 8). The “thousand-yard hill” (qianren gang 千仞崗) was conjured up by the Western Jin poet Zuo Si 左思 (fl. last quarter of the third century) in one of his yongshi 詠 史 poems: “Shaking open my clothes on top of the thousand-yard hill, / Washing my feet in the ten-thousand-league stream” 振衣千仞岡, 濯足 萬里流.68 The calculated descent from the lofty mythological Langfeng Terrance and Fusang Pool to the “thousand-yard hill in the human world” represents a practical compromise for Chen Yuyi, an acknowledgment of the limiting power of material reality on human action. Like yuande 願得 (“I wish to be handed”) in “Journey North,” the word shimi 試覓 (“I’ll try instead looking for”) demonstrates the poet’s awareness of that chronic tension. The traveler’s occasional burst of imagination does not obscure but serves to illuminate the inner consistency and practicality of his thought.

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The Poetics of Intimacy When he started out from Dengzhou to fetch his family, many places north of the Yellow River were still embattled, although order had been restored in the Kaifeng area. The siege of Taiyuan, mentioned earlier, had been going on since the winter of 1125. The loss of that city in the fall of 1126 initiated a series of events, including the second siege and eventual fall of Kaifeng later in the year and the demise of the Northern Song dynasty soon thereafter. Chen Yuyi took a different route, traveling by way of Ruzhou, on his return trip south. The decision seemed a practical one because he had family ties there, where he stayed for three years mourning for his mother. After leaving Ruzhou, he traveled south, beyond Dengzhou, to the other side of the Han River; he stayed at the small military town of Guanghua 光化 for the winter and moved back to Dengzhou at the start of 1127. The experience of traveling through the small mountain roads from Ruzhou to Guanghua had a lasting impact on his poetry. The frequent image of the horseback rider in his earlier poems disappears altogether, replaced by the traveler on a popular local means of transit, the sedan chair or palanquin Chen refers to as zhuyu 竹輿 (bamboo sedan chair) or lanyu 籃輿 (bamboo-basket sedan chair).69 This was probably because of the narrow mountain roads he traveled and, more likely, the strict requisition of horses after the start of the war.70 In “Expressing My Thoughts on Recent Events on the Road” 道中書事 (#259/455–456), he writes: “Approaching old age, I am saddened by constant travel; / On the bamboo-basket sedan chair, the year rushes to an end” 臨老傷行 役, 籃輿歲月奔 (ll. 1–2). Compared with riding on horseback, the sedan chair is more tranquil and offers a more leisurely opportunity to commune with the landscape. The flexible bamboo poles when the chair is in motion tend to bend slightly up and down, generating a creaking sound that Chen likes

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to describe onomatopoeically as yiya 伊軋 or yiya 伊鴉. “In the wild countryside, human traces are rare, / Yiya, yiya, the bamboo sedan chair hums and creaks” 荒野少人去, 竹輿伊軋聲; “Yiya, yiya, the bamboo sedan chair creaks and squeaks” 竹輿聲伊鴉.71 The pristine quietness of the mountain landscape, enhanced by the gentle sounds of the sedan chair, facilitated a heightened mode of perception and observation of the world in microcosm. “Setting Out from Yecheng in Early Morning” 曉發葉城 (#262/459) is a good example of this intimate mode of perception and interaction. “The bamboo sedan chair opens two windows, / Cutting up the autumn colors into equal halves. // On the left, I send off the lingering moon; / On the right, I welcome the spreading clouds” 竹輿開兩牖, 秋色為橫 分. 左送廉纖月, 右揖離披雲 (ll. 1–4). Traveling slowly to the tune of the sedan chair’s comforting yiya, the poet looks out on both sides as if through the window of his Simplicity Studio. Framed by those imagined windows, he actively interacts with the landscape that continuously streams into his view.72 He is not describing himself being greeted and sent off by the clouds and the moon; he takes the initiative, welcoming and taking leave of the objects in the landscape. He does not consider himself an outsider traveling incidentally through the space but performs the role of a hospitable host. As his journey takes him deeper into the interior of the southern mountains in the next few years, the pattern of intimate interaction we see here will play an increasingly important role in shaping his experiences of and engagement with nature. Although he will continue to incorporate new content and new ingredients, the fundamental dynamic of this active and immersive communication will persist and help him achieve his eventual poetic transformation. Two additional poems written on the same trip south after retrieving his family further illustrate how unfamiliar local landscapes are domesticated and transformed in his thinking and his poetry. Both are written in his favorite five-syllable ancient-style format and both are sixteen lines long.

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The first is “Splendid Indeed Pavilion” 美哉亭 (#264/461). In this poem, he describes spotting a pavilion on a hill while he is traveling through a narrow canyon, and how, once at the pavilion, the change in perspective opens up new horizons to his view and his understanding. The first six lines set up the pavilion’s abrupt appearance in the traveler’s view: “Coming west out of the city gate, / The canyon’s dirt road is wide enough for only one camel. // The sky hangs down like a scroll of white silk, / The twin cliffs competing to show their ruggedness on both sides. // Suddenly, a five-yard-crack opens up ahead, / A pavilion standing loftily like a bird’s nest” 西出城臯關, 土谷僅容駝. 天掛一匹練, 雙崖鬬嵯峨. 忽然五丈缺, 亭構如危窠 (ll. 1–6). The pavilion’s role changes when its relationship to the traveler changes. When the traveler has climbed the hill and reached the pavilion, it becomes the launching ground for the traveler’s new visual adventure, and a new landscape opens up. The next four lines of the poem describe this new landscape from the vantage point of the traveler’s newly acquired height: “Blue mountains illuminate the plains in the middle, / A white sun shines over a big river. // Looking down onto the valley of ten thousand leagues, / How numerous are the plants and trees!” 青山麗中原, 白日 照大河. 下視萬里川, 草木何其多 (ll. 7–10). The grand, open view contrasts sharply with the cramped space the traveler has just labored through at the bottom of the canyon. The opening up of the physical landscape entices the traveler to release longpent-up feelings. His venting, however, is immediately checked by a more powerful force: “Standing high looking into the distance, I heave out a gasp of relief— / But what can I do with these vigorous winds!” 臨高一吐氣, 却奈雄風何 (ll. 11–12). The aggression of the winds leads the speaker to admire the cleverness of the Creator’s design, affirming a popular Northern Song belief that success must be obtained through effort and pain: “A single moment of pleasure comes from diligence and pain, / The Creator’s design is indeed careful and ingenious” 辛苦 生一快, 造物巧揣摩 (ll. 13–14). The poet then comments on the lack

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of perfect correspondence between the two in the real world, before exiting the scene: “Steep and level in the end are not equally matched, / Turning around, I descend the dilapidated slopes” 險易終不償, 翻身 下殘坡 (ll. 15–16). The second poem is “Traveling on the Mountain Road in Early Morning,” which documents another spontaneous experience of travel through the local landscape. Traveling on the Mountain Road in Early Morning 山路曉行 (#265/463) 兩崖夾曉月 The two cliffs hold the morning moon tightly in between, 萬壑分秋風 2 Ten thousand ravines divide the autumn wind. 今朝定何朝 What a beautiful morning it is today! 孤賞莫與同 4 No one is here to share the solitary enjoyment with me. 石路抱壁轉 The rocky road hugs every turn of the cliff walls, 雲氣青濛濛 6 Vapors of cloud rise above misty greens. 籃輿拂露枝 The sedan chair brushes against the dew-strewn branches, 亂點驚僕童 8 The drops splatter chaotically, startling the servant boy. 微泉不知處 A tiny spring comes from nowhere, 玉佩鳴深叢 10 Jade pendants tingling in the deep clusters. 平生慕李愿 Throughout my life I have admired Li Yuan,73 即此行旅中 12 My wish is fulfilled here right in this journey. 居人輕佳境 The local residents take lightly of the beautiful scenery,

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過客意無窮 14 The intentions of the passing traveler are without end. 山木好題詩 The mountain trees are perfect for inscribing poems on, 恨我行怱怱 16 Regrettable that I have to hustle along with my trip. As this poem starts, the landscape is clear, crisp, demarcated, perfectly in place. The moon is firmly propped up, flanked by the high cliffs rising on both sides of the canyon (l. 1); the autumn winds are distributed evenly among the mountain’s myriad crevices and ravines (l. 2); the “vapors of cloud” (l. 6) are lifting above mist-shrouded green bushes. The view, and the traveler’s “solitary enjoyment” (l. 4), are appreciated by a coolheaded, sharp-eyed observer who establishes his authority by minutely describing the scenery and its components. His observational precision transfers to the movements of the objects as well; the road follows every twist and turn of the cliff walls (l. 5), clinging to them like a proxy or extension of the poet himself. Compared with “Splendid Indeed Pavilion,” which focuses on the discovery of the multiple faces of the landscape, this poem describes the recovery of the poet-observer’s senses, some of which are muted or obscured when the poem starts and gain their full functionality only later in the poem. The turning point occurs in lines 7–10, where the poet’s perception sharpens. His undivided focus on his surroundings, as if in slow motion, shifts from the visual details to the aural: “The sedan chair brushes against the dew-strewn branches, / The drops splatter chaotically, startling the servant boy. // A tiny spring comes from nowhere, / Jade pendants tingling in the deep clusters” (ll. 7–10). The close-quarters encounter with “dew-strewn branches” and other objects reflects the particular circumstances of the road as the poet pushes deep into the details of the landscape; he is no longer observing from a distance or recalling them afterward. This four-line stanza represents the most focused treatment thus far of the poet’s natural engagement. The traveler in his sedan chair brushing against the dewy branches is both unusual and stunning. The

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dewdrops that fall off the stirred branches and the startled response of the servant boy, as well as the narrow road’s personified effort to cling to the cliff walls—these sensual perceptions are infused with a sense of deliberateness, a metaphorical stepping forth of the poet’s person into the landscape. The poet shows up not as a mere observer and follower of the scenery but as an enthusiastic explorer actively taking in and interacting with the landscape’s tiny sounds and details. The dewdrop couplet also represents the climactic point in the poem’s visual perception. The experience of the early morning has until now been processed primarily through the traveler’s eyes. The boy’s shock is initially presented only visually as well; then, in the following couplet, the scene all of a sudden erupts with sounds, with the hidden waters beneath the bushes simultaneously waking up themselves and amplifying the acoustic effect of the boy’s startled cry. The narrative process toward this experiential climax is gradual and carefully, albeit unnoticeably, controlled. It starts at the beginning of the poem, when everything in the early morning landscape is clearly defined, but only visually so; even the whistling and rustling of the autumn winds are rendered soundless. The focus is on the visually unfolding movements and actions; the tenacity of the roads, the audacity of the sedan chair moving through the cramped canyon, and the chaotic dispersal of the dewdrops are described through a series of action-packed verbs: bao 抱 (to hug), zhuan 轉 (to turn), fu 拂 (to brush, to whisk), and jing (to startle, to shock). With aurality restored, the early-morning travel experience is finally complete. At the height of the revelation, the reader’s senses are fully activated and can almost hear the boy’s surprised exclamations. The awakening also brings the poet out of his immersive observation and back to the reality of his journey. Here, the poem’s time frame extends from the present to the historical and cultural, with the poet expressing admiration for the Tang scholar Li Yuan’s choice of reclusion (ll. 11–12); philosophizing about the differences in the perceptions of local residents and passersby (ll. 13–14); commenting on how his need to keep moving

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regrettably prevents him from inscribing the poem on the trees along the mountain road (ll. 15–16). The process we witness here, by which a local landscape is traversed, observed, inscribed with meaning, and thus acquires an identity, was essential to the new path to poetry Chen was venturing onto. The physicality of the experience, as well as its embedded presentism and performativity, would loom large as his journey went on, ultimately helping to bring his poetry to a new level. This transformative process also took place within the larger context of his forced movement away from home and the political center, always pushed on by his fear that the Song court was on the verge of being extinguished by a foreign, barbarian power. These experiences, with their qualities of great intimacy and solitude, would be key to Chen Yuyi’s eventual achievement of the ideal unity between self and world, person and scenery. His experience here, in these poems, also represents an augmented version of an earlier one that had helped him through his Chenliu exile, at the end of which he was able to rediscover his mental balance. The uncertain vista opening before his horse when he started from Shangshui had been stabilized, so to speak, narrowed down, and had acquired a forward vector as he pushed through the pristine mountain roads from Ruzhou to Guanghua. The new paths now emerging before him, filled with “feelings of poetry” 詩 情, would take him into ever narrower and more challenging situations before eventually opening up and leading him to self-discovery and the feeling of poetic perfection.74

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Notes 1. The official history of the Song describes the drama surrounding the abdication. On the twenty-third day of the twelfth lunar month of the previous year, 1125, “Huizong ordered the Crown Prince to succeed him and designated himself Supreme Emperor of the Daoist Lord. He had the Crown Prince rushed to the palace and placed the imperial robe on him. The Crown Prince wept and steadfastly refused. On the pretext of illness, he again steadfastly refused, but it was not allowed” 徽宗詔皇 太子嗣位, 自稱曰道君皇帝. 趣太子入禁中, 被以御服, 泣涕固辭, 因得 疾, 又固辭, 不許. Songshi, 23.421. Qinzong ascended the throne the next day, on the twenty-fourth. 2. The Jingkang reign lasted essentially for only one year, 1126. Qinzong’s rule effectively ended when he surrendered at the end of 1126 to the commanders of the Jurchen army besieging Kaifeng during the second Jurchen invasion, although his reign was not officially abolished by the Jin until the second month of the following year. Gaozong ascended the throne on the first day of the fifth lunar month of 1127 in Yingtian with the new reign title Jianyan (1127–1130), and this marked the beginning of the Southern Song. Unless otherwise noted, events for the Jingkang period are based on Wang Zhiyong, Jingkang; those for the Jianyan and the subsequent Shaoxing period (1131–1162) are based on JYYL. 3. Wang Zhiyong, Jingkang, 95. Huizong left Kaifeng on the third night of the first lunar month of 1126, on getting the news that the Jurchen cavalry had already crossed the Yellow River. Chenliu was on the Bian Canal and thus on Huizong’s retreat route to Bozhou. Huizong would soon be captured by Jurchen soldiers and taken back to Kaifeng as a prisoner. 4. A mention of Chenliu in the JYYL under the eighth day of the fourth month of the following year, 1127, may shed some retrospective light on the chaotic situation there when Chen Yuyi left: “Li Zhong, a trooper originally garrisoned in Chenliu, leading a group of defeated soldiers, wanted to enter Qingshui township of Hezhou. The military inspector of Haozhou, together with the militias of the local families in Dingyuan County, refused their passage and killed Li Zhong” 陳留潰散戍兵李忠 率眾入和州清水鎮, 濠州巡檢及定遠界土豪許氏, 徐氏, 金氏槍仗手 遮境拒之, 殺李忠. JYYL, 4.23b [87].

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5. JYYL, 4.1b–2a [76–77]. 6. Dengzhou was 750 leagues to Kaifeng. Deducting the 52 leagues between Kaifeng and Chenliu, the exact number from Chenliu to Dengzhou would be 698. 7. “Endangered tears” (weiti 危涕) as a compound originated in the “Rhapsody on Regret” 恨賦 by Jiang Yan 江淹 (444–505), although using the idea of “precariousness” (also wei 危) to describe an endangered person’s mind can be traced back to Mencius 7A.18. 8. The fifth-century general Tan Daoji 檀道濟 was proud of his “thirty-six military stratagems” 三十六策. He was later mocked because, as people said, “his best strategy was to flee” 走是上計 while in an actual battle. 9. Du Fu likes to use mangmang 茫茫 (blank, vast, far and wide) to describe scenes of war and his feelings about it. “Ballad Regretting Parting: Seeing Off Liu, the Administrative Assistant of the Vice-Director” 惜別行送劉 僕射判官: “In the nine regions the clash of arms spreads far and wide” 九州兵革浩茫茫. “South Pool” 南池: “The clash of arms spreads far and wide” 干戈浩茫茫. Xiao Difei, Du Fu, 5842, 2926; Owen, Poetry, 6:121, 3:335. 10. “Inviting Zhang Zhongzong Over” 招張仲宗 (#215/391). Zhongzong was the courtesy name of Zhang Yuangan 張元幹 (ca. 1091–1170), who was known in the Southern Song for his vigorous song lyrics. 11. “Encountering Rain in a Monk’s Room at Eight Passes Temple” 八關 僧房遇雨 (#218/395). “To Ah Xin of the Huang Family” 贈黃家阿莘 (#219/396). 12. “Life’s Splendid Blossoms” (#39/92): “Life’s splendid blossoms do not betray the sojourner, / One by one, they enter my poems” (ll. 7–8). 13. CYYJJJ, 399. 14. Gaozong arrived at Hangzhou in the second month of 1129. In the seventh month of the year the city was upgraded from a regular prefecture to a superior or metropolitan prefecture 府 and renamed (the name Lin’an originally referred to a county under the city’s jurisdiction). Lin’an was adopted, following historical precedent, as Gaozong’s xingzai 行在, “imperial residence on the road” or “temporary capital-inexile.” During the winter of that year, Gaozong was driven by a fastmoving Jurchen cavalry contingent out of the city onto the open sea. After the Jin troops retreated, the court returned and stayed in Yuezhou 越州 (upgraded to a metropolitan prefecture and renamed Shaoxing 紹 興 in 1131) for about a year and a half before moving back to Hangzhou at the start of 1132. Hangzhou was officially proclaimed the Southern Song

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capital six years later, in 1138. The imperial court and central government stayed there for about a century and a half, until the city fell to the invading Mongols in 1276. The choice of Hangzhou as capital was based in part on its relative seclusion, a natural defense against Jurchen attack. In Jacques Gernet’s words, to reach it, “a region had to be traversed which was riddled by innumerable lakes and by muddy rice-fields: difficult terrain for the deployment of cavalry.” Gernet, Daily Life, 23. For the pragmatic rationale behind the selection, see also Kiang, Cities, 139– 142. Practicality played an important role in the selection of Kaifeng as the Northern Song capital as well; E.A. Kracke Jr. calls it a “pragmatic metropolis.” Kracke, “Sung K’ai-feng.” 15. Qiancang was in Pingyang 平陽, a county of Wenzhou 溫州 in southern Zhejiang. 16. All statistics in this book, unless otherwise noted, are mine. 17. Under the eighteenth day of the first month of 1126, The Essential Record of Jingkang reports: “When a group of conscripted soldiers from Luoyang led by the military commander Ma Zhong encountered the Jurchen soldiers outside the Southern Gate of Zhengzhou, they launched a quick attack taking advantage of the situation, killing and capturing many of them. After this, the Jurchens became afraid and their mounted scouts no longer dared to go into the outlying areas [of Kaifeng], and the local people from the capital southward started to calm down and settle” 是日, 統制官馬忠以西京募兵至, 遇金人於鄭州南門外, 乘勢擊 之, 殺獲甚眾. 於是金人始懼, 遊騎不敢旁出, 自京城以南, 民始奠居. Wang Zhiyong, Jingkang, 161. It was a surprise encounter because the Jurchen troops were believed to have encamped in Kaifeng. Zhengzhou was 140 leagues, or about 43 miles, west of Kaifeng. Ye Mengde paints a more harrowing picture of the type of extreme measures the common people had to resort to in their scramble for survival: “Since the start of the war, wherever the robbers, bandits, and barbarian invaders went, no living creatures could be found again. There were instances where people had escaped and hidden in the woods and mountain valleys but then the baby they carried on their back cried, betraying their location. As a result, those fleeing the bandits who had small babies that could not be instructed to keep quiet all abandoned them by the roadside, where they piled up like mountains” 兵興以來, 盜賊夷狄, 所及無 噍類. 有先期奔避, 伏匿山谷林莽間者, 或幸以免. 忽襁負嬰兒啼聲聞 於外, 亦因得其處. 於是避賊之人, 凡嬰兒未解事, 不可戒語者, 率棄之 道旁以去, 纍纍相望. Ye Mengde, Bishu luhua 避暑錄話, juan 2; quoted

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18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

23.

24.

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in CYYJJJ, 400n1. Domestically initiated violence, including local banditry and mutinying soldiers, was a severe problem for the Song government in the first few years of the war. CYYJJJ, 401. Kuizhou (modern Fengjie of Chongqing) occupies the entrance point from Sichuan via the Gorges into the middle and lower regions of the Yangzi. According to Chen Yixin 陳貽焮 (1924–2000), Du Fu’s work during his twenty-one-month stay in Kuizhou from 766 to 768 represents about a third of his total output, 467 out of 1,439 poems. Chen Yixin, Du Fu, 940. Chen Yixin, Du Fu, 939–949. “First Letter to Wang Guanfu” 與王觀復第一書. Huang Tingjian, Yuzhang, 19.18b. From, respectively, Du Fu’s “Sunning Myself at West Tower” 西閣曝日: “Why, as I enter my twilight years, / Does heart’s strength for worrying about the times weaken?” 胡為將暮年, 憂世心力弱; and “Winter Solstice” 冬至: “The heart snaps at this moment, even that one speck is gone, / My way is lost, and when will I see tripartite Qin?” 心折此時 無一寸, 路迷何處是三秦. Xiao Difei, Du Fu, 4278, 5325; Owen, Poetry, 5:27, 5:343. That Chen started to write more in Du Fu’s manner after the Jingkang period should not be taken as my endorsement of his works. I am in general agreement with Michael Fuller’s insightful critique of Chen Yuyi’s poetry: that his aesthetic universe is far more complex than Du Fu’s but much less powerful, both aesthetically and emotionally. See Fuller, Drifting, 174–181. On the series as Du Fu’s highest achievement, see Ye Jiaying, “Lun Du Fu.” For “former gardens” (guyuan), see “Stirred by Autumn: Eight Poems” (1 of 8): “Chrysanthemum clumps twice have bloomed forth tears of another day, / A lonely boat tied up once and for all a heart set on its homeland” 叢菊兩開他日淚, 孤舟一繫故園心. Xiao Difei, Du Fu, 3790; Owen, Poetry, 4:353. For a different translation of the poem, see McCraw, Du Fu’s Laments, 201. For “former country” (guguo), see “Stirred by Autumn: Eight Poems” (4 of 8): “Fish and dragons grow silent now, autumn rivers grow cold, / The life I used to have at home is the longing in my heart” 魚龍寂寞秋江冷, 故國平居有所思. Xiao Difei, Du Fu, 3808; Owen, Poetry, 4:355. For a different translation, see McCraw, Du Fu’s Laments, 202.

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25. Lu Qinli, Xianqin, 330. As noted by Yu Guanying 余冠英, in Chinese poetry often only one of the components in a compound directional noun such as xibei 西北 (northwest) refers to the intended direction, the other being a filler. See Yu Guanying, Han Wei Liuchao, 45. I want to thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out to me. 26. Stephen Owen calls the opposite direction, the southeastern flight of birds in early five-syllable poetry, most notably the anonymous yuefu 樂 府 poem “Southeast Fly the Peacocks” 孔雀東南飛, the “expected poetic direction,” because it was governed more by poetic prosody or convention than their referential coherence. Owen, Making, 82. For a translation and analysis of the poem “Southeast Fly the Peacocks,” see Frankel, “Chinese Ballad.” 27. Lu Qinli, Xianqin, 401. 28. “Stirred by Autumn: Eight Poems” (2 of 8). Xiao Difei, Du Fu, 3796; Owen, Poetry, 4:353, with minor modifications. For a different translation of the poem, see McCraw, Du Fu’s Laments, 201. 29. In “Stopping at Nanyang” 次南陽 (#222/401), the clouds seem to have finally cast off their conventional symbolism and become referential. “The clouds today in the northeast, / How beautiful and gorgeous your shapes are! // Let my horse for a moment not gallop, / And wait for the auspicious words to come” 今日東北雲, 景氣何佳哉! 我馬且勿驅, 當 有吉語來 (ll. 1–4). Emphasis added. 30. The exact date of Chen’s arrival in Dengzhou cannot be determined, but it was probably toward the end of the first lunar month. Dengzhou was the administrative seat of the prefecture of the same name. In the Northern Song, Dengzhou and neighboring Tangzhou 唐州 were under the administrative jurisdiction of Wusheng Military Prefecture 武勝軍. Nanyang was one of the five counties under Dengzhou Prefecture. 31. “The Wall Towers of Dengzhou” 鄧州城樓 (#256/449). 32. Xiao Tong, Wenxuan, 68; Knechtges, Wen xuan, 1:311. 33. On the difficulty of the Tang Huaixi campaign, see Peterson, “Regional Defense.” This region is hilly relative to the flat plains of the Yellow River area to the north. As subsequent Jurchen military campaigns showed, the low-lying hills of this area proved no match for the fast-moving, heavily armored Jurchen cavalry. 34. Wang Zhiyong, Jingkang, 556. 35. Ibid., 608. 36. Huizong’s son and successor Qinzong ascended to the throne in the last days of the previous year.

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37. There is some uncertainty regarding the identity of the Zhou family referenced in the poem, but it should not concern us here. See CYYJJJ, 440– 441n1. 38. For example, “Pacing on the Dike at Night: Three Poems” (2 of 3) (#208/382): “Let me just bring this worried mind, / And count out the trees west of the bridge one by one” (ll. 9–10). 39. The theme of Du Fu’s poem “Journeying South,” written in 769, toward the end of his career, is life’s shortness and the difficulty of finding a “true understanding friend”: “Spring shores, waters of peach blossoms, / Cloud-like sail, forests of maple trees. // Saving my life, ever seeking a refuge, / I go off far, again soaking my gown with tears. // Old and sick, days of journeying south, / My ruler’s grace, a heart that gazes north. // Life’s hundred years, singing of my suffering, / I have never seen a true understanding friend” 春岸桃花水, 雲帆楓樹林. 偷生長避地, 適遠更 霑襟. 老病南征日, 君恩北望心. 百年歌自苦, 未見有知音. Xiao Difei, Du Fu, 5684; Owen, Poetry, 6:45. 40. The Fang La rebellion of 1120–1121 seriously distracted the Northern Song from its then-ongoing war effort against the Liao in the north and served as an early warning of severe internal trouble for the Northern Song government. For a study in English, see Kao, “Study.” 41. The city fell eventually in the ninth month of 1126. The long and hardfought siege in Taiyuan was the first real test of military might and strength of will for both the Song and the Jin. The fall of the city significantly worsened Northern Song defenses in the entire Yellow River region, leaving Kaifeng and Luoyang virtually unprotected. 42. Lian Po and Lin Xiangru served in the same court of the Warring States ruler of Zhao: the former was a military general and the latter a civil minister. The duo overcame some early grudge and became one of the most successful general-minister teams in Chinese history. 43. “Bing Gate” refers to Bingzhou 并州, an archaic name for Taiyuan. 44. The full text of the edict is cited in Wang Zhiyong, Jingkang, 772–775. 45. The syntax of the Chinese original here is modeled on the opening couplet of Du Fu’s “Recalling the Past: Two Poems” 憶昔二首 (2 of 2): “I recall long ago when the Kaiyuan reign was in its glory days, / Even small towns contained within homes of ten thousand families” 憶昔開元 全盛日, 小邑猶藏萬家室. Xiao Difei, Du Fu, 3240; Owen, Poetry, 3:409. 46. The abandoned temple refers to Fan Zhongyan’s temple in Dengzhou. Huang Tingjian observed at the start of the Yuanfeng period that the shrine was already in a dilapidated state. See CYYJJJ, 426n2.

166 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54.

55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62.

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Hu Yinglin, Shisou, Outer Collection 外編, 5.25a [180]. Mo, Zhu Xi, 43. CYYJJJ, 408n1. Owen, Poetry, lv. Hu Zhi attributed Chen’s adoption of this studio name to a later date. I am following Bai Dunren, who placed its adoption at this time in Dengzhou, based on a convincing argument by Liu Chenweng. For more details, see CYYJJJ, 435–436n1. Chen probably continued to name his residence Jianzhai after his Dengzhou days. See the essay on Chen by Ma Qiangcai 馬強才 in Fu Xuancong, Song caizi zhuan, 837. I want to thank one of the anonymous reviewers for directing me to this piece of scholarship. Yunshuang Zhang, “Porous Privacy.” For “inward turn,” see James T.C. Liu, China Turning Inward. Celestial maidens scattering flowers is a stock theme in decorative paintings, especially those of a Buddhist nature. “Fellows who can order devils” is a figurative reference to money, deriving from the popular saying “Money will make the devil turn the millstones” 有錢能使鬼推磨. A foldable seat made of cords of rope (shengchuang 繩牀) appears frequently in the literature of the period. Ruan Fu loved shoes and never restrained himself from demonstrating his love for them before his guests and friends. The story of the commandant of Ye is told in the “Household Governance” 治家 chapter of Yanshi jiaxun 顏氏家訓 (Family instructions of the Yan clan) by Yan Zhitui 顏 之推 (531–591). Wang Liqi, Yanshi, 45. Xiao Difei, Du Fu, 779; Owen, Poetry, 1:259, with modifications. Owen translated the title as “View in Spring.” Liu and Yu, Li Shangyin, 1396. The translation is mine. For an alternate translation, see James J.Y. Liu, Poetry, 165. Quoted in Liu and Yu, Li Shangyin, 1397. See Liu and Yu, Li Shangyin, 1397–1398; James J.Y. Liu, Poetry, 165. Ruan Ji was a member of the early Six Dynasties group “Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove.” He often drove out alone but did not follow predetermined paths; he would wail when the road ended. Li Shangyin describes a situation even more desperate than Ruan’s end-of-the-road sadness. The phrase “silently burning” was used by Wu Diaogong 吳調公 to describe Li’s passion for poetry. Wu Diaogong, Li Shangyin, 28. “Traveling Thoughts on an Autumn Day” 秋日客思 (#258/453), l. 1.

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63. Langfeng was an imagined garden for the immortals atop the highest peaks of Mount Kunlun 崑崙, in a craggy mountain range located in northwest China. See Birrell, Chinese Mythology, 183–185. 64. Fusang, or the Leaning Mulberry, was a mythological tree in the seas to the east of China from which the sun rose. See Birrell, Chinese Mythology, 234. 65. Du Fu, “Journey North,” ll. 1–4. Xiao Difei, Du Fu, 943-46; Owen, Poetry, 1:333–345. Du Fu’s elaborate five-syllable narrative poems are a phenomenon in themselves and have long attracted attention from traditional commentators. Ye Mengde succinctly remarks: “Long compositions are most difficult. Before the Wei and Jin period, no poem had more than ten couplets. This is probably because the goal was to express what is on the poet’s mind, and thoroughness of narration was originally not considered a mark of success. When it comes to Du Fu, especially his compositions such as ‘An Account of My Concerns’ and ‘Journey North,’ he intended to treat his topics as exhaustively as possible in the style of Sima Qian’s historical annals and biographies. This was certainly unparalleled in poetic history” 長篇最難. 晉魏以前, 詩無過十韻者. 蓋常使人 以意逆志, 初不以序事傾盡為工. 至老杜述懷北征諸篇, 窮極筆力, 如 太史公紀傳, 此固古今絕唱. Ye Mengde, Shilin shihua, 7. Du Fu’s “An Account of My Concerns” 述懷 has thirty-two lines and narrates his escape from rebel-occupied Chang’an and arrival at Suzong’s itinerant imperial court in Fengxiang in the early summer of 757, before he wrote “Journey North.” 66. Of the 254 shi poems written up to this point, including both the fivesyllable and seven-syllable formats, 30 are sixteen lines in length, which is more than the number of poems longer than sixteen lines combined (there are 24 longer poems: 2 eighteen-liners; 13 with twenty lines; 5 with twenty-four; 2 with twenty-eight; 1 with thirty-two; and 1 with fortyeight). Of the remaining 308 poems in the collection, 24 have sixteen lines. This brings the total number of sixteen-line poems to 54 out of 562, about 10 percent of Chen’s works. The longest poem in the collection, written in 1129, has fifty-six lines (#394, see chapter 6). 67. See note 65 of this chapter. 68. Lu Qinli, Xianqin, 733. 69. According to David McCraw, this object and its variations appear more than twenty times in Chen’s poems. McCraw, “Poetry,” 247. McCraw’s remark that it is “most unusual” to hear Chen speak of traveling on

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70.

71. 72. 73.

74.

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horseback, however, is valid only for the post-Jingkang period, as discussions in the earlier chapters show. The exchange of Chinese tea for horses at frontier towns and trading depots was a pillar of cross-border trade between the Song court and its northern neighbors, the Liao, the Western Xia, and the Jin. See von Glahn, Economic History, 270. After the outbreak of the Jurchen war, however, horses became a strategic commodity and the trade was tightly regulated. “On the Road, Stopping for the Night in Yecheng” 將次葉城道中 (#260/457), ll. 1–2. “Entering the City” 入城 (#206/380), l. 1. As pointed out by an anonymous reviewer, the windows here were probably not imagined; they could be actual windows of the covered bamboo sedan. In “Preface Sending off Li Yuan to Return to Meandering Valley” 送李愿 歸盤谷序, the Tang guwen master Han Yu describes the beautiful natural scenery of the valley Li was returning to, having failed his examinations in Chang’an. Han consoles a crestfallen Li by saying that his great moral virtue was a perfect match for the valley. Liu and Yue, Han Yu, 1031–1032. Ouyang Xiu considered the piece “the best single prose work” of the entire Tang dynasty. Charles Hartman called it “a paean to the virtues of rustic life that enlarges into a meditation on the meaning of life itself.” Hartman, Han Yü, 264. See also Spring, “T’ang Landscape,” 322–323. “Setting Out from Yecheng in Early Morning” (#262/459): “Feelings of poetry fill up the landscape before the traveler” 詩情滿行色 (l. 5).

Chapter 5

Mountains and Rivers Chen Yuyi spent the rest of 1126 in Guanghua, then returned to Dengzhou at the start of 1127 and stayed there for a full year before being driven out of it and into Fangzhou 房州 in the first month of 1128, when the city fell to the Jurchen army. Within that same time frame, Kaifeng was besieged for a second time and quickly fell; Emperors Huizong and Qinzong were carried north as prisoners when the Jurchens withdrew in the fourth month of 1127; and Zhao Gou 趙構 (r. 1127–1162), the ninth son of Huizong and a half-brother of Qinzong, and only male member of the Song royal family who was not captured by the Jurchens, ascended the throne and established what would later become known as the Southern Song (1127–1279). This last event took place on the first day of the fifth lunar month of the year and marked the beginning of the new reign era of Jianyan 建炎, “Establishing Incandescence,” signifying the fighting spirit of the new emperor and his government. When Chen reentered Dengzhou, only the second besiegement of Kaifeng had happened. Things around him, however, did not seem as usual at all. In the third of a four-poem set titled “Expressing My Thoughts on Recent Events upon Returning to Dengzhou from Guanghua with Jishen and Xindao” 與季申信道自光化復入鄧書事四首 (3 of 4) (#272/473), the

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memory of his first arrival one year earlier invokes mixed feelings.1 “Coming again, white hair has grown in my head, / I see Dengzhou’s spring for a second time. // The city’s west road looks as before, / But the peach blossoms no longer remember me” 再來生白髮, 重見鄧州春. 依 舊城西路, 桃花不記人 (ll. 1–4). The peach blossoms that in the previous year had extended their welcoming branches to the exhausted poet now acted like strangers, indifferent to the returning visitor’s feelings. This perceived change of attitude on the part of the natural world presciently signaled what was awaiting him in the next year. “Things look as chaotic as yesterday, / Affairs of the world are doubly lamentable” 物態紛如昨, 世事再嗚呼, he writes in “Expressing My Feelings” 述懷 (#278/479, ll. 7–8), referring to the fall of Kaifeng and the capture of Huizong and Qinzong. The sad status of the political situation left him feeling entrapped: “Riding off on a raft would lead only to unfathomable blankness; / Let me stop and linger here for a while instead” 乘槎莽未辦, 且復小踟躕 (ll. 11–12).2 The mood in the poem was symbolic of his general sentiment during his second stay in the city: he remained hopeful for the newly established Southern Song government’s restoration efforts but was deeply aggrieved and uncertain about the state of things on both the national and the personal level. His grief found an outlet for expression in what should be one of the year’s most celebratory occasions, the Double Ninth festival in the fall. Chen begins his poem “Double Ninth” (#280/483) with the lines, “Last year on Double Ninth, already worried a hundred times; / This year again I lament being a stranded traveler as before” 去歲重陽已百憂, 今年依 舊歎羈遊 (ll. 1–2). The personal lament is then coupled with the political situation: “Chill winds again bring down leaves south of the palace, / An old goose cries alone in the lands north of the Han River” 涼風又落宮南 木, 老鴈孤鳴漢北州 (ll. 5–6). The trees in Kaifeng must be shedding their leaves again, but the palaces are devoid of their former residents because they were captured and carried away to the north. The former imperial capitals are still reachable in his imagination, but they are physically

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separated from the poet.3 Even the old, tested tool of poetry seems to have lost its power and efficacy: “Years passing by like this, how can I bear writing about them? / I aimlessly arrange lines of verse to record the new sorrows” 如許行年那可記, 謾排詩句寫新愁 (ll. 7–8). The Double Ninth festival also brought back fond memories of past happiness, particularly the grand imperial banquet in Kaifeng on the festival day three years before, in 1124, to celebrate the momentous recovery of Yanjing 燕京.4 “I recall that time, the Double Ninth day of the jiachen year [1124], / His Imperial Majesty’s grace bestowed us a feast in the city’s east” 憶昔甲辰重九日, 天恩曾與宴城東, Chen writes in “Having Leftover Thoughts, I Composed Another Poem” 有感 再賦 (#281/484, ll. 1–2). Three years later, the situation and mood were completely reversed. Not only had the hopes of recovering the historically lost northern territories been shattered by the Jurchen invasion, but the two former emperors had been carried north in captivity, and, as news had just come, both had been sent farther away from Yanjing, to the northern deserts.5 As Chen continues in “Having Leftover Thoughts”: “The west winds in White Dragon Sands must be cold today, / Who will be there snapping the yellow flowers for the two Imperial Majesties?” 龍沙此日西風冷, 誰折黃花壽兩宮? (ll. 7–8).6 The Southern Song loyalist and author of Shilin guangji 詩林廣記 (Extended record of the groves of poetry), Cai Zhengsun 蔡正孫 (fl. 1289), commented on the “doleful tone” of these Double Ninth poems: “It overflows with grief and sorrow, feeling like reading Du Fu” 悲慨之 情溢於言外, 有老杜風.7 What is noteworthy is that Cai did not merely make a comparison between Chen Yuyi and Du Fu’s poems, as did many of Chen’s Southern Song commentators; he revealed the basis on which he made the comparison. His comment followed a similar line of thought as the remark by Qian Zhongshu that I quoted in the introduction, that Chen’s Du Fu awakening was driven by the same personal tribulation and national disaster that had tormented Du Fu after the An Lushan Rebellion.8

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In discussing the emotional awakening in Chen Yuyi’s poetry after the Jingkang Catastrophe, I suggested in chapter 4 that we need to make a distinction between his desire to adopt Du Fu’s emotions and the actual outcome of his effort. A key factor preventing a complete Du Fu impersonation was that Chen was writing in a very different intellectual and technical environment, with very different skills and cultural expectations. Du Fu’s impact was manifest most conspicuously in the content of Chen’s emotions, not their expression. We also need to keep in mind that there was a self-reflective aspect to Chen’s Du Fu emulation. As much as he would want to don everything in Du Fu’s poetic wardrobe, there was a concurrent desire inside him to find the most appropriate words for the current situation he faced himself. As we will see in chapter 6, he had a variety of intellectual and literary resources available for him to draw on; Du Fu doubtless was the most prominent, but he was still just one of many influences on Chen Yuyi’s thinking and writing. In the following pages of the chapter, I document the psychological and emotional process by which Du Fu’s greatness and relevance were measured and remeasured by Chen against the harsh, new realities he encountered as his travel took him farther and farther into uncharted territory, and the emotional part of his struggle was pushed to the foreground.

Du Fu’s Heftiness The idea that the emotional profile of Chen Yuyi’s poetry experienced a radical revamping after the Jingkang Catastrophe received a confessional endorsement by the poet himself in a poem written at the start of 1128, when he was chased by Jurchen soldiers, first from Dengzhou across the Han River to Fangzhou, and then from the city of Fangzhou into the nearby mountains. Fangzhou fell to troops led by the Jurchen general Nichuhe 尼楚赫 (1072–1140) on the twelfth of the first lunar month; Dengzhou fell a few days before that, on the third of the month.

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On the Twelfth Day of the First Month, I Encountered the Jin Marauders in Fangzhou and Fled into the Southern Mountains; On the Fifteenth Day, I Arrived at the Zhang Family House in Winding Valley 正月十二日自房州城遇金虜至奔入南山十五日 抵回谷張家 (#288/498) 久謂事當爾 I have long thought that things would turn this way, 豈意身及之 2 How could I have imagined that I would experience it myself? 避虜連三年 In escaping the barbarians I have entered into the third year,9 行半天四維 4 In my travels I have covered half of the world’s ordinal directions.10 我非洛豪士 I am not that brocade-caped man of Luoyang, 不畏窮谷飢 6 I have no fears of starving in a barren valley.11 但恨平生意 The only regret is, all my life, 輕了少陵詩 8 I have taken lightly of Du Fu’s poems. 今年奔房州 This year I fled from Fangzhou, 鐵馬背後馳 10 Iron horses were galloping right behind me. 造物亦惡劇 The Creator indeed played a naughty trick, 脫命真毫釐 12 Letting me escape death by a split hair only. 南山四程雲 Southern Mountain’s clouds over the past four days, 布襪傲險巇 14 Witnessing me weather the hazards with bare stockings. 籬間老炙背 The old man basking his back behind the fences, 無意管安危 16 Totally unconcerned whether I was in danger or safe.

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Writing Poetry, Surviving War 知我是朝士 Having known that I was an official of the court, 亦復顰其眉 18 He indeed again knitted his eyebrows. 呼酒軟客腳 Calling for wine to assuage the pain of the traveler’s feet, 菜本濯玉肌 20 Boiling vegetable roots to wash the guest’s flesh.12 窮途士易德 In dire straits, a scholar was quick to express his gratitude, 歡喜不復辭 22 Joy after delight, I happily accepted his kindness. 向來貪讀書 I had always committed to the reading of books, 閉戶生白髭 24 Behind closed doors, white hair had grown in my head. 豈知九州內 How could I have known that within the Nine Regions, 有山如此奇 26 There was a mountain of such marvelous beauty! 自寬實不情 As I consoled myself on my good fortune against the odds, 老人亦解頤 28 The old man also broke into smiles. 投宿恍世外 Staying the night here, I felt as if being in another world, 青燈耿茅茨 30 A blue lamp shining under the thatched roof. 夜半不能眠 At midnight I could not sleep, 澗水鳴聲悲 32 The canyon stream was moaning sadly.

With thirty-two lines, this is one of Chen’s longest poems. The increased length can be taken as a natural result of the poem’s dramatic plotline and its rollercoaster-like emotional profile. As the poet remains sleepless in the late hours of the night, listening to the rushing torrents outside (ll. 29–32), his mind is thronged with a multitude of thoughts and reflections:

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his lifelong commitment to book learning and his regrettable neglect of the real world (ll. 23–24); his past two years on the road (ll. 1–4); his narrow escape from the Jurchen soldiers in Fangzhou a few days ago (ll. 9–12); the past four days of hard travel that brought him to the Zhang family home (ll. 13–14); and his heartfelt reception by the family and his delight and gratitude (ll. 13–28). The description of his dire situation on the road and the chase and his narrow escape in the first half of the poem psychologically and emotionally sets up his coming to terms with the situation in the second half. As the poet is left to face his inner thoughts at midnight in absolute quietness, an insuppressible sadness descends on him. The shining blue lamplight (l. 30) does not lead to poetic production as in “Night Rain”; the rushing torrents in the mountain stream outside are sympathetic, “moaning sadly” in commiseration (l. 32). The acuteness of the poet’s sensual experience is foregrounded through a series of explicit contrasts with his previous cognitive perceptions. Chen starts the poem by noting the difference between a personal, physical encounter (shen ji 身及, l. 2) and a long-time assumption (jiu wei 久 謂, l. 1). This establishes the pattern for subsequent comparisons that run through the length of the poem, including physically experiencing the cragginess (xianxi 險巇, l. 14) and marvelousness (qi 奇, l. 26) of the mountain, evaluated against his usual closed-door mode of gaining knowledge through book reading (dushu 讀書, ll. 23–24); most noticeably, his admitted earlier failure to appropriately measure the weight and real importance of Du Fu’s poems (ll. 7–8). The intensity of the poem’s emotions motivated Liu Chenweng to describe the poem as “boundlessly regrettable, sad without limit” 恨恨 無涯, adding that “tears streamed down every time I read it” 每見潸 然.13 Liu’s friend Zhongzhai 中齋 shared this sentiment when he made a similar comment, emphasizing the poem’s diverse emotional profile: “This poem exhausts all the looks and appearances of what a harrowing journey entails, mixing feelings and emotions of sadness and joy, fear and awe” 此詩盡艱苦歷落之態, 雜悲喜憂畏之懷.14 Liu took an unusual

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step, placing the poem above Du Fu’s “Journey North.” “Boundless emotions turn and change throughout the course of the poem,” he wrote, “to the point that it becomes unbearable to read. The poem’s rich and many descriptions of joy and sorrow makes me feel Du Fu’s ‘Journey North’ cumbersome” 轉換餘情, 殆不忍讀, 欣悲多態, 尚覺北征為煩.15

Immersive Description Grief or sadness emerges as the defining sentiment during Chen Yuyi’s three months of hiding in the mountains near Fangzhou. The emotion is so intense that it extends beyond specific occasions and manifests itself in almost all settings. In the second poem in a set of two titled “On the Sixteenth Night of the First Month” 正月十六夜二絕 (2 of 2) (#290/503), the sound of wind blowing over a cluster of bamboo metamorphoses into sympathetic moans: “At second watch, the winds blew over the bamboo, / Moaning sadly past midnight” 二更風薄竹, 悲吟連夜分 (ll. 1–2). The moaning continues from night into day, as in “Sitting on a Rock by the Stream” 坐澗邊石上 (#291/503): “Three walls of blue mountains surround the bamboo fence, / No human ways to inquire about the safety of the world outside. // Bamboo staffs in hands, we sit together on a craggy boulder, / The canyon stream moans sadly without an end” 三面青山圍 竹籬, 人間無路訪安危. 扶筇共坐槎牙石, 澗水悲鳴無歇時 (ll. 1–4). The feeling of being physically surrounded in a constrained mountain canyon profoundly affects the way Chen sees, observes, and interacts with the local environment while in the mountains. Everything now seems to be cast in a different light. The tendencies we observed in his earlier mountain-road poems when he traveled from Ruzhou to Guanghua, in which the intimate encounters with the local landscape pushed his descriptions to a new level of detail and precision, are now intensified; traditionally romantic situations, such as a moonlit walk, are defamiliarized and acquire new meanings. In “Moonlight on the Seventeenth Night,” we find the poet engulfed by sadness. His

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appreciation of the beautiful moonlit scenery described in the first fourteen lines of this poem is totally undone by the last two lines. Moonrise on the Seventeenth Night 十七日夜詠月 (#292/505) 月輪隱東峯 The moon’s full disk is hidden beneath East Peak, 奇彩在南嶺 2 Its marvelous glow already appears on South Ridge. 北崖草木多 North Precipice is numerous with plants and trees, 蒼茫映光景 4 Indistinctly reflecting the light and shadow. 玉盤忽微露 All of a sudden, the jade disk slightly emerges, 銀浪瀉千頃 6 Silvery waves pouring down over a thousand acres. 巖谷散陸離 Rocky cliffs and valleys are unevenly revealed, 萬象雜形影 8 Ten thousand objects mixing up their forms and shapes. 不辭三更露 Not avoiding midnight dew of the third watch; 冒此白髮頂 10 I risk exposing the top of my graying head. 老筇無前遊 My old bamboo staff shows no forward movement, 危處有新警 12 From precarious spots come new alarms. 澗光如翻鶴 The canyon stream glistens like a crane tossing its body, 變態發遙境 14 Constantly changing its appearance in the distance. 回首房州城 Looking back at Fangzhou City, 山中夜何永 16 The long night lingers on in the mountains.

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The poem’s imagery is devoid of almost all traditional allusions and references to the moon (the only exception is the clichéd phrase “jade disk” in line 5). What we have is a concrete, immersive experience of the moonrise and how its sudden, overwhelming brilliance changes the poet’s perceptions of the night landscape. As in most of the poems we have discussed from the post-Jingkang period thus far, the internal process of change and discovery does not lead to a resolution. A potential resolution appears in lines 13–14, where the innovative description of the stream glowing in the moonlight as “a crane tossing its body” (fanhe 翻鶴, l. 13) culminates a series of observations of the moonlight’s beauty and its effect on the surrounding landscape. The momentum from this progressive linguistic and aesthetic innovation, however, is negated in the next couplet (ll. 15–16), when the poet’s expression of pure aesthetic joy is subverted by a surging sadness as he turns his eyes back to Fangzhou. The poet’s description of the subtly changing patterns of light and shape before and after the moonrise is rooted in his precise position in the night landscape. The mapping underlies multiple perspectives: by naming East Peak, South Ridge, and North Precipice he creates a broad survey of the upper rim of the canyon (ll. 1–3); the discernment of the changing light pattern on the distant stream establishes the bottom of the canyon space and the depth of the night view; and the feedback from his probing staff (ll. 11–12) helps him establish his own position in the landscape. This careful mapping reflects the poet’s abruptly displaced status; having been driven into the unfamiliar mountain topography without prior knowledge of it or preparation, the constant exploration of his immediate physical surroundings is a top priority. His acknowledgment that he could be bringing harm to his body (“Risking exposing the top of my graying head,” l. 10), and his identification of three locations in the poem’s first three lines (East Peak, South Ridge, North Precipice) are two prominent illustrations of the urgency of Chen’s need for precise geographical and psychological positioning and navigation.

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In the larger picture of Chen’s journey, as he was pushed farther away from his home region and into the south and southwest of the country, that need and his efforts at mapping and self-positioning would only intensify. The city of Fangzhou, where a few days before he had fled from Jurchen soldiers, had quickly become another unreachable spot on his psychological map, however intense his gaze toward it might be. The sensitive feedback he received from his walking staff (“My old bamboo staff made no more advancement, / From precarious spots came new alarms,” ll. 11–12) not only helped him establish the most advanced position in his midnight adventure; it had metaphorical significance for him as well: the effective transmission of alarms from the tip of the stick to the poet’s hand gives him something specific and tactile to grasp in dealing with an uncertain new situation. As the poet stops his movement and establishes his position, he quietly watches the moonrise, eventually fixing his eyes on the glistening stream in the distance, in the personified image of “a crane tossing its body.” Thus viewed, the stream, whose persistent moaning has tormented the poet for the past three days and nights, is defamiliarized and aestheticized: the moaning is now suppressed by the captivating power of the moonlight and temporarily silenced.16 The visual spectacle of “Silvery waves pouring down over a thousand acres” (l. 6) is counteracted at the end of the poem by the darkness that stretches all the way to Fangzhou, but the moonlight’s sublime beauty for the time being postpones that from happening, creating a safety zone of complete indulgence.

Comprehensive Mapping Chen Yuyi thoroughly and comprehensively mapped his physical surroundings during the three months he spent hiding in the mountains near Fangzhou. As we read more poems, the place is gradually brought into focus, revealing the details of its topography in broad daylight. The canyon that appears vaguely in “Moonrise on the Seventeenth” takes shape as being surrounded by rising peaks, rocky cliffs, steep

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ravines, strewn with craggy boulders, and alive with flora. Chen conducts the mapping from different angles—horizontally, vertically, top-down, bottom-up. The poems also show continuity and consistency, with the same spot sometimes being described in different poems from different positions, and thus can be compared with one another. For example, “Sitting on a Rock by the Stream” (#291) mentions being in a place surrounded by “three walls of blue mountains” 三面青山. In the poem that follows it, “Moonrise on the Seventeenth Night” (#292) discussed earlier, we find those “three walls” being furnished with names: East Peak, South Ridge, North Precipice. Furthermore, the wait before the moon’s appearance in the poet’s view in that same poem reflects both the height of the surrounding peaks from the poet’s position and the moon’s slightly waned phase on the seventeenth night of the lunar month (full moons normally occur on the fifteenth night of the month). In “Picking Sweet Flag” 採菖蒲 (#294/507), Chen describes getting to the bottom of the ravine and witnessing its craggy terrain in person: “Walking leisurely at the bottom of the ravine to pick the sweet flag, / Thousand-year-old dragons and snakes wrap around the stony rocks” 閑行澗底採菖蒲, 千歲龍蛇抱石臞 (ll. 1–2).17 The poet’s relationship with the ravine changes as he physically walks in it; the stream, whose moaning has haunted him for days, now becomes the setting of a leisurely sweet-flag-picking venture. In “Strolling by the Stream with Xindao” 與信道遊澗邊 (#295/508), we see Chen and fellow refugee Sun Xindao, who appears at the start of this chapter when he and Chen entered Dengzhou together, climb down the mountain: “The slanting sun shines on scattered rocks, / A pair of bamboo staffs in our hands, together we go down the peak” 斜 陽照亂石, 顛崖下雙筇 (ll. 1–2). From their newly acquired position at the bottom of the canyon, the craggy hilltops take on a different look. The poet performs this reverse view with self-consciousness: “Let me try from the bottom of the deep ravine, / Look upward at those most marvelous peaks” 試從絕壑底, 仰視最奇峯 (ll. 3–4). What meets his

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eyes are rugged protuberances of rock (l. 5); misty vapors rising from treetops (l. 6); half-exposed sweet flag roots (l. 7); and old trees shaped like crouching dragons (l. 8). Unsurprisingly, the outlandish view elicits thoughts of a rendezvous with a recluse: “How can there not be a worldevading recluse / Here to meet with me unprompted?” 豈無避世士, 於 此儻相逢? (ll. 9–10). When the imagined encounter does not materialize, the poet returns to reality and loses his way back: “The traveler’s mind is suddenly saddened, / On my way back I lose track of my path” 客心 忽悄愴, 歸路迷行蹤 (ll. 11–12). The following snippets from other verses about exploration and mapping can be read symbolically as the poet’s extended efforts to retrieve that lost path—and his lost self: 1. We see him tour West Ridge 西嶺 to appreciate the plum blossoms: “After the rain the cliffs become emerald green, / White plum blossoms stand tall in the cold. // From faraway they welcome the visitor, / As if wanting to come down the slopes” 雨後眾崖碧, 白處紛寒梅. 遙遙 迎客意, 欲下山坡來.18 2. We see him tour South Shield 南嶂 with Sun Xindao, where the view obtained by the strollers through “faraway gazing” (yaozhan 遙瞻) and “traversing by foot” (ta 踏) is followed by the imagined “downward aerial view” (xiashi 下視) of the immortals.19 3. We see him stroll East Cliff 東巖: “Extending my staff on the road of East Cliff, / A place I have previously visited in my dreams. // The light of the evening sun shines upon the remaining snow, / The glistening glow spreads over the valleys and hills” 散策東巖路, 夢中曾記經. 斜 暉射殘雪, 崖谷遍晶熒.20 4. We see him, with Sun Xindao again, ascend an ancient plateau at evening.21 5. We see him stroll on a mountain path alone in the morning after the rain.22

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6. We see him arrive at West Trail 西徑 by himself, plucking the plum blossoms in drunkenness.23 Through these extensive efforts to map, mark, record, and poetically inscribe, the unfamiliar local landscapes not only acquire names but also are incorporated into a larger network of meaning. A new aspect of Chen’s experience in the mountains of Fangzhou is that the solitary acts in his earlier poems now gain a communal element, as he conducts many of these events and activities together with fellow refugees and friends. “Raising my head, the mountains encircle the sky, / Washing my feet, I see reflections of trees in the pool,” Chen writes. “Let me record this day in the mountains: / Four scholars gather here on an empty cliff” 舉頭山圍 天, 濯足樹映潭. 山中記今日, 四士集空巖.24 He is fully aware that this is neither the fantastic Langfeng Terrace nor Fusang Pool; the constricted mountain space is remembered and documented for what it is, in its own right. In another poem, he emphasizes the point again: “In the mountains, I record this morning’s marvelous happenings— / Staff in hand, finding their ways are Sun and Chen” 山中異事記今晨, 杖藜得道孫與陳.25

The Road Lengthens Chen left the southern mountains of Fangzhou at the end of the spring. He traveled first back to Fangzhou and then, in the summer, to Junyang 均陽, a small town at the confluence of the Han and Dan Rivers then under the administration of the military prefecture of Guanghua, where he had stayed briefly at the end of 1126 after fetching his family from Kaifeng, before returning to Dengzhou early the next year. The sacred Daoist mountain Wudang 武當 lies just to its southwest. A poem written on his way from Fangzhou to Junyang, “Upon Hearing the News of Wang Daoji Being Captured by the Barbarians” 聞王道 濟陷虜 (#318/531), gives us a glimpse of the poet’s emotional state at this point on his journey.26 On hearing the news, Chen cannot control his emotions: “Isolated clouds hover above Resting Horse Ridge, / Aged

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tears stream down, unable to be wiped away” 雲孤馬息嶺, 老淚不勝 揮 (ll. 7–8).27 Chen expresses his deep sadness in the image of clouds stalling over the mountain ridge, mirrored in tears streaming down the face of the solitary traveler. The return of live tears marks a shift from silent grieving to explicit expressions of pain in the poems written after his Fangzhou escape. The halting clouds over Resting Horse Mountain also indicate another gradual, long-term change in Chen’s mentality. Despite his being driven into increasingly narrow and alien spaces and territories, prior to this point his moral compass seemed to maintain its sense of direction. When he started out in early 1126, for example, it firmly pointed him toward the “craggy clouds in the northwest.” Two and a half years (or ninetyseven poems) later, it appears that the tears were getting old and the clouds had exhausted their ability to move and communicate. It is as if Resting Horse Mountain’s natural ability to halt horses has transferred from the absent horses to the clouds in the sky, which, like the streams back in the Fangzhou mountains, have frozen in place and are mourning the captivity of a colleague alongside the poet. In the larger political picture, when the sorrow-stricken poet weeps for the fallen fellow official on his way to Junyang in the summer of 1128, uncertainty still gripped the country and hung over Gaozong’s fledgling imperial court. Although the Jurchen armies had temporarily withdrawn from the Han River area by this time, the overall situation had not shown any signs of improving. During the Jurchen campaign against the newly founded Southern Song in 1127–1128, Gaozong was forced to move his court from Yingtian, where he had ascended the throne in the fifth month of 1127, to Yangzhou in the tenth month of the year, where he stayed for more than a year, until the second month of 1129, at which point he was driven out of the city, crossed the Yangzi River, and retreated to Hangzhou.28 During the two previous Jurchen campaigns against the Northern Song from 1125 to 1127, although Jurchen forces succeeded in terminating

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the Northern Song dynasty, the occupation of territory had not been their main focus. By mid-1127 when the Southern Song was established, according to a report by then-Grand Councilor Li Gang 李綱 (1083– 1140), only about ten prefectures north of the Yellow River were actually controlled by the Jin.29 The situation changed radically, however, in the following year when the Jin consolidated their occupation of the major cities along the Yellow River and pushed hard into the Huai and Han River areas. At the forward point of their attack, the Jin army was able to take many strategic towns in Jingxi South Circuit 京西南路, advancing as far as Dengzhou and Fangzhou in the Han River area. Chen’s poems give us a rare glimpse into the havoc these military actions wreaked on the local population and the suffering of individual refugees. Chen Yuyi stayed in Junyang only briefly before traveling down the Han toward Hunan in early autumn. The new round of Jin attacks was imminent and posed great danger for civilian refugees in the area. Having to leave the Han River area had tremendous symbolic meaning for the poet. The river, which once marked a geographical boundary and a psychological threshold in Chen’s world, now became the starting point of a new part of his journey. Despite the generally itinerant and transient nature of official life in the Song and the ubiquity and importance of travel for Song literati (as Cong Zhang has comprehensively documented), the geographical extent of Chen’s travels up to this point had been quite limited.30 As he prepared to follow the current down the Han and looked beyond the area to the Jinghu 荊湖 circuit (including modern Hubei and Hunan), he probably understood that it meant leaving home forever. In a poem written during his short Junyang stay, using the rhymes of Tao Qian’s poem “Return to My Old Residence” 還舊居, Chen starts with a statement recognizing that sad fact: “It is not that there are no roads to my old gardens, / But now I no longer think of returning” 故園非無 路, 今已不念歸.31 In Tao Qian’s original poem, despite the poet’s deep lament over what had happened to his old house when he was away, the central theme is a celebration of his return.32 The tone of Chen’s

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poem is very different; the whole narrative is predicated on the looming reality that he would never be able to return to his “old gardens.” Also lost is his sense of orientation: “East or west, north or south, / Whichever way I turn, it feels mistaken” 東西與南北, 欲往還覺非 (ll. 5–6). The change of outlook is obvious when we compare the lines with an earlier statement made on his northbound trip to Kaifeng to fetch his family two years before in 1126: “East and west, north and south, wherever I go is my hometown.”33 In the poet’s mind, the paths leading home are now irretrievably cut off; he has to continue with his journey and find a home elsewhere. His current location, the small Han River town where he is drinking with and taking leave of a friend, not only does not offer a solution but is unsympathetically demonstrating its alienness, becoming another tianya (“Heaven’s edge”) for him: “One cup of wine at Heaven’s edge, / Savor it slowly, Sir, do not push it aside” 天涯一尊 酒, 細酌君勿推 (ll. 11–12). Looking out, his sadness again descends on the landscape before his eyes: “Holding the goblet, I gaze into the rivers and mountains, / The road is long, I am sad, my body is declining” 持 觴望江山, 路永悲身衰 (ll. 13–14). The target of the poet’s gaze, “rivers and mountains” (jiangshan 江 山), once able and reliable facilitators of poetic production and sources of internal peace for Chen, now seem to have lost all their consoling and tranquilizing capacity. The lengthening road leads back to the gazer, whose body and person have been severely diminished by the poet’s now three-year-long flight.

The Surging Waves of the Han In Chen Yuyi’s earlier poems about being on the road, the natural landscape works in aid of his writing, helping him to cope with his worsening political and personal situation. In those poems our eyes are filled especially with images of protruding crags, rising peaks, steep canyons, and an assortment of other objects found in the various mountainous areas he has traveled. Whereas the “mountains” (shan) aspect of the landscape has

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received copious representation, its counterpart, the “rivers” component (jiang 江, chuan 川, shui 水), has remained relatively muted. Many poems do feature water, but it has not achieved real equity with its mountain counterpart, its most prominent appearance thus far having been in the form of tears, splattering dewdrops, and moaning mountain streams. Starting from Junyang, however, this imbalance gradually changes and water becomes the most important force defining his road experience and his engagement with nature. Water will carry him, literally, from the Han, the Yangzi, Dongting Lake, and the Xiang all the way to the open sea in Guangzhou. His increasingly intimate and physical relationship with water during the next stages of his journey comes about essentially out of necessity, because much of his subsequent itinerary involves water and traveling by boat, which becomes at most times his default means of transportation. The following poem, written while Chen was still in Junyang, provides a starting point for our understanding the growing profile and importance of water in Chen’s thought and writing. Junyang lay at the confluence of the Han and Dan Rivers, hence the “twin fords” in the poem’s fourth line. Watching the River Rise 觀江漲 (#324/540) 漲江臨眺足消憂 Looking out as the rivers flood is enough to dissipate my cares, 倚杖江邊地欲浮 2 Staff in hand at river’s edge, the ground is as if floating. 疊浪並翻孤日去 Layers of waves, one pushing another, carry the lone sun away; 兩津橫卷半天流 4 The twin fords roll up half a sky’s gushing flow. 黿鼉雜怒爭新穴 The turtles and alligators compete for new holes with chaotic furor; 鷗鷺驚飛失故洲 6 The gulls and egrets are startled into flight, having lost their former islets. 可為一官妨快意

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How can I give up this happy pleasure for a single office? 眼中唯覺欠扁舟 8 What is missing before my eyes is only a little skiff. Descending from the southern slopes of the Qinling 秦嶺 Mountains, the upper Han unfurls tranquilly until it meets the many little streams from the Nanyang area, the Dan being one of the Han River’s largest tributaries. In the poem, the speaker allows himself floating with the surging river’s mighty streams. The usual expectations of such still and stabilizing acts as “leaning on” 倚 (l. 2), “overlooking” 臨 (l. 1), and “looking out” 眺 (l. 1), which under normal circumstances would be enough to assert the observer’s metaphorical control of the agitated landscape, are nullified by the sheer force of the rising waters. This aquatic turmoil throws everything out of order. It unroots, overturns, tears apart, and renders futile all efforts to pacify it, shattering any resistance that the human observer is able to mount in the face of its physical majesty. Efforts at stabilization having been dashed in the opening couplet, the poet devotes the regulated verse’s two middle descriptive couplets unrestrainedly to the power of that physical force. The description is dominated by the observer’s visual sense: layers of waves, pushed forward by more waters coming from behind, surge so high that the sun seems to be carried away by them; walls of moving water roll cyclonically over the two fords, devouring half the sky. The cascading motion of the streams unfolds both horizontally, pushing into the far end of the horizon, and vertically, splashing into the skies. The scene gains unusual underwater depth as well, going beneath the surface of the chaos to note the struggles of displaced turtles and alligators. At this point, the speaker wishes a small aquatic vehicle of transportation, the proverbial pianzhou 扁舟 (skiff, little boat) of freedom, would come and carry him away. With that desired boat “missing before my eyes” (l. 8), the speaker returns to observed reality. Although his mind and senses are overwhelmed by the physical spectacle, he endeavors to keep himself grounded. “Unbridled pleasure” (l. 7), which would be a natural match

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for the poem’s vast imagery, proves ephemeral, thwarted by the poet’s internal concerns with office.34 The fleeting thought of the arrival of a pianzhou to relieve the poet is seen in other poems written in Junyang as well. Elsewhere, thoughts of the imagined boat are immediately suppressed, for example, by vast stretches of impregnable clouds, or by the imposing shadows of rugged mountains at night, both apt metaphors of the poet’s clouded mental interior.35 We can put the poet’s implicit attempts to maintain clarity and order into context by comparing this poem with a similar one by Du Fu. In “Watching the River Flood at the Pavilion at Baxi Station, Presented to Prefect Dou” 巴西驛亭觀江漲呈竇使君二首 (1 of 2), Du Fu writes: “From last night’s rain the south river flooded, / The huge waves are confused with distant peaks. // This lone pavilion rises over its churning, / Ten thousand homes are pressed by its crashing. // It worries high birds in the upper clouds, / Distresses old dragons in mud and sand. // He who shares this guest lodge at the earth’s end / Holds my hand, easing my breast” 宿雨南江漲, 波濤亂遠峰. 孤亭凌噴薄, 萬井逼舂容. 霄漢愁高 鳥, 泥沙困老龍. 天邊同客舍, 携我豁心胸.36 An apparent difference between the poems is the observer’s position relative to the objects being described. When Chen uses “looking out” (l. 1), his gaze is enacted from his grounded position “at river’s edge” (l. 2), at the same level as the flooding waters. Du Fu, on the other hand, looks down on the flooding river from a raised position in a pavilion, and he tries to reach beyond the scene before his eyes into other places (“ten thousand homes” 萬井, “the upper clouds” 霄漢, “the earth’s end” 天 邊). Other than in the momentary thought of a missing pianzhou, from beginning to end Chen keeps himself in the current frame of the scene, staying with what is before his eyes as a witness to the river’s flooding and its tremendous power, the beautifully crafted middle couplets of his poem quietly lending themselves to the maintenance of that levelheadedness. Du Fu’s view is motivated by a different force, his focus being on the flooding water’s “churning” and “crashing” and on himself (“my

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hand,” “my breast”), not the inherent coherence or order in the physical phenomenon. Du Fu endeavors to bring forth all the agitating forces in the scenery, eliminating the conflicts or imbalance in the scenery never being a goal for him. By keeping himself grounded at the level of the floods, and by carefully depicting the spatial and horizontal dimensions of the floods and their psychological impact on the poet, Chen Yuyi on the other hand considers revealing and describing the internal coherence in the scenery his implicit goal. The emotional and psychological cleansing and stabilizing that occur in “Watching the River Rise” demonstrate a rare boldness in Chen as he becomes ostensibly more proactive in releasing and expressing his emotions. The anger and fierce intensity of the speaker’s actions in the next poem presents a so-far-unseen side of the consistently coolheaded and pragmatic poet, written in a passionate but controlled style characteristic of his writing in general. Composed on the Boat in Junyang at Night 均陽舟中夜賦 (#328/545) 遊子不能寐 The wandering traveler cannot sleep at night, 船頭語輕波 2 From the head of the boat come the waves’ gentle whispers. 開窗望兩津 Opening the window, I gaze into the twin fords, 煙樹何其多 4 How numerous are the trees in the mist! 晴江涵萬象 The clear river harbors myriad images, 夜半光蕩摩 6 Swaying and rubbing light at midnight. 客愁彌世路 The traveler’s sorrows fill the world’s roads, 秋氣入天河 8 Vapors of autumn reach up to the Heavenly River.37 汝洛塵未銷

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Writing Poetry, Surviving War In Ru and Luo the dust has not settled,38 幾人不負戈 10 How many men are not carrying a spike? 長吟宇宙內 I whistle lengthily in the universe, 激烈悲蹉跎 12 In all fierceness, I grieve at my wasted life.

The poem starts quietly, seemingly with the traditional sleepless-atnight motif. The gentle whispers of the waves outside the cabin of the boat entice the wakeful traveler to push open the window that separates him from the outside world. What he sees from his secure position inside and looking out, with his view reliably framed by the window, is a tranquil, romantic picture of mystic, tender beauty, of the reflections of the myriad objects “swaying and rubbing light at midnight” (l. 6). The gentleness of the scene turns out to be an illusion. The “swaying and rubbing” (dangmo 蕩摩) of lights that is happening before his eyes is but a muted manifestation of the violent emotional storm that is brewing in his mind. The “traveler’s sorrows” 客愁 both surge horizontally, filling the “the world’s roads,” and race vertically to the Milky Way. In a similar fashion, “vapors of autumn” form a montage with the swirling dust of war and images of trudging soldiers with heavy spikes leaning their shoulders. The progressive buildup apexes in the last couplet, when the traveler releases his emotions in an intense, elongated whistle (changyin 長吟, or changxiao 長嘯, yongxiao 永嘯 elsewhere) that extends to the whole universe. As David McCraw wrote, the poem “displays an intensity of feeling and a grandeur of sensibility rarely seen in Chen’s poetry.”39 We may not completely agree with the nineteenth-century critic Xu Yinfang 許印芳 (1832–1901), who said of “Watching the River Rise” that the poem is an “all-out political allegory of what the Song southern exodus feels like” 全寓宋家南渡之感.40 However, even though Chen’s rational, pragmatic realism is not innately conducive to such a blatant metaphorical reading, Xu Yinfang certainly had a point in seeing that parallel meaning running beneath the poem, especially when one considers it beside

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“Composed on the Boat in Junyang at Night.” We may not want to push the metaphorical potential of the poems as far as Xu Yinfang suggested, but there is no denying that both poems point to a microscopic internal tempest in the poet’s mind as he readied himself both physically and psychologically for a more distant southern journey, a yuanyou that his past life experience and his poetic training had not prepared him for. The Junyang boat poem makes that metaphorical reading more plausible by explicitly linking the traveler’s sleeplessness with the war raging in the north. As Foong Ping’s study of Northern Song landscape painting suggests, the prominence of intimate physical detail and a painting’s metaphorical power are not mutually exclusive but qualities that can coexist and be mutually invigorating.41 In “Watching the River Rise” and “Composed on the Boat in Junyang at Night,” we see that dual possibility at work and witness how the prominent vertical geography of shadow and light and the poet’s internal emotions mutually push the poems’ narratives toward the final release.

Emotional Cleansing and Emancipation The Junyang boat poem is a prime example of how Chen Yuyi expertly builds up creative momentum and drives it progressively toward its final release. It represents an emergent tendency to let the emotions run their course and be accounted for, rather than aestheticizing them or lodging them indirectly. If the reactivation of tears on Horse Resting Ridge marked a turning point from silent contemplation to more spontaneous expression, “Watching the River Rise” and “Composed on the Boat in Junyang at Night” pushed that tendency further toward complete discharge. In the Junyang boat poem, the process starts microscopically. As the whispers of the waves meander through various spots in the night landscape, their momentum accelerates until the gentle puffs seem to transform into a column of autumn vapors reaching up to the Milky Way. The restoration of aurality at the end of the poem comes when the poet’s

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emotional intensity reaches its highest point. The process is paralleled prosodically in the gradual construction of the poem’s acoustic profile. David McCraw skillfully analyzes the ending couplet’s sophisticated sound effects, writing that “the last three syllables in the penultimate line share oblique tones, and vowel finals, lending the line a tone of strident urgency.” This is contrasted in the last line, where the three last characters all have vowel finals but level tones, “paralleling the closure’s mournful lamentation.”42 The elongated acts of sighing and lamentation empower the poet to push his internal limits, carrying him to new places and new possibilities. We hear the grieving and moaning of a solitary traveler releasing his wakeful anguish at the quintessential threshold moment of midnight, and of a bereft poet who feels cleansed and galvanized to plod ahead. Our exhausted traveler, after the release of his pent-up emotions, drags his tired but tranquilized body forward and continues to push on with his journey. He is ready to entrust himself to the churning waves of the Han River, letting them carry him to the far, uncharted, enticing land that lies “South of the Lake.”

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Notes 1. Jishen was the courtesy name of Fu Zhirou 富直柔 (ca. 1080–ca. 1156), a grandson of Fu Bi 富弼 (1004–1083) and an old acquaintance of Chen Yuyi from his Ruzhou period. Xindao was the courtesy name of Sun Que 孫確, who died at the start of the Jianyan reign period, and whose relationship with Chen is unclear. From this point onward, Chen’s companions and fellow refugees start to appear in his poems. 2. Riding off to sea on a raft was the path to personal freedom Confucius imagined taking if his ideas of government did not prevail. 3. As he writes in another poem, “Expressing My Feelings” (#278/479): “Capital Luo is clearly within sight, / But how meandering are the mountains and rivers!” 京洛了在眼, 山川一何迂 (ll. 9–10). 4. Yanjing was part of the historically Chinese territory south of the Great Wall, known as the Sixteen Prefectures of Yan and Yun 燕雲十六州, that were ceded to the Liao by the Five Dynasties government in 938. The Northern Song had formed an alliance with the newly established Jurchen state of Jin in 1122 and started an irredentist war against the Liao but failed to recover Yanjing until 1124, when the strategic town (modern Beijing, the Liao southern capital) was finally captured by the Northern Song army with the help of the Jin. The recovery turned out to be shortlived: the Jin soon claimed it when the Song-Jin alliance collapsed. 5. Huizong and Qinzong arrived in Yanjing in the fifth month of 1127 and were moved farther north four months later to the Jin Central Capital 中 京; less than a year thereafter, in 1128, they were sent still farther north to the Jin Supreme Capital 上京, where they were presented as offerings to the shrine of the Jurchen founder and given humiliating titles. Chen’s poem was in response to their move to the Jin Central Capital in the fall of 1127. For a summary of these events, see Ebrey and Bickford, Emperor Huizong, 15–17. For a detailed account of Huizong’s sufferings on his northern journey and in his last years in Jurchen captivity, see Stephen West’s chapter in Ebrey and Bickford, Emperor Huizong, 565–608. 6. White Dragon Sands 白龍沙 was where Huizong and Qinzong were supposed to have been detained. The “yellow flowers” are chrysanthemums, a traditional token of longevity offered to seniors on the Double Ninth. 7. Quoted in CYYJJJ, 485. “Doleful tone” is David McCraw’s phrase. McCraw, “Poetry,” 330.

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8. Qian Zhongshu, Songshi, 131. 9. Chen started out in the first month of 1126. 10. The four ordinal directions, Northeast, Southeast, Southwest, and Northwest, are called siwei 四维 in traditional Chinese terminology. Chen’s journey so far has covered two of them, Northeast and Southwest, thus “half of the world’s ordinal directions.” 11. Alluding to the story of a wealthy man from Luoyang in the Tang who later in his life had to endure living in hunger in a barren valley to avoid bandits. 12. The vegetable roots were boiled in water, and the hot water was used for washing the feet. I want to thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out a misinterpretation by me in an earlier version of the manuscript. 13. CYYJJJ, 502. 14. CYYJJJ, 502. Zhongzhai was the style name of Deng Yan 鄧剡 (1232– 1303), a friend of Liu Chenweng’s and a fellow disciple of Wen Tianxiang 文天祥 (1236–1283). 15. CYYJJJ, 502. Liu Chenweng was himself a great admirer of Du Fu and a pathbreaking commentator on Du Fu’s poems. No doubt that his effusions were colored by his own experiences at the end of the Southern Song witnessing the tragic fall of another dynasty; not all readers would feel Du Fu’s masterwork “Journey North” “cumbersome.” But Liu had a point in suggesting that Chen Yuyi illustrated an extraordinary ability to express his complicated emotions rationally and concisely according to the situations he faced. For Liu Chenweng as a respected Du Fu commentator in the Southern Song, see Yang Jinghua, Songdai Dushi, 289– 334. 16. The moaning sound comes back in “Standing Alone” 獨立 (#293/506), the very next poem after “Moonrise on the Seventeenth Night.” 17. Sweet flag (Acorus calamus) is a waterside plant believed in traditional Chinese medicine to have the effect of lightening the body. According to the Materia Medica 本草, those plants that grow by a stony stream in a ravine are the most valuable. See Stuart, Chinese Materia, 12–13. 18. “On Plum Blossoms at West Ridge” 詠西嶺梅花 (#296/509), ll. 1–4. 19. “Strolling South Shield with Sun Xindao” 遊南嶂同孫信道 (#297/509– 510), ll. 1–4 and 13–14. 20. “Strolling on East Cliff” 遊東巖 (#298/511), ll. 1–4. 21. “Ascending an Ancient Plain with Xindao at Evening” 同信道晚登古原 (#301/514). 22. “A Leisurely Stroll in the Sun after the Rain” 雨晴徐步 (#300/513).

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23. “Arriving at the Plum Blossoms of West Trail in Drunkenness; They Are Already in Full Bloom” 醉中至西徑梅花下已盛開 (#304/517). 24. “Gathering by the Stream with Xia Zhihong, Sun Xindao, and Zhang Jushan, I Composed Four Little Poems, Using San Fa Yan Xiu [Loosening up My Hair among Rocks and Caves] as Rhymes” 與夏致宏孫信道張巨 山同集澗邊以散髮巖岫為韻賦四小詩 (3 of 4) (#313/525), ll. 1–4. 25. “Strolling on South Shield with Sun Xindao” (#297/510), ll. 17–18. 26. The exact identity of Wang Daoji is difficult to determine. As Bai Dunren noted, he was probably the immediately preceding prefect of Caizhou, who had not yet left the city when it fell to Nichuhe’s army on the ninth day of the second month (the incumbent prefect at the time was another person). CYYJJJ, 531–533n1. 27. Resting Horse Mountain 馬息山, according to the Southern Song administrative geography Yudi jisheng 輿地紀勝 (Record of splendid places in the empire) by Wang Xiangzhi 王象之, was seventy leagues to the north of the prefectural seat of Fangzhou. Quoted in CYYJJJ, 533n5. 28. Frederick Mote recounts Gaozong’s 1129 retreat from Yangzhou to Hangzhou in detail. Mote, Imperial China, 292–296. 29. JYYL, 6.16b [124]. 30. Cong Ellen Zhang, Transformative Journeys. 31. “Together with Master Zuotong, Using the Rhymes of Tao Qian’s ‘Return to My Old Residence’” 同左通老用陶潛還舊居韻 (#325/541), ll. 1–2. 32. Tao Qian, “Return to My Old Residence.” Yuan, Tao Yuanming, 215–216. For translation, see Hightower, Poetry, 116–117. 33. “Traveling Thoughts on an Autumn Day” (#258/453). 34. The vastness of the poem’s imagery was praised by even the usually tight-lipped, moralistic Qing commentator Ji Yun, who called it “magnificently vast, a perfect match for the poem’s title” 雄闊稱題. Li Qingjia, Yingkui, 701. 35. “Four Quatrains in Harmony with Wang Dongqing” 和王東卿絕句四 首 (3 of 4) (#322/539) and (1 of 4) (#320/537), respectively. Wang was a former colleague of Chen’s at the Imperial Library. 36. Xiao Difei, Du Fu, 2824; Owen, Poetry, 3:225–227. 37. That is, the Milky Way. 38. The Ru River is a tributary of the Huai; the Luo is a tributary of the Yellow River. 39. McCraw, “Poetry,” 149. 40. Li Qingjia, Yingkui, 701.

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41. Ping, Efficacious Landscape. 42. McCraw, “Poetry,” 245–246.

Chapter 6

Face to Face Chen left Junyang in the eighth month of 1128 and soon arrived at Yuezhou 岳州 by way of the Han and the Yangzi. He stayed in Yuezhou until the ninth month of the following year, at which point circumstances pushed him southward again. Like Dengzhou, Yuezhou was another important restorative rallying point for Chen. His one-year stay here gave him valuable time not only for reflection but also for synthesis and integration. During this pause in his travels many of his earlier experiences and tendencies had an opportunity to converge and come in touch with the local reality, and to shape his mind and his writing. Part of the ancient kingdom of Changsha, Yuezhou was historically known as a sorrowful place of exile. It was the area where the Chu nobleman and poet Qu Yuan was banished and died by drowning himself in the nearby Miluo River 汨羅江. Jia Yi, the young Western Han talent from Chen’s native Luoyang, was also banished to this place. While there, Jia wrote “Lament for Qu Yuan” 弔屈原 and “Rhapsody on the Owl” 鵩 鳥賦, both famous for their pensive philosophical musings over how to make sense of life and how to situate the politically reduced and exiled person in the larger operations of the universe. Jia Yi used the example of Qu Yuan in lamenting his own fate.1

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In his poems written during the Yuezhou stay, we see Chen calmly engaging with the local scenery, immersed in the region’s consoling warmth and the city’s rich history and culture. Yuezhou helped mitigate the impact of the rushing and meandering early part of his journey and opened to Chen new routes and new possibilities.

Ascending the Yueyang Tower When Chen Yuyi arrived in Yuezhou and stood on top of the iconic Yueyang Tower looking out onto vast Dongting Lake, the memories of his traumatizing journey seemed to fall away. Yuezhou, “one of China’s most fascinating and romantic regions,” seemed like a dream, a place that gave him a predestined feel, before it was disrupted again by uncontrollable external forces.2 Ascending the Yueyang Tower: Two Poems 登岳陽樓二首 (1 of 2) (#331/548) 洞庭之東江水西 East of Dongting Lake, west of the Yangzi River, 簾旌不動夕陽遲 2 The banners and flags are motionless, the sun sets slowly. 登臨吳蜀橫分地 I ascend and look out, in the place where Wu and Shu divide, 徙倚湖山欲暮時 4 Pacing and lingering, as lake and mountain merge into the dusk. 萬里來遊還望遠 Over ten thousand leagues I’ve come traveling, still gazing afar, 三年多難更憑危 6 On top of three years with many hardships, again leaning on this high tower. 白頭弔古風霜裏 White-headed, I mourn antiquity amid the frost and wind: 老木滄波無限悲 8 Old trees, gray waves, bottomless sadness.

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Ascending the Yueyang Tower: Two Poems (2 of 2) (#332/551) 天入平湖晴不風 The sky enters the still lake, sunny with no wind, 夕帆和鴈正浮空 2 Evening sails mingle with wild geese, floating in the void. 樓頭客子杪秋後 A sojourning traveler on top of the tower, at autumn’s tip, 日落君山元氣中 4 As the sun sinks into Junshan Mountain’s vigorous vapors. 北望可堪回白首 Gazing north, how can I bear turning my white head? 南遊聊得看丹楓 6 Having traveled south, I will just enjoy watching the red maples. 翰林物色分留少 The Hanlin Academician has left so little scenery for me,3 詩到巴陵還未工 8 My poems are not yet perfected as I arrive at Ba Mound.4 The first two of sixty-nine poems Chen Yuyi wrote in Yuezhou, both regulated verses in the long seven-syllable line, the “Ascending the Yueyang Tower” verses are among Chen’s most celebrated poems. They helped secure his status as a worthy successor to the Jiangxi school craftsman Huang Tingjian as well as to Du Fu. The first poem especially, included by Fang Hui in his compendium of regulated verses from the Tang and Song and by Qian Zhongshu in his influential modern anthology of Song poetry, is considered Chen’s crowning achievement in sevensyllable regulated verse.5 Over the course of the following year in Yuezhou, the historical and cultural landmarks referred to in the poems—Dongting Lake, Junshan Mountain, Ba Mound—gradually shed their symbolic stature and become sites of actual physical adventure as well as poetic imagination for Chen. By unexpected circumstances, he would be literally driven onto the lake, wander there for over two months, and experience it from the inside out. The shift in the role of the lake from an object of observation to a site of

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direct experience reflects the larger, long-term changes affecting the poet both during and after his Yuezhou stay. The close-quarters, face-to-face encounter with the lake’s waters and topography transformed him from a composed spectator to an enthusiastic participant in the local landscape.

Junshan Mountain, Face to Face “East of Dongting Lake, West of the Yangzi River, / The banners and flags are motionless, the sun sets slowly.”6 From his vantage point at the top of the famous Yueyang Tower, Chen Yuyi searches habitually for geographic coordinates and cultural landmarks to locate himself, while at the same time fixing his eyes on the warm glow of the setting sun over the breezeless surface of the vast lake. In taking these actions, he is adopting the gaze of his predecessors, the contingent of earlier poets who had ascended the tower and shaped the parameters of looking, thinking, and writing about it for later generations.7 Despite Chen’s explicit invocation of Li Bai at the end of his second Yueyang Tower poem, commentators from Song to Qing saw the poems as influenced primarily by Du Fu and Chen’s Northern Song predecessor Huang Tingjian—and for good reason.8 When we read Li Bai’s and Du Fu’s eponymous poems on the tower, Chen’s emotional and stylistic indebtedness to Du, rather than Li, is obvious. Li Bai’s “Ascending the Yueyang Tower with Xia Twelfth” 與夏十二 登岳陽樓 is a classic example of a style centered on human feelings and activities rather than the landscape. The poet and his friend are having a banquet atop the tower, which is so high that it reaches the sky. As the breezes blow on their sleeves, the surrounding mountains, moon, clouds, and flying geese all seem to be joining them in the happy merrymaking. Written in 759, the poem reads: “From the tower, the view of Yueyang is complete; / Dongting is vast, opening itself into the distance. // The geese lead the heart’s sorrows away; / The mountains bring the gorgeous moon coming. // Amid the clouds, the couch is lined; / In the skies, the

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goblets are passed around. // After getting drunk, a cool breeze arises, / Blowing our sleeves into dancing” 樓觀岳陽盡, 川迥洞庭開. 雁引愁心 去, 山銜好月來. 雲間連下榻, 天上接行杯. 醉後涼風起, 吹人舞袖迴.9 Li’s poem creates a mythically beautiful world where objects are defined not by their functions in the actual physical setting but their evocative power and willing participation in human events. The physical setting remains vague and unspecified. Except for the opening couplet that references the tower and the lake, the poem could be describing an event in any other high place. For Li Bai, descriptive accuracy or realism is obviously not a goal. His purpose is instead to express his unique perceptions of the scene and the moment, in a manner highly emblematic of the ancient tradition of aesthetic enjoyment, in which the identity of the place and content of the view are less important than the observer’s subjective feelings about it. About a decade later, in 768, toward the end of his southern travels and his life, Du Fu wrote “Ascending the Yueyang Tower” 登岳陽樓.10 “I heard long ago of Dongting’s waters, / And this day I climb Yueyang Tower. // Wu and Chu split in east and south, / Heaven and Earth float day and night. // From kin and friends not a single word, / Old and sick, I do have a solitary boat. // War-horses north of barrier mountains, / I lean on the railing, my tears streaming down” 昔聞洞庭水, 今上岳陽樓. 吳 楚東南坼, 乾坤日夜浮. 親朋無一字, 老病有孤舟. 戎馬關山北, 憑軒涕 泗流.11 Du Fu’s transcendent gaze, the poem’s emotional intensity, and the effort to recognize the landmark tower’s geographical location and cultural importance all leave a deep mark on Chen Yuyi’s poem. The difference between Chen Yuyi’s and Du Fu’s poems is also obvious, however, especially in terms of the underlying poet–world relationship. As McCraw wrote, “While the speaker in Du Fu’s poem feels the world is out of joint, the speaker in Chen’s poem is striving for harmony with his surroundings.”12 Poetically, and in this case, that striving for harmony derives not from Du Fu but from Chen’s Northern Song predecessor and Jiangxi school patriarch Huang Tingjian. Twenty-six years before Chen’s

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arrival in Yuezhou, in 1102, on his way down the Yangzi after a six-yearlong banishment in Sichuan, Huang stopped at Yuezhou, ascended the same tower, and composed two seven-syllable quatrains. In a colophon to a hand-written copy, Huang details the occasion of his ascent: “On the twenty-third day of the first month of the first year of the Chongning reign [1102], I set off from Jingzhou at night and arrived at Baling on the twenty-sixth. Rain and dark clouds lasted for several days and kept me indoors. On the first day of the second month, I alone ascended the Yueyang Tower” 崇寧之元正月二十三日, 夜發荊州, 二十六日至 巴陵, 數日陰雨不可出, 二月朔旦, 獨上岳陽樓.13 After his six years of hardship in exile, the persistent rain kept him waiting even longer, preventing Huang from ascending the tower days after his arrival. In the two poems titled “Ascending the Yueyang Tower, Gazing into Junshan Mountain in Rain” 雨中登岳陽樓望君山, Huang Tingjian demonstrates his characteristic calm, optimism, and poetic imagination.14 All the emotions and memories of pain and suffering surge in the mind, but they are quickly dispelled by the sheer presentness of the moment, creating a positive turn of mood that is facilitated by the quatrain form’s capacity for making quick connections. The first of Huang’s two poems reads: “Having escaped ten thousand deaths, my hair has turned white, / How lucky I have come out of Yanyu Heap of Qutang alive.15 // Having not yet arrived at Jiangnan, I crack a smile here in advance, / On top of Yueyang Tower, with Junshan Mountain face to face” 投荒萬死鬢毛班, 生出瞿塘灩澦關. 未到江南先一笑, 岳陽樓上對君山 (1 of 2).16 Cracking a smile at an intense moment of charged emotions is something Huang Tingjian as a person and a poet was well known for—an illustration of his calm acceptance of hardship and his belief in the power of the human mind to overcome and transform adversity into positive outcomes. And this was not true of Huang Tingjian alone but is a general characteristic of Song poetry. Both the internal calm and serenity and the optimistic transformation of sorrow and pain we see here, as Yoshikawa

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has noted, were long in the making and took root in the Song poets’ new worldview and philosophy of life.17 The heartwarming moment at the end of the poem melts away all past memories, of “ten thousand deaths,” of his graying head, of feelings of barrenness, exile, and old age—all are cleansed by the regenerating power of being “with Junshan Mountain face to face” (dui Junshan 對君山, l. 4). Whereas Du Fu in his poem demonstrates his full “theatrical genius” by lamenting lavishly, letting his tears stream down without attempting to restrain them, Huang Tingjian gazes on the landscape calmly, immersed in the singularity of the encounter, and everything follows naturally from that intense engagement.18 The prominence of Junshan Mountain in the poet’s engagement is expected from the poem’s title: “Ascending the Yueyang Tower, Gazing into Junshan Mountain in Rain.” After establishing the target of the gaze and the relationship between the observer atop the tower and Junshan Mountain, Huang Tingjian devotes the second poem to describing the content of the gaze and what happens in the observer’s mind. “I lean on the railing alone, as winds and rain stream down to fill the lake, / And the Xiang Maids earnestly display their twelve knotted hairdos. // I regret that I am not on the lake at the same level with the water, / Watching piles of blue mountains amid piles of silver mountains” 滿川風雨獨憑 欄, 綰結湘娥十二鬟. 可惜不當湖水面, 銀山堆裏看青山 (2 of 2). The speaker’s view is dominated by the misty silhouette of the blue crags and peaks of Junshan Mountain. As the gaze intensifies, the peaks and crags metamorphose into the hairdos of the Xiang goddesses, the legendary consorts of the sage emperor Shun, who came there looking for their husband and, after hearing of his death, decided to stay there to forever guard his burial place down south in the Jiuyi Mountains 九 嶷山.19 At this moment, the speaker is drawn into the story, imagining himself to descend to the lake and be physically at the level of the tossing waves. From that reversed position in his mind, he imagines looking at the peaks of Junshan Mountain again and finds himself surrounded by

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mountains of silver splashing waves as Junshan fades into an elusive blue mass in the background. When Chen Yuyi stands on the Yueyang Tower carefully gauging and mapping his position in relation to the lake and the many objects in and surrounding it, his gaze and imagery are informed by those of all his predecessors, especially Du Fu and Huang Tingjian. And there is an inherent audacity in this act. “As Chinese critics have observed, very few of Du Fu’s successors even dared to write about Yueyang Tower,” McCraw remarks. “Chen not only did so, but nearly succeeded in equaling Du Fu’s achievement.”20 My purpose here is not to evaluate Chen’s success against his predecessors, or to what extent he “succeeded in equaling Du Fu’s achievement,” but I agree with McCraw about Chen’s confidence in his ability to do so. I would push the point a bit further and argue that the collective confidence of the Song poets in their ability to engage Du Fu up front underlies the very success of Song poetry. The Jiangxi school played a pivotal role in helping to consolidate that confidence by giving control of the art to the individual writers, who were imbued with the confidence to emulate their distinguished Tang predecessors and also given the theory and technical tools to do so. Huang Tingjian and Chen Yuyi contributed to the construction of that confidence through their own examples as great craftsmen with sophisticated skills. Huang Tingjian’s hypothetical venturing into the lake is selfconsciously marked as an act of imagination, a wish that remains unactualized: “I regret that I am not on the lake at the same level with the water” 可惜不當湖水面. Chen Yuyi would have an uncanny opportunity to fulfill Huang’s wish to watch “piles of blue mountains amid piles of silver mountains” on his behalf when, in the next summer, circumstances in Yuezhou forced him literally onto the lake and kept him water-borne for more than two months. But at this moment, when he had just arrived at Yuezhou and climbed the iconic tower, and he had fixed his gaze on the motionless banners and flags and the slowly setting sun on the horizon, as “the sky enters the still lake” 天入平湖, as “evening sails mingle with

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wild geese” 夕帆和鴈 (2 of 2, ll. 1–2), his mind is occupied by the beauty of the present moment and the actuality of his current being. As the sun beams down its last rays on the still surface of the lake, the liminal moment between light and darkness becomes an active interface for communication between the poet and the landscape, between self and world, East and West, mountain and lake. This is Chen Yuyi’s moment of unity, his opportunity to engage Junshan Mountain “face to face,” his moment of meaning. Amid Junshan Mountain’s “vigorous vapors” (2 of 2, l. 4), his mind and body are rejuvenated, disappearing into, becoming part of, the serene evening landscape. There are potential ideological and stylistic incongruities or contradictions in the various voices and former perspectives summoned before him, but these are all overcome by the presence of the poet’s body and mind, and the innate coherence and harmony of the evening landscape.

Yueyang Tower and Dongting Lake in Literary and Cultural History “East of Dongting Lake, West of the Yangzi River, / The banners and flags are motionless, the sun sets slowly.” As Chen ascends Yueyang Tower, carefully recognizing his location and surveying the landscape, he emphasizes another aspect of his gaze. We seldom see him look from an elevated position downward in his poems. His point of view is launched preponderantly from the ground, with the target level with or above his eyes. “Watching the River Rise” discussed in the last chapter offers an example of this level, inside-out view. Chen’s orientation subtly changed in Yuezhou, however. There, he wrote eight poems that include ascending Yueyang Tower explicitly in the title or mention it in the text.21 The change in perspective can be understood as indicating not just the tower’s imposing presence in the local landscape but also, more important, its position in literary and cultural history.

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At its peak size, Dongting Lake covered an area of seven to eight hundred leagues around as recorded in historical records.22 The lake serves as the geographical divide between modern Hubei (“north of the lake”) and Hunan (“south of the lake”).23 In addition to the Yangzi from the north, it is also fed by four major tributaries from the south, the Xiang 湘, Yuan 沅, Zi 資, and Li 澧, as well as other smaller rivers, such as the Miluo, which flows into the lake on its eastern shore. Moreover, the Xiao 瀟 flows into the Xiang near Yongzhou 永州 before the latter flows north into the lake. The lake is well known in Chinese history and literature, and by Chen’s time it had already accumulated a rich body of popular lore. Literally meaning “Grotto Court Lake,” Dongting was named for the huge cavern believed to exist underneath the lake’s surface. Originally known as Grotto Court Mountain, Junshan is an island in the middle of the lake with many small peaks directly facing the Yueyang Tower. The scenery of the lake and Junshan, together with the Jiuyi Mountains and the Xiao and upper Xiang Rivers to the distant south, is profusely represented in Chinese poetry and painting. According to Alfreda Murck, during the Song it became fashionable to paint it in a set of eight scenes, referred to as Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang 瀟湘八景.24 The Tang story “The Tale of the Supernatural Marriage at Dongting” 洞庭靈姻傳, by Li Chaowei 李朝威, is set here; the narrative starts when a young scholar, Liu Yi 柳 毅, is entrusted by the married daughter of the dragon king of the lake to deliver a letter to her father.25 Positioned centrally between the ancient kingdoms of Wu and Yue in the east and Ba and Shu in the west, Yuezhou had military importance as well. It was a key spot, for example, in the fierce contest for regional dominance between Wu and Shu in the Three Kingdoms era. One celebrated episode in that lengthy historical struggle took place in 214, when the Wu general Lu Su 魯肅 (172–217) was ordered to station an army at Yuezhou, a brilliant move that had great ramifications for the eventual control of Jingzhou 荊州, a strategic town upstream.26

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Yueyang Tower, which is at the northeast corner of the lake and historically served as the city’s West Gate, “overlooks Dongting Lake, commanding a view that is vast and wide” 下瞰洞庭, 景物寬廣.27 A significant contributor to the lore regarding the tower’s importance in literary history was the early Tang statesman Zhang Yue 張說 (667–730), who during his tenure as prefect of Yuezhou had more than a hundred poems that he and his literati guests had composed inscribed on the tower’s walls.28 Zhang Yue also built a separate tower slightly to the north, known in later literature as the Lord Yan Tower 燕公樓, which also frequently appears in Chen Yuyi’s poems.29 For Chen, the Yueyang Tower had resounding contemporary cultural resonance as well. It was rebuilt and enlarged in 1045 under the prefect Teng Zongliang 滕宗諒 (990–1047), in celebration of which Fan Zhongyan wrote the famous “An Account of the Yueyang Tower” 岳陽樓記 to mark its completion.30 The significance of Fan’s short, 368–word essay in shaping the intellectual discourse of the Northern Song reform movement can perhaps hardly be overstated. His account, together with Wang Anshi’s “An Account of a Visit to Baochan Mountain” 遊褒禪山記, was one of the most influential and most intellectually empowering political treatises of the entire Northern Song and late imperial period.31 In his essay Fan Zhongyan gives a detailed account of the grand views from Yueyang Tower in the different seasons, although he himself never visited the place. Intellectually, however, the essay is informed by a profound Northern Song conviction that the human mind is capable of overcoming the inherent contradictions and uncertainties of the world and reaching a rational tranquility that transcends worry and pleasure. Whereas his famous statement that “one should worry ahead of the rest of the world and take pleasure after the rest of the world” 先天下 之憂而憂, 後天下之樂而樂 perhaps only popularized the traditional Confucian teaching of putting the state and others before oneself, or the world’s worries ahead of one’s own pleasures, his other equally influential aphorism in the essay, “Do not rejoice when the world is prosperous, do

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not mourn when the world is sorrowful” 不以物喜, 不以己悲, embodies the Northern Song intellectual consensus on the importance of a perfectly stabilized mind as the basis for action. It is this last idea that plays the most important role in shaping the emotional outlook and mindset of Song poets such as Huang Tingjian and Chen Yuyi. This imperturbable mind lies at the heart of the NeoConfucian investigation of the material world and drives the emotional enterprise of Song poetry. In contrast to Liu Xie, the classical theorist, who luxuriates in the spontaneity between the natural world and the human mind, writing, in Owen’s translation, “When spring appears with the incoming year, feelings of delight and ease infuse us; in the billowing luxuriance of early summer, the mind, too, becomes burdened. And when autumn skies are high and its air is clear and chill, our minds, sunken in the darkness of Yin, are intent upon far things; then frost and snow spread over limitless space, and our concerns deepen, serious and stern” 獻歲發春, 悦豫之情暢; 滔滔孟夏, 鬱陶之心凝; 天高氣清, 陰沈之志遠; 霰雪無垠, 矜肅之慮深, Fan advocates rationality and restraint.32 To the eleventh-century statesman, resisting that automatic emotional response, not letting external things or one’s personal situation interfere with the mind, is the necessary first step for social and intellectual action. The Yueyang Tower poems by Chen Yuyi and Huang Tingjian offer excellent examples of the Song intellectual quest for tranquility, independence, and restraint in emotional expression. Although Huang does allow his appreciation of the scenery to cross into ecstatic imagination, he clearly marks it as such and presents it with calm and confidence. As Chen Yuyi leans on the railing of Yueyang Tower and locks his eyes on Junshan Mountain, we can imagine that he too is gradually calming down and assuming command of the scene before him. His self-awareness becomes even more explicit than Huang’s, as he not only goes to great lengths to acknowledge his precise location but also takes advantage of the tower’s height to capture the grandeur of the landscape and its complex history.

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Geographical and Historical Self-Positioning “East of Dongting Lake, West of the Yangzi River, / The banners and flags are motionless, the sun sets slowly.” When Chen Yuyi finally stands on Yueyang Tower and starts identifying the geographical coordinates of his position, he is performing an action we have seen before, listing and itemizing the objects in the physical landscape as a way of ordering it, and himself. When he scans the lake and establishes his position, he also brings the recent history of his travels and larger sweeps of time and space to the picture, facing up to his immediate journey that was already in the past. “Space expands throughout the poem, from the initial site to provinces in line three to the empire in line five to limitless space in line eight,” McCraw comments on the first poem. “Similarly, the poem’s timescape expands from sunset in the first four lines to three years in line six to antiquity in the last couplet.”33 Chen uses a plethora of broadly sweeping words and phrases to construct that artful expansion of time and space: denglin 登臨 (to climb up and look out; 1 of 2, l. 3), wangyuan 望遠 (to gaze afar into the distance; 1 of 2, l. 5), beiwang 北望 (to gaze north; 2 of 2, l. 5), nanyou 南遊 (to travel south; 2 of 2, l. 6), wanli (ten thousand leagues; 1 of 2, l. 5), sannian 三年 (three years; 1 of 2, l. 6). Both the long view and the words have their origins in Du Fu’s poems, but Chen employs them in a way that is characteristically his own. For illustration, we may compare the Yueyang Tower set with Du Fu’s Kuizhou-period regulated verse “Climbing the Heights” 登高: “The wind blows hard, the heavens, high, gibbons howl in lament; / Isles clear, sands white, where birds turn in flight. // Endless trees shed their leaves that descend in the whistling wind; / Unending, the long River comes on churning. // Grieving for fall across ten thousand leagues, always a traveler; / Often sick in this century of life I climb the terrace alone. // In hardship I bitterly resent these tangled, frost-white locks, / Down and out, I recently quit cups of thick ale” 風急天高猿嘯哀, 渚清沙白鳥飛 迴. 無邊落木蕭蕭下, 不盡長江滾滾來. 萬里悲秋常作客, 百年多病獨 登臺. 艱難苦恨繁霜鬢, 潦倒新停濁酒杯.34

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Traditional commentators heaped praise on this famous Du Fu poem. The Qing dynasty critic Yang Lun 楊倫 (1747–1803) called it “the number one seven-syllable regulated verse in Du Fu’s collection” 杜集七言律詩 第一.35 Hu Yinglin of the Ming considered it “not only the number one seven-syllable regulated verse in the Tang, but the number one sevensyllable regulated verse of all time” 此詩自當為古今七言律第一, 不必 為唐人七言律第一也.36 The flow of words, images, sounds, and prosody has such coherence that all fifty-six characters read like the work of a single brushstroke, what Yang Lun pithily describes as gaohun yiqi 高 渾一氣, “grand, holistic, out of one breath.”37 This is the perfection Du Fu’s Song and later emulators constantly talked about; the poem flows naturally and spontaneously, revealing no traces of the craftsman’s hand. The “one breath” (yiqi 一氣) that Yang Lun sees running through Du Fu’s poem is the distillation of years of suffering, embodied by the images of gusty winds, tumbling leaves, and the unending flow of the Yangzi’s rushing waters. Chen Yuyi inherits many of these components but maintains a much closer and more realistic relationship with his objects. He carefully defines his standpoint and keeps his perspective limited and tied to the actual situations of his travel. He performs his tasks first and foremost in his role as an actual visitor, and from that brings the reader to his other role as a poet. His gaze emanates from a fixed position on the tower, and from there spreads outwardly and horizontally to Junshan Mountain in the middle view and further out into the far end of the space. We see a close similarity between the visual progression of his gaze here and that in “Spring Day,” where the rippling movement of the spring colors advances methodically from the courtyard to the distant forest. The rational, realistic nature of Chen’s gaze is also illustrated in the terms he uses. Qian Zhongshu commented on one such phrase, “three years with many hardships” 三年多難 in line 6 of the first poem. “The poem was written in the autumn of the second year of the Jianyan reign [1128], and Chen started his journey in the spring of the first year of

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the Jingkang reign [1126], hence ‘three years,’” Qian wrote. “Had it been written by the Seven Masters of the Ming, they would certainly have copied Du Fu from his ‘Seeing Off Zheng Qian,’ ‘Climbing the Heights,’ or the first poem in the ‘River Village on a Spring Day’ set, using ‘a hundred years’ to match ‘ten thousand leagues’” 這是建炎二年秋天的詩, 陳與 義從靖康元年春天開始逃難, 所以說三年. 要是明代的七子作起來, 準 會學杜甫送鄭十八虔, 登高, 春日江村第一首等詩, 把百年來對萬里.38 Qian’s apparent sarcasm toward the Seven Masters of Ming notwithstanding, his comment touches on a characteristic of Chen’s use of language that reflects a general feature of his writing. Du Fu habitually uses “a hundred years” to contrast “ten thousand leagues”; this, for him, is perhaps no more than a matter of poetic convention, of aesthetic choice than referentiality. Chen’s style and habit call for him to be as physically referential as possible. Compared with Du Fu and other classical poets, Chen’s imagination is more bound to the material circumstances, and although he often willingly, and explicitly, adopts the terminology and sentiments of Du Fu’s poems, his writing is significantly more constrained by those circumstances. In other words, for Chen, using the exact phrase “three years” to describe his travel instead of the readily available conventional phrase “a hundred years” is not a purely technical or aesthetic choice but a necessity, a trained response. The same applies to his use of the phrase “ten thousand leagues.” While describing his travels from Chenliu to Dengzhou at the start of his journey, he used “a thousand leagues” to describe the 700 or so leagues of distance he had actually traveled.39 We see the same spirit being illustrated here in “ten thousand leagues.” It might be only trivial to what we value in Chen as a poet, but if we add up all the distances he traveled in the past three years up to Yuezhou, we get an approximate 6,451 total leagues, making ten thousand not too much of an exaggeration.40

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The Creator Constantly Changes His Script “East of Dongting Lake, West of the Yangzi River, / The banners and flags are motionless, the sun sets slowly.” Once at the top of the tower, with the multitude of voices from the poetic, historical, and cultural past all resonating in his mind, the poet calms down, composes himself, and conducts a gradual, tiered survey of the scene, moving from nearby to faraway, from the most recognizable to the most obscure. The opening two couplets of the first poem establish the position of the observer and his target and the route of view, which sets all subsequent visual and mental processes in motion. The third couplet further defines the speaker’s extended negotiation with the scenery by bringing the larger temporal and spatial context into the question. The poem ends by situating the poet’s immediate travel history in the larger context of his life in general. This outwardly visual and mental exercise is repeated and mirrored in the second poem, with a positive turn of mind starting to take control of the poem’s emotional outlook, in the speaker’s recognition of the bright maple trees among the autumn landscape in line 6, and in the last couplet, where the speaker measures his own work against that of Li Bai, as his train of thought drifts from past history and his recent travel back to the current situation, suggested characteristically by his desire and determination to improve his poetry. The mental uptick that ends the “Ascending the Yueyang Tower” set is indicative of some subtle changes in Chen’s general mood and emotional status during his stay in Yuezhou. As we have seen several times, at the most difficult junctures of his life, poetry reliably emerges as a dependable source of internal strength, a pillar of his physical resilience and moral conviction. The positivity forms an emotional bedrock sustaining him in his Yuezhou stay. In “Lakeside Walk at Evening” 晚步湖邊 (#334/554), we see the poet actively welcome the setting sun: “Staff in hand, I come forward and greet the rays of the setting sun” 杖藜迎落照 (l. 3). Stirred

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by the commotion of the objects in the landscape (“Ten thousand objects all move and rock” 萬象各搖動, l. 9), he initially resists but eventually gives in: “In the end my heart and bosom are roused” 終然動懷抱 (l. 15). The process toward acceptance and freeing the self illustrated here serves as a template for the general mental and emotional process he will go through in Yuezhou in the following year, when his intimate, intense negotiations with the physicality of the place play a transformative role in restoring his disrupted internal balance. There is a palpable sense of uncertainty at the start of this period, when perceived conflicts in the natural landscape are promptly recognized but left unresolved. In “Ascending the Yueyang Tower Again, I Was Moved and Composed Another Poem” (#335/555), the impulse toward a resolution is thwarted, rendered ineffective by the agitations in the lake: “I want to inscribe words to mourn the past, / The winds are vigorous, the waves surging, my mind becomes blank” 欲題文字弔古昔, 風壯浪湧心 茫然 (ll. 7–8). The poet’s mental movement toward diaogu (“mourning the past”) immediately loses its efficacy in the strong winds and waves before his eyes. The urge to transcend the current moment is not only suppressed by the surging winds and waves but preempted by a series of phenomena described in the poem’s first six lines: the imposing shadows of Yueyang Tower and the lake’s meandering embankment (l. 2); the lush, interlocking plants and trees that extend into the distance (l. 3); the alien-looking appearance of the lake (l. 4); and thoughts about the poet’s graying hair and current political events (l. 5). The internal tension and conflicts in the landscape forcefully present themselves before the poet, who seems both unable and unwilling to reconcile them. Recognizing these incongruities, however, is the first step toward their eventual reconciliation and harmonization. On New Year’s Eve of the following year, 1129, the poet’s mind is tormented by the same conflicting feelings, but this time he is able to step up and let the innate optimism of the festive occasion take control. In both poems titled “New Year’s Eve” 除夜二首 (#339–340/563–564), the

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mental disturbances are resolved with an upbeat note pointing forward to the future. The second poem in the set, a seven-syllable quatrain, starts with the image of the weary traveler’s haggard body but ends with the anticipation of the imminent coming of spring. “Ten thousand leagues of rivers and lakes, this haggard body of mine, / The drumbeats in the street are relentless, unforgiving. // I only worry that the plum blossoms may get old overnight— / I shall watch them until daybreak and hand them over to spring” 萬里江湖憔悴身, 鼕鼕街鼓不饒人. 只愁一夜梅花老, 看到 天明付與春. The end-of-the-poem anticipation of spring, emerging out of the heavy gloom that dominates the opening couplet, is a refrain of the positive mentality that ends the first poem in the set. The longer form of the first poem, a regulated verse instead of a quatrain, allows the poet to set up a similar turn with a more leisurely pace. The first six lines read: “The firecrackers in the city lasted until the night was old, / The northern winds blew on the river, rousing my thoughts. // Events of the world are many, hairs at my temples have changed colors with the season; / The flames of the lamp burn unrestrainedly, brightening toward me.41 // Measured against last year, things have turned reasonably for the better; / Cast away in this strange land, I again am afraid” 城中爆竹已 殘更, 朔吹翻江意未平. 多事鬢毛隨節換, 盡情燈火向人明. 比量舊歲 聊堪喜, 流轉殊方又可驚. It ends with a heart-warming determination: “Tomorrow, up to Yueyang Tower I shall go— / To watch spring rise out of the lake’s misty islands” 明日岳陽樓上去, 島煙湖霧看春生. McCraw keenly captures the diversity of the poem’s emotional profile and internal movement, commenting that the poem “displays harmony with a season of dying and rebirth by balancing apprehension and anticipation, then tipping the balance with the forward-looking momentum of his closure.”42 The warm anticipation that ends both poems is expressed with a rare boldness and passion that bring us back to earlier moments in Chen’s life when the circumstances demanded similar thoughts. They are

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written in the same spirit of Huang Tingjian’s Yueyang Tower quatrains, where the senior poet breaks into smiles as he finally faces Junshan Mountain in person after years of exile and suffering. Chen Yuyi would need every bit of this optimism as the year progressed. Events in both the Song-Jin military struggle and the local Yuezhou area seriously pushed the limits of his faith and sanity of his mind. On the national stage, the teetering Southern Song government under the young emperor Gaozong, who was only twenty-two years old as Chen Yuyi celebrated the New Year in Yuezhou, was forced to go on the run again. Gaozong abandoned Yangzhou in the second month of 1129 in great haste, with Jin soldiers hot on his heels, crossed the Yangzi, and arrived at Hangzhou in the same month.43 Then again, in the winter of that year, he was driven by the Jurchens out of Hangzhou onto the open sea in a boat, with the survival of the dynasty hanging by a thin thread. Yuezhou and Hunan were not the main battleground in this year’s Jurchen campaign but they were affected by the war nevertheless. A Jin army pushed deep south into neighboring Jiangxi in the winter of 1129 and from there crossed into Hunan and invaded Tanzhou 潭州, causing great fear throughout the region. The most severe impacts on Chen’s life during his Yuezhou stay, however, came from local sources: a devastating fire and a domestically brewed rebellion. Although the year started on an upbeat note for Chen Yuyi, early in the year Yuezhou was devoured by a big fire and was “almost completely burned” 延燒殆盡.44 The damage obviously included Chen’s part of the city because we see him out looking for lodging after the blaze. He ended up borrowing a pavilion in the rear garden of Wang Jie 王接 (courtesy name Cuiweng 粹翁), the incumbent prefect, and dubbed it Gentleman Pavilion 君子亭 to honor his host. Chen describes the traumatizing effect of the fire in his poems several times. About the ruin in the fire’s aftermath: “My wounded soul wanders in the rubble, site of my old lodge, / I still see in my mind the clouds of smoke galloping like ten thousand horses” 魂傷瓦礫舊曾遊, 尚想奔煙萬馬遒.45 About nature’s

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relentless indifference to human suffering: “The Creator constantly changes his naughty tricks” 天公惡劇逐番新.46 The location of his new lodging, near the Lord Yan Tower (and thus Yueyang Tower as well), is also comprehensively documented in his poems.47 Despite the fire, the spring of 1129 seemed rather peaceful for the poet. We find him composing poems on a variety of seasonal occasions and appreciating the profuse local blooms: plum blossoms; daffodils; crabapples.48 With the serene scenes of flowers he seeks and succeeds in finding psychological support in the resilience of such beautiful natural objects. “The Crabapple Blossoms Withstood the Rain and Did Not Fall” 海棠經雨不謝; “The Plum Blossoms Were All Gone, But Their Red Calyces Remained on the Branches” 梅花無在者, 獨紅萼留枝間: the perseverance of the flowers gives him inspiration and strength to cope with traumatizing situations. His pain, however, is only temporarily assuaged. Contemplative appreciation of beautiful spring blossoms can lead quickly to lamentation: “I whistle lengthily to cleanse myself, / A crescent moon rises above the city’s walls” 永嘯以自暢, 片月生城頭.49 This sudden, determined act, yongxiao (or changyin in the Junyang boat poem), recurs later in moments of hardship and anxiety. Its reappearance here serves as a reverse image of the calm perseverance he sees prominently manifest in the flowers, those bright symbols of “spring’s evanescent beauty.”50

Wandering About on the Lake As spring changed to summer, Chen’s life was again thrown into upheaval by a local emergency. A rebel force led by Gui Zhongzheng 貴仲正 that had been disrupting the larger area brought its destruction to Yuezhou in the fifth month of the year. Official accounts on the rebellion are scanty; Li Xinchuan’s copious record of the period has only two brief mentions of it.51 Chen Yuyi, however, wrote fourteen poems on the event. Not only do the poems

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provide detailed information on his own itinerary as he fled from the rebels on the lake, but they represent a rare case, as Bai Dunren has argued, in which poetry serves to amend the deficiencies of the historical record.52 For example, from the poems, we know that the rebel occupation of Yuezhou lasted for twenty-one days, from the second to the twentysecond of the fifth month.53 The first poem in the series documenting his two and a half months in flight from the rebels paints a dramatic picture of panicking refugees scrambling onto the lake: “Battle drums came from Jiayu like a thousand thunders, / Chaotic sails mingled with rain, all rushing to the lake” 鼓發嘉魚千面雷, 亂帆和雨向湖開.54 The title of the last poem in the series gives detailed information about his return trip: “Since Fleeing the Rebels on the Second Day of the Fifth Month, I Had Wandered about on the Lake, Then Returned via Black Sands on Huarong Pass; At Midnight on the Sixteenth Day of the Seventh Month, I Came Out of Little River Mouth and Moored My Boat; Pacing Back and Forth below the Helms Tower, I Composed Twelve Lines” 自五月二日避寇轉徙湖中 復從華容道烏沙還郡七月十六日夜半出小江口泊焉徙倚柁樓書十二 句 (#385/616–617).55 The main body of the poem describes the tortuous, dizzying movements of Chen’s boat as it negotiated the lake’s meandering shorelines: “Having wandered about for three hundred leagues, / I have completely exhausted my strength. // Ba Mound tossed left to right, / Zhanghua Terrace turned west to east” 回環三百里, 行盡力都窮. 巴丘 左移右, 章華西轉東 (ll. 1–4).56 The poem ends with another release of pent-up emotions by whistling: “I whistle solitarily to match up with the winds” 孤嘯聊延風 (l. 12).

Distinctly Different from Being Appreciated Afar The details of Chen’s lake adventure are less clear. We know that he encountered what looked like a local tornado at Songtian Bay and stopped in a few other recognizable places around the western and northern

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shores of the lake, including Huarong County.57 Early on, he passed by Junshan Mountain but was unable to disembark to visit the island. Passing by Junshan Mountain, Not Able to Land and Visit 過君 山不獲登覽 (#373/601–602) 我夢君山好 In my dreams, Junshan Mountain was gorgeous, 萬里來南州 2 Over ten thousand leagues, I have come to this southern province. 青眉橫玉鏡 Green eyebrows lie across the jade mirror,58 色照城中樓 4 Beautiful colors shine upon the city’s towers. 勝日空倚眺 On splendid days, I leaned and looked out, all in vain, 經年未成遊 6 The year had turned, but my wish remained unfulfilled. 今朝過山下 This morning I passed by the mountain’s bottom, 賊急不敢留 8 But the bandits pressed hard, I dared not stay longer. 嵌空浪吞吐 Sky-scraping waves swallowed everything up, 薈蔚風颼飀 10 Darkening winds whistling through massive clouds. 龍吟雜虎嘯 Howls of dragons mixed with tigers’ roars, 九夏含三秋 12 Autumn chills hidden in the summer heat. 了與遙賞異 Distinctly different from being appreciated afar, 況乃行巖幽 14 Let alone walking among its secluded cliffs. 蚍蜉何當掃 When can the moles and ants get swept away?59 延佇回我舟 16 Having stretched my head, I turned around my boat. 擲去九節筇

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Throwing away my nine-joint bamboo staff, 褰裳走林丘 18 Lifting up my robe, I run through its mounds and forests. 會逢湘君降 Just then, the Xiang goddesses descend, 翠氣衣上浮 20 Emerald vapors blowing on their robes. 山椒望蒼梧 On top of the mountain peak, they gaze off to Cangwu,60 寄恨舒冥搜 22 Their sorrow extends into the unending darkness. As the speaker transforms himself from a dreamer and distant observer to an immersive experiencer and participant in Junshan Mountain’s physical spectacle, he fulfills not only his own dreams but metaphorically also what Huang Tingjian regrets not being able to do: to be physically on the lake and roaming with the waves although the experience is compromised by the urgency of fleeing a rebellion. Prior to this point the poet’s relationship with Junshan Mountain has been conventional, and aesthetically constructed, with the island engaged remotely as an object of beauty and a source of emotional consolation through such routine mechanisms as yitiao 倚眺 (“leaning and looking out,” l. 5) or yaoshang 遙賞 (“appreciating from afar,” l. 13). All five earlier descriptions of the mountain also fit this looking-out, remoteappreciation model: 1. “A sojourning traveler on top of the tower, at autumn’s tip, / As the sun sinks into Junshan Mountain’s vigorous vapors.”61 2. “Junshan Mountain rises tall, imposing its presence at year’s end, / The skies south of the lake are reflected in the waters, white as if being swept” 君山偃蹇橫歲暮, 天映湖南白如掃.62 3. “The mirror-like surface of Dongting Lake extends to a thousand leagues, / It nevertheless needs Junshan Mountain to set it off” 洞庭鏡 面平千里, 却要君山相發揮.63

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4. “Only Junshan Mountain is as pretty as before, / A floating eyebrow of green greets me under the clear sky” 唯有君山故窈窕, 一眉晴綠 向人浮.64 5. “Leaning alone on the lofty battlements, I gaze far off to Cangwu, / In the sunset, Junshan Mountain is like a scroll of painting” 獨憑危堞 望蒼梧, 落日君山如畫圖.65 Chen’s close physical encounter with the mountain changes that yitiao or yaoshang relationship, but his success is only half realized. A complete encounter is preempted by the urgent circumstances of the visit. The poet nonetheless takes advantage of the opportunity: he stopped his boat, “stretched my neck” (l. 16), and opened up his mind and body to the physical spectacle unfolding at the bottom of the mountain. To our surprise—or perhaps not—his previous distant appreciations turn out to have been a little romanticized or overly optimistic: his actual encounter with the sounds and sights surrounding the island is far more chilling and dangerous than those earlier imaginative explorations prepared him for. The landscape before him is defined by “sky-scraping waves,” “darkening winds,” “howls of dragons,” and “tigers’ roars”; it is a situation where fear is interwoven with beauty, brutality is mixed with sublimity. Under these circumstances, the poet does not linger; after taking a long look, he pulls himself back out onto the lake. He remains regretful, however, and ventures immediately into an imaginative walk on the island, using the last six lines of the poem (ll. 17–22) to describe the unfulfilled journey virtually. He throws away his staff, imagines running through the island’s forests and valleys and, at the very height of the drama, witnesses the descent of the Xiang goddesses on the island. As the goddesses grace the mountain that bears their name, when form and substance, name and body become united, however, sadness reigns again. Their pensive gazes travel from the top of the mountain all the way south to Cangwu, the source of their ancient grief, and the entire murky landscape is swallowed up by sorrow.

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Three distinct modes of engagement with Junshan Mountain are evoked in the poem. The conventional long-distance appreciation described at the start of the poem is replaced, first, by the close-up experience of the island’s immediate surroundings as seen from just offshore, and second, by the poet’s imagined wandering through the mountain’s fabled topography. The third mode, the still tableau that ends the poem, with the goddesses gazing silently toward Cangwu, is a brilliant touch because their gaze also serves as an apt projection of the poet’s own grief; the goddesses are a substitution for himself atop the mountain, looking into the distance and contemplating his own destiny. Chen is unconsciously anticipating the future of his journey beyond Yuezhou, as his earlier gaze onto the lake from atop Yueyang Tower after his arrival had uncannily anticipated his current wandering on the lake. As his journey continues, we will see that his gaze continues to have this unusual power of seeing into the future and becomes increasingly volitional and psychically predictive. The shift of perspectives described in the poem also symbolizes the larger change taking place in Chen’s relationship with the natural landscape in general, where we see a similar tendency to move from distant observation to close-quarters encounters. Prior to 1126, Chen’s poetic relationship with nature was consistently close but not very personal. His writing had an aesthetically launched remote sensibility and careful verbal representations without much physicality or visceral feeling attached to them. The more than three years of forced movement and migration took him farther and farther from his geographical and psychological home and into increasingly intimate contact with the gritty realities of the world. His three months of hiding in the mountains near Fangzhou and two-and-a-half month circling on Dongting Lake are two extreme examples of how the changing dynamics of his encounters with nature were enacted by extraordinary circumstances. The change, however, was undergirded by long-term tendencies as well.

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A common theme that emerges out of Chen’s experience is that despite all the difficulties inflicted on him in his travels, nature remains a reliable source of consolation, a pillar of emotional and moral support against the vicissitudes of the human experience. The brutality and roughness of the landscape is gradually revealed on his journey, then smoothed out, domesticated, and turned into material for poetry and personal regeneration. This cycle of being shattered and gaining new footing through physical engagement with the natural world endures across the 1126 divide. As the poet’s old balance is broken, a new one is established and the wings of his imagination start to flutter again. Facing drizzling rain while still on the lake, he proclaims: “I haven’t felt that my youthful ambitions have subsided” 未覺壯心休.66

The River and the Lake In its modern usage, the term jianghu 江湖 (lit., “rivers and lakes”) is closely associated with the world of martial arts heroes and social outcasts, suggesting maverick behavior and a wayward existence. In the premodern period, the term was used to convey a range of meanings but its core sense remained quite stable, denoting an alternate order outside of the state and family, a symbolic space of unbridled enjoyment and freedom. The term appears only once in Chen’s poems prior to the Yuezhou period but it enjoys a brief eruption of occurrence in the sixty-nine poems he wrote while there, appearing altogether nine times:67 1. “Four years of wind and dew have encroached upon the traveler, / In the tenth month, river and lake spit out chaotic islets” 四年風露侵 遊子, 十月江湖吐亂洲.68 2. “Grasses and trees are interlocked in the southern land, / river and lake demonstrate different looks before the railing” 草木相連南服內, 江湖異態欄干前.69

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3. “Ten thousand leagues of rivers and lakes, this haggard body of mine, / The drumbeats in the street are relentless, unforgiving.”70 4. “The vital forces of the rivers and lakes are stirred, but spring is still cold, / In the lengthening calls of the swans and geese, I remain sleepless” 江湖氣動春還冷, 鴻鴈聲迴人不眠.71 5. “Five years of endless events between Heaven and Earth, / Among ten thousand leagues of rivers and lakes, me in this place” 五年天地無 窮事, 萬里江湖見在身.72 6. “In the clashing of arms and weapons, no date for return, / On the rivers and lakes, I live out my old life” 兵甲無歸日, 江湖送老身.73 7. “Between Heaven and Earth a useless scholar is trapped, / Among the rivers and lakes, a lonely boat comes to lodge itself” 天地困腐儒, 江湖託孤檝.74 8. “Between Heaven and Earth the dust has not settled, / On the rivers and lakes, I briefly extend my breath” 天地塵未消, 江湖氣聊伸.75 9. “River and lake deepen before my drinking goblet, / The sun and moon speed by in my dreams” 江湖尊前深, 日月夢中疾.76 Although the traditional use and meaning of the term, as general reference to an unspecified space of freedom, is still detectable, in almost every case the term can also be understood as referring to the actual Yangzi River and Dongting Lake within the poet’s sight, as part of the speaker’s physical surroundings. This is most obvious in examples 1 and 2 and, to a lesser extent, example 9.77 Another, more obvious change is that although the term’s traditional connotations are still a factor in the examples cited, the concept acquires a considerable range of new meanings connected to hardship and adversity: wind and dew impinging on the traveler (1); deviation in appearance (2); long distances and haggard looks (3); lingering cold and sleeplessness (4); chaos and unfathomable space (5); warfare, sojourning, and the

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aging body (6); constraint and loneliness (7); unsettled dust (8); and impermanence (9). The subtle change in the meaning and semantic connotations of jianghu illustrates how the poet’s sharpened sense of space and locality and his innovative use of conventional words to describe them are interlocked. Chen’s heavy reliance on physical space in his Yuezhou poems is a consequence of the anxiety and hardship he endured during this period and over the course of his travels. Visceral encounters with pristine mountain scenery on his way from Ruzhou to Guanghua, the cramped canyon spaces where he was hiding in the mountains of Fangzhou, and his tortuous wandering on Dongting Lake in his boat all left indelible marks on his psyche, and their impact is reflected both emotionally and lexically in his poems. Such direct encounters also keep him connected to the energizing pulses of nature, emboldening both his view and his thoughts. When, on the Double Ninth of 1129, he ascends Yueyang Tower one more time with his friends, to bid them farewell and to say goodbye to the place that he had engaged with so viscerally in the past year, all his hardships and suffering seem to disappear into the lake’s unfathomable depth: Two Quatrains 兩絕句 (1 of 2) (#392/625) 西風吹日弄晴陰 The western winds blow, playing with the sun’s light and shadows, 酒罷三巡湖海深 2 After three rounds of wine, the lakes and seas have become deep. 岳陽樓上登高節 On Yueyang Tower, at the festival of climbing the heights, 不負南來萬里心 4 My intentions of traveling ten thousand leagues south are not in vain.

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Notes 1. See Sima Qian, “Biographies of Qu Yuan and Jia Yi” 屈原賈生列傳, Shiji, 84.2481–2504. For a brief introduction of Jia, see Knechtges, Wen xuan, 3:375–376. 2. The description is David McCraw’s. McCraw, “New Look,” 1. 3. The “Hanlin Academician” is Li Bai 李白 (701–762), who visited the area late in his life. 4. Baling 巴陵, or Baqiu 巴丘, an archaic name for Yuezhou. 5. Li Qingjia, Yingkui, 41. Qian Zhongshu, Songshi, 135. Hargett and Fuller translated the first poem, and McCraw translated both. Hargett, “Poetry,” 199; Fuller, Drifting, 177; McCraw, “Poetry,” 156, 302–303. 6. “Ascending the Yueyang Tower” (1 of 2), ll. 1–2. 7. For a survey of poems on the lake and the tower by Tang writers, see Dai Weihua, Diyu wenhua, 87–89. 8. Fang Hui succinctly summarizes this double influence of Du Fu and Huang Tingjian by saying that Chen “reached the perfection of Huang Tingjian in the near and Du Fu in the distant past” 近逼山谷, 遠詣老杜. Li Qingjia, Yingkui, 41. Hu Yinglin comments that the poems are “gorgeous, outstanding, in the true style of Du Fu” 雄麗冠裳, 得杜調者也. Hu Yinglin, Shisou, Outer Collection, 5.12a [173]. Ji Yun remarks that “the conception and vision are grand and deep, a true match for that of Du Fu” 意境宏深, 真逼老杜. Li Qingjia, Yingkui, 42. 9. Qu and Zhu, Li Bai, 1249. 10. Du Fu died two years later, in 770. For a discussion of Du Fu’s poems written on his journey from Kuizhou down the Yangzi to Hunan, see McCraw, Du Fu’s Laments, 61–80. 11. Xiao Difei, Du Fu, 5673; Owen, Poetry, 6:43, slightly modified. See also McCraw, Du Fu’s Laments, 74. 12. McCraw, “Poetry,” 309. 13. Zheng Yongxiao, Huang Tingjian, 364. 14. Liu Shangrong, Huang Tingjian, 584–585. 15. Yanyu Heap was a huge rock that stood at the entrance to Qutang Gorge, the westernmost of the Three Gorges, through which Huang traveled out of Sichuan. The rock was removed in 1958 to facilitate navigation by modern ships. A fragment of it is now preserved in the Three Gorges Museum at Chongqing. A poem by Du Fu, “Yanyu Rock” 灩澦堆, suc-

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20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

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cinctly describes how the rock posed great danger to boatmen, appearing to change in size with the waterlevel changes in different seasons: “Huge rock in the midst of the water, / When the River is cold, it rises tall from the water” 巨石水中央, 江寒出水長. Xiao Difei, Du Fu, 3738; Owen, Poetry, 4:138–139. Huang was traveling downstream to his home in Jiangxi, part of what is traditionally known as Jiangnan (“Southland,” “south of the Yangzi River”). Yoshikawa, Introduction, 24–38. The phrase is McCraw’s, “New Look,” 7. What is given here represents a composite version of the various legends and tales associated with the Xiang goddesses. For a detailed account of these legends, see Schafer, Divine Woman, 38–42, 57–69, 93–103, 137– 145. For a brief sketch, see Waters, Three Elegies, 133. McCraw, “Poetry,” 310. In addition to the two under discussion, the remaining six poems are: “Ascending the Yueyang Tower Again, I Was Moved and Composed Another Poem” 再登岳陽樓感慨賦詩 (#335/555); “Ascending the Yueyang Tower Yet Again” 又登岳陽樓 (#338/563); “Two Quatrains” 兩絕句 (1 of 2) (#392/625); “Cuiweng Used Qifu’s Rhymes and Composed a Poem on Double Ninth Day, I Also Composed One, Concurrently Presented to Qifu” 粹翁用奇父韻賦九日與義同賦兼呈奇父 (#394/626); “Farewell to Preceptor Kang Yuanzhi” 留別康元質教授 (#397/635); and “Farewell to Yuezhou” 別岳州 (#399/637). The area varies owing to the lake’s nature as a drainage basin for the Yangzi. In modern times, the lake’s area may increase to 7,700 square miles in flood season. A popular saying, “eight hundred leagues of Dongting” 八百里洞庭, dates back to the Tang and Song period. Dongting used to be the largest freshwater lake in China; it is now the second largest, after Poyang Lake in Jiangxi, as much of Dongting Lake had been converted into farmland. Yuezhou, now part of Hunan Province, was in Chen’s time under the jurisdiction of Jinghu North Circuit, rather than Jinghu South Circuit. Murck, Poetry and Painting, 61–72. Nienhauser, Tang Dynasty, 2:1–41. See also Allen, Shifting Stories, 151– 153. CYYJJJ, 553n1. Chen references this event several times: for example, “Expressing My Thoughts on Recent Events at Ba Mound” 巴丘書事

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29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

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(#333/552) and “Song of a Local Old Man: A Ballad” 里翁行 (#336/556– 557). Yueyang fengtu ji 岳陽風土記; quoted in CYYJJJ, 549n1. Zhang served as prefect of Yuezhou from 715 to 717. On the importance of Yuezhou for his poetry, see Zhou Rui, Zhang Yue, 37–38, 93–95, 139– 145; Dai Weihua, Diyu wenhua, 91–94; Shang Yongliang, Tang Wudai, 223–228. CYYJJJ, 566n1. Lord of Yan was Zhang Yue’s noble title. Fan Zhongyan, Fan Wenzheng, 19. The account was signed “the fifteenth day of the ninth month” of 1046. For the larger political and intellectual context of Fan’s essay, see Li Qiang, Beisong Qingli, esp. 135–148. Wang Anshi, Linchuan, 716. Wang Anshi, the future grand councilor and reform mastermind, wrote his account eight years after Fan’s essay. In a tone of what Jonathan Pease calls a “youthful bravado,” Wang makes the passionate declaration, based on his personal experience of visiting Baochan Mountain, that “the grandest, most marvelous and extraordinary view in the world often exists in the most dangerous, distant places where people seldom go” 世之奇偉瑰怪非常之觀, 常在於險遠, 而人之 所罕至焉, and that “only those with a strong will can reach them” 故非 有志者不能至也. For a translation and discussion, see Pease, “No Going Back.” Huang, Li, and Yang, Wenxin, 566; Owen, Readings, 278. McCraw, “New Look,” 6. Xiao Difei, Du Fu, 5092; Owen, Poetry, 5:273. Yang Lun, Dushi jingquan 杜詩鏡銓, juan 17; quoted in Xiao Difei, Du Fu, 5097. Hu Yinglin, Shisou, Inner Collection 內編, 5.17b [109]. Quoted in Xiao Difei, Du Fu, 5097. Qian Zhongshu, Songshi, 135. “Seven Masters of the Ming” refers to a group of writers in the early years of the Archaist movement 復古 headed by Li Mengyang 李夢陽 (1472–1529) and He Jingming 何景明 (1483–1521), known for their radical ideas of going back to the Han and Tang for literary models. See Bryant, Great Recreation, 641–658. The full title of “Seeing Off Zheng Qian” is “Seeing Off Zheng Qian Who Has Been Banished to the Post of Revenue Manager in Taizhou” 送鄭十八 虔貶台州司戶, in which Du Fu writes: “Ten thousand leagues, it pains my heart, this day of stern banishment, / Approaching death in our hundred-year span, at the time of the Restoration” 萬里傷心嚴譴日, 百年垂 死中興時. Xiao Difei, Du Fu, 990; Owen, Poetry, 1:361. In the first poem

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41. 42. 43.

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in “River Village on a Spring Day: Five Poems” 春日江村五首 (1 of 5), Du Fu writes: “Heaven and Earth, eyes that see thousands of leagues; / In the sequence of seasons, heart of life’s hundred years” 乾坤萬里眼, 時序百年心. Xiao Difei, Du Fu, 3346; Owen, Poetry, 4:51. “Expressing My Thoughts on Recent Events at the West Pavilion of Dengzhou: Ten Poems” (2 of 10) (#225/408): “Over a thousand leagues I came, bringing only the shadow of me” (l. 1). That was about 2,004 miles. The number of 6,451 Chinese leagues breaks down as follows. Notes: (1) The route is reconstructed based on Chen’s poems and his chronology by Hu Zhi and Bai Dunren; (2) The distances are based on Wang Cun’s Yuanfeng jiuyu zhi; (3) When there is no entry for a place, I use the nearest substitution; (4) Both the route and the distances are approximate to the best of my knowledge; (5) There are more ambiguities regarding some parts of the route than others; for example, there is only scanty information about Chen’s northbound trip from Dengzhou back to Chenliu to fetch his family in the summer and autumn of 1126; (5) When Chen writes about arriving at or starting from a county or prefecture, it is safe to assume that he refers to the seat of that county or prefecture; (6) In most cases, Wang Cun provides two sets of numbers: the distance from the seat of an administrative unit to its border 界首 in a given direction and the distance from there to the seat of the neighboring unit; in calculating the distances Chen traveled, I add the two numbers up; (7) There are sometimes slight discrepancies when the distance between two points is calculated starting from different locations; I choose the one that best reflects the possible route Chen might have taken. (1) Chenliu to Dengzhou: 698; (2) Dengzhou to Luoyang: 1,040; (3) Luoyang to Kaifeng: 382; (4) Kaifeng to Chenliu: 52; (5) Chenliu to Kaifeng: 52; (6) Kaifeng to Luoyang: 382; (7) Luoyang to Guanghua: 1,300; (8) Guanghua to Dengzhou: 260; (9) Dengzhou to Fangzhou: 475; (10) Fangzhou to Junyang: 215; (11) Junyang to Xiangzhou 襄州: 330; (12) Xiangzhou to Yingzhou 郢州: 217; (13) Yingzhou to Ezhou 鄂州: 598; (14) Ezhou to Yuezhou: 450. I borrowed McCraw’s wording in translating this line: “The fully sympathetic flame of the lamp brightens toward me.” McCraw, “Poetry,” 129. McCraw, “New Look,” 18. Chen Yuyi referred to some of these events in his poems. In “Residing in Barbarian Land: A Ballad” 居夷行 (#337/559), he wrote: “The vapors of clouds in Yangzhou are dark and motionless” 揚州雲氣鬱不動 (l. 11). In “Matching the Rhymes of Zhou Yinqian’s ‘Expressing My Feelings’” 次

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48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

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韻尹潜感懷 (#371/596), he wrote: “The barbarian soldiers are frolicking in the Huai River spring again” 胡兒又看繞淮春 (l. 1). JYYL, 24.21b [388]. “Thoughts While Looking for Lodging in the South of the City after the Fire” 火後至城南問舍有感 (#341/565), ll. 1–2. “Living in Gentleman Pavilion after the Fire, I Composed Four Quatrains Expressing My Thoughts on Recent Events, Presented to Cuiweng” 火 後借居君子亭書事四絕呈粹翁 (1 of 4) (#343/567), l. 1. “The lofty tower is separated by only a single layer of fence” 危樓只隔一 重籬 (l. 1), he writes in “Using the Same Rhymes, I Composed Four More Poems” 用前韻再賦四首 (3 of 4) (#349/571). “The luxuriantly flowering trees under the Lord Yan Tower, / I look at them a hundred times a day” 燕公樓下繁華樹, 一日遙看一百回 (ll. 1–2), he opens the poem “Watching from Afar the Prune Blossoms at the Bottom of the Lord Yan Tower” 望燕公樓下李花 (#353/574). “Watching from Afar the Prune Blossoms at the Bottom of the Lord Yan Tower” (#353/574); “On the Twenty-First Day the Winds Were Copious; the Following Day, the Plum Blossoms Were All Gone, But Their Red Calyces Remained on the Branches, and They Were Very Lovely” 二 十一日風盛明日梅花無在者獨紅萼留枝間甚可愛也 (#351/572); “Five Rhymed Couplets on Daffodils” 詠水仙花五韻 (#352/572); “Accompanying Cuiweng for a Drink at Gentleman Pavilion, under Which the Crabapples Were Blooming Luxuriantly” 陪粹翁舉酒於君子亭亭下海 棠方開 (#354/575); “Facing Wine in Rain, the Crabapple Blossoms in the Courtyard below Withstood the Rain and Did Not Fall” 雨中對酒庭下 海棠經雨不謝 (#365/585). “Touring Many Flowers Pavilion on Cold Food Day” 寒食日遊百花亭 (#368/590), ll. 15–16. The phrase was used by David McCraw to describe the crabapple flowers, one of the last to bloom in spring. McCraw, “Poetry,” 273. The more elaborate of the two mentions is in the form of a note attached to the entry for the sixth month of 1129. JYYL, 24.21ab [388]. CYYJJJ, 600–601n1. This information comes from the titles of two poems: “On the Second Day of the Fifth Month, I Entered Dongting Lake to Flee the Gui Zhongzheng Rebels: A Quatrain” 五月二日避貴寇入洞庭湖絕句 (#372/600); “On the Twenty-Second Day, I Set Off on Boat from North Sands, Having Heard that the Rebels Had Repented Today” 二十二日自 北沙移舟作是日聞賊革面 (#376/605).

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54. “On the Second Day of the Fifth Month, I Entered Dongting Lake to Flee the Gui Zhongzheng Rebels: A Quatrain” (#372/600), ll. 1–2. Jiayu is a county of Ezhou in Hubei, where the rebels came from. 55. Huarong Pass 華容道 was a narrow road in Huarong County, which was under the administration of Yuezhou, on the northern bank of Dongting Lake; Cao Cao escaped by the pass to Jiangling after his disastrous defeat in the 208 naval battle in nearby Red Cliff 赤壁. The exact locations of Black Sands 烏沙 and Little River Mouth 小江口 are unclear. 56. Zhanghua Terrace 章華臺 was reputedly built by an ancient king of Chu to the northwest of Yuezhou on the Yangzi River. 57. “Moored at Songtian Bay, Having Encountered Perverse Winds” 泊宋田 遇厲風作 (#375/604); “My Boat Arrived at Huarong County” 舟抵華容 縣 (#380/611); “Composed at Night” 夜賦 (#381/612). Michael Fuller has translated “Composed at Night,” in Drifting, 179. 58. “Jade mirror” is a metaphor Li Bai used to describe the lake. Chen added the blue eyebrows component for Junshan Mountain. 59. Moles and ants are a metaphor for the rebels. 60. Cangwu was their deceased husband Shun’s burial place down south in the Jiuyi Mountains. 61. “Ascending the Yueyang Tower” (2 of 2) (#332/551), ll. 3–4. 62. “Residing in Barbarian Land: A Ballad” (#337/559), ll. 7–8. 63. “Ascending the Yueyang Tower Yet Again” (#338/563), ll. 3–4. 64. “Thoughts While Looking for Lodging in the South of the City after the Fire” (#341/565), ll. 7–8. 65. “Evening Thoughts on Top of the City Walls” 城上晚思 (#364/585), ll. 1–2. 66. “Drizzling Rain” 細雨 (#374/603), l. 8. 67. The number does not include instances when the term’s two components, jiang 江 and hu 湖, appear separately, nor when Chen uses the variant huhai 湖海 (“lakes and seas,” which appears three additional times, in poems 365, 391, 392). The term’s sole pre-Yuezhou occurrence is in the last of the four Preserving Authenticity Pond poems, which is dated by Bai Dunren to 1124, “Gathering on Preserving Authenticity Pond with Dormmates on Summer Solstice: Two Poems” 夏至日與同 舍會葆真二首: “How can rivers and lakes be far off? / What is lacking is a single rain cape” 江湖豈在遠, 所欠雨一簑 (2 of 2) (#159/303), ll. 7–8. I wish to thank one of the anonymous reviewers for identifying this occurrence for me. The term acquired a new meaning toward the end of the Southern Song, when it was used to name a group of poets,

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68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76.

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the Rivers and Lakes school 江湖詩派, who self-consciously distanced themselves from the urban centers of political power, choosing instead to “drift among the rivers and lakes.” See Fuller, Drifting; Zhang Hongsheng, Jianghu. “Expressing My Thoughts on Recent Events in Ba Mound” (#333/552), ll. 5–6. Chen uses the term literally here, to describe a natural phenomenon of the Yangzi River and Dongting Lake. “Ascending the Yueyang Tower Again, I Was Moved and Composed Another Poem” (#335/555), ll. 3–4. Used literally, to describe the changing appearance of the Yangzi River and Dongting Lake. “New Year’s Eve” (2 of 2) (#340/564), ll. 1–2. Chen uses the term in both the general, classical sense and in reference to the actual river and lake. “Touched by Thoughts on a Spring Night, Sent to Xi Daguang” 春夜感 懷寄席大光 (#355/576), ll. 5-6. Chen uses the term in both the general, classical sense and in reference to the actual river and lake. “Matching the Rhymes of Zhou Yinqian’s ‘Expressing My Feelings’” (#371/596), ll. 5–6. “Five years”: the war with the Jin had spanned five years by this point (1125–1129). Chen uses the term in both the general, classical sense and in reference to the actual river and lake. “Gazing into the Wilds on a Clear Evening” 晚晴野望 (#378/608), ll. 7–8. Chen uses the term in both the general, classical sense and in reference to the actual river and lake. “My Boat Arrived at Huarong County” (#380/611), ll. 7–8. Chen uses the term in both the general, classical sense and in reference to the actual river and lake. “Moonlit Night” 月夜 (#382/613), ll. 7–8. Chen uses the term in both the general, classical sense and in reference to the actual river and lake. “In the Ninth Month of the jiyou Year [1129], I Set Out to Cross the Lake from Ba Mound; Farewell to Cuiweng” 己酉九月自巴丘過湖南別粹翁 (#396/633), ll. 7–8. Chen uses the term in both the general, classical sense and in reference to the actual river and lake. McCraw’s translations of examples 1 and 2 also reflect this literal reading: “In the tenth month Yangzi and lake disgorge jumbled islets”; “River and lake have different appearances before the railing.” “Poetry,” 142 and 154, respectively.

Chapter 7

Poetic Perfection In seeking a rough metaphor for the Yuezhou and Dongting Lake area as a geographical and cultural locality, we might think about the modern traffic roundabout. The region served as both a natural transit hub, where some of the empire’s main waterways and land routes intersected, and a cultural center, where famous officials and poets crossed paths as they traveled on business, in exile, or for pleasure. Yuezhou’s reputation and long history attracted a great many people to the place, pushing the city to be ever more open to accepting and nurturing different personalities—and different styles of poetry. For Chen Yuyi, his year-long stay turned out to be invaluable for his emotional recovery and poetic renovation. He was able to reexamine and consolidate some earlier habits and inclinations in his thought and writing and came out of the year refreshed and with a renewed sense of conviction. The thought of leaving Yuezhou must have been on his mind from the start. When he was at the top of Yueyang Tower his gaze was routinely directed beyond the lake to the distant mountains in the south. The idea seemed to become more compelling as the year progressed. In a poem about seeing off a friend who had finally made up his mind to cross the lake and go south, he starts by describing his own accidental arrival at

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the place: “My body was like a lonely cloud, / Following the wind, on the lakeside it fell” 我身如孤雲, 隨風墮湖邊.1 His mind, however, has raced across the lake and is already on the Xiao and Xiang Rivers: “On Dongting Lake, misty vapors rise above the islets, / In Xiao and Xiang, the rain splatters on the empty streams” 洞庭煙發渚, 瀟湘雨鳴川 (ll. 13– 14). The imagined rainy landscape along the Xiao and Xiang deep in the southern mountains serves as an effective roadmap for the next section of his journey. As he sees himself disgorged from the vast, circulating waters of Dongting Lake into the lush, meandering valleys of the Xiao and Xiang, the echoes of the raindrops he imagines hearing there pretty accurately presages the area’s cozy, heavily covered hilly topography as well as serving as a metaphor for the intensifying psychological storm in his mind. The sounds of rain would soon mix with those of resounding poetic recitation, shaking up the river and mountainous local landscape, helping bring him the sense of poetic perfection.

Realm of Ephemeral Illusions Chen did not leave Yuezhou until after the Double Ninth of the year. In a poem on taking leave of two of his closest friends in Yuezhou, titled “Cuiweng Used Qifu’s Rhymes and Composed a Poem on Double Ninth Day, I Also Composed One, Concurrently Presented to Qifu” (#394/626), he employs an elaborate narrative not just to mark the occasion but also take stock of the last three Double Ninths that he spent on the road. With fifty-six lines, this is the longest poem in his collection, more than triple his favorite length of sixteen. The poem starts conventionally with a general statement on the natural cycle of the seasons (ll. 1–2) and then goes quickly down memory lane: “The year before last year in Dengzhou city, / Winds and rain toppled the traveler’s lodge” 前年鄧州城, 風雨傾客居 (ll. 5–6); “I went out of the city gate and then came back, / Halberds and banners filled up the streets” 出門復入門, 戈旆填街衢 (ll. 13–14). The picture painted of the following year, when he was on his way down the Han to Yuezhou, is no

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less gloomy: “Last year on the banks of Yingzhou, / A lonely boat faced the city’s broken walls” 去年郢州岸, 孤檝對壞郛 (ll. 15–16); “At sunset, I was left to stumble and linger in the wilds” 日暮野踟躕 (l. 22). The year he spent in Yuezhou was likewise marked by hardship but it also contained peaceful enjoyment: “This year on Dongting Lake, / Nine-fold was the rugged landscape. // From time to time I leaned on Yueyang Tower, / And looked on the winding mountains and streams” 今年洞庭上, 九折餘崎嶇. 時憑岳陽樓, 山川看縈紆 (ll. 25–28). After paying respects to his hosts by bringing up their shared memories, the poet ventures into intense contemplation and expectation: “I hope next year at this festival, / We shall get drunk again, enough that we will need to be helped with. // These flowers I also expect to once again face, / Not letting them fall into the empty void” 會須明年節, 醉倒還相扶. 此 花期復對, 勿令墮空虛 (ll. 37–40). He understands that the chrysanthemums will remain, but the people now appreciating them will once again disperse. As for himself, he already has a plan: “Tomorrow’s weather will be great, / Heading south this wild duck will take wing the first” 明日風景佳, 南翔先一鳧 (ll. 41– 42). Thereupon he makes a pledge: “Let us meet again south of Mount Heng, / Chasing, pacing in the realm of ephemeral illusions” 相期衡山 南, 追步淩忽區 (ll. 49–50). Mount Heng, known as Nanyue 南嶽, or the Southern Marchmount of the sacred Chinese mountains, is part of a mountain range stretching from Yuelu Mountain 岳麓山 in modern Changsha southward to the Nanling Mountains that traditionally marked the southern border of the ancient Chinese empire. Mount Heng holds great importance in Chinese religion, especially Daoism.2 The word xiu 秀 (originally used to describe the heading and flowering of grain crops such as rice or wheat) in the popular expression Nanyue du xiu 南嶽獨秀, “The Southern Marchmount rises and demonstrates its elegant beauty without peers,” well captures the mountain’s exceptional grace and beauty. At only about 4,200 feet high, it is a mere hill by comparison with other great Chinese mountains.

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It has no exposed craggy cliffs or stunning pinnacle; instead it is defined by its rolling, gentle wooded hills and valleys. In a sense, with its lush scenery and quiet natural beauty it represents the soft side of the great Chinese mountains. Mount Heng marks another important geographical and psychological threshold in Chinese culture as well. It was the southernmost point the migrating geese traveled each year for the winter; from there they returned north in the spring. For this reason it was known as Geese Turning Peak 回雁峰, the southern gateway to the mountain range. The sage kings Yu and Shun were said to have reached this far on their respective southern tours, the mountain marking the southern edge of their empires. It marked also the southernmost extent of the travels of Li Bai and Du Fu.3 Eighty-nine years before Chen Yuyi’s arrival, in 1040, the Northern Song statesman Fan Zhongyan composed a famous song lyric in which he looks down from his northern vantage point in Shaanxi to the migrating geese’s last stop in Hengyang 衡陽 (lit., “south of Mount Heng”): “On the northern frontiers, the autumn comes, the landscape takes on a different look, / To south of Mount Heng the geese leave without hesitation” 塞下 秋來風景異, 衡陽雁去無留意.4 Thirty-eight years after Chen was there, another event added to Mount Heng’s cultural significance. In 1167 the great Southern Song Neo-Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi accepted an invitation from his friend and intellectual rival Zhang Shi 張栻 (1133– 1180), then judicial commissioner of Hunan, to lecture at the Yuelu Academy in Tanzhou (modern Changsha). The two men and one of Zhu’s pupils visited Mount Heng in the winter of that year, and together they wrote 149 poems during their seven-day stay, in what became a celebrated event in the Southern Song Neo-Confucian movement.5 “Realm of ephemeral illusions” (huqu 忽區), the phrase Chen uses for his proposed rendezvous site with Cuiweng and Qifu, was borrowed from the Huainanzi 淮南子, where it refers to “murky, ephemeral realms that have no shape” 忽恍無形之區.6 In addition, the verb ling 凌 in the

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third position of the line also brings up the Daoist notion and practice of “riding the void” 淩虛 or “pacing the void” 步虛.7 When Chen actually traveled to those “realms of ephemeral illusions,” however, the murky, shapeless huqu he had imagined in Yuezhou gradually acquired an identity and a material existence, and the associated senses of alienness and ephemerality were gradually domesticated as part of his own experience. His 1129 Double Ninth poem on taking leave of Cuiweng and Qifu also anticipates this transformation. After proposing to meet at Mount Heng, the poet performs another characteristic act of “turning around”: “Turning my head, I gaze back onto the clouds of Yao’s land, / The Central Plains are overgrown with thorns and brambles” 回 首望堯雲, 中原莽榛蕪 (ll. 51–52). “The clouds of Yao’s land,” the very thought of which would have broken his heart at the start of his journey, had now turned into “thorns and brambles.” Crowding out the idea of home, the overgrown weeds represent an important symbolic shift in the poet’s mindset. As his backward gaze toward home is blocked by them, the view before him looms as his only alternative, becoming the determining factor in what he does and thinks. He now looks at his home from a distant, estranged, but authentic perspective. He will continue to look back, but now the present, local landscape constantly pulls his mind back to the place he is actually in, which he gradually comes to understand and accept as the only legitimate place for his being and his identity. On ascending Yueyang Tower after arriving in Yuezhou about a year before, he had lamented, with equal parts anxiety and anticipation, “My poems are not yet perfected as I arrive at Ba Mound” 詩到巴陵還未工. A few months after leaving Yuezhou, in a small village deep in the mountains in Shaozhou 邵州, he would proclaim with pride and contentment that “this old man’s poetry is complete at this place at last” 老夫詩到此間成. The pristine, beautiful scenery of the southern mountains helped him finally achieve this transformation.

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First Acquaintance The uncertainty and murkiness of Mount Heng as he imagined it before leaving Yuezhou are resolved, little by little, by the quiet, unspoiled beauty of the local landscape as he traveled from Yuezhou to Mount Heng and from there westward to Shaozhou. The following quatrain, written at the start of the trip, recalls the romantic sensibilities and lighthearted humor that graced his early poems: First Acquaintance with the Camellia Flower 初識茶花 (#401/640) 伊軋籃輿不受催 Creaking, cracking, the bamboo sedan chair is not being hurried, 湖南秋色更佳哉 2 South of the Lake, the autumn scenery is even more gorgeous. 青裙玉面初相識 Green skirts, jade faces, a first acquaintance, 九月茶花滿路開 4 Camellia flowers in the ninth month bloom all over the place. Camellias, with their glossy, waxy leaves and showy flowers, provided an excellent backdrop for the poet as he made progress on the road to Mount Heng in the autumn of 1129. The lush Xiang River gorges and valleys are known for their scenery, and camellias are a great plant in showcasing the area’s exuberant floral beauty, welcoming the poet as his eyes are filled with the spectacle. The return of the gentle yiya of the bamboo sedan chair, which had accompanied him as he traveled the narrow mountain roads from Ruzhou to Guanghua three years before, was certainly a source of solace. The journey’s unhurried pace also offered an ideal context for the appreciation of the quietly blooming local flora. The short quatrain form is uniquely suited to the purpose and occasion, as the slowly progressing first couplet sets up the narrative and the second follows with the sudden burst of an imagined romantic encounter and the brilliance of the opening flowers.

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In this poem Chen uses some of the same rhetorical devices as in the early ink plum quatrains to dramatize the meeting of traveler and camellia flower as a romantic encounter. “Green skirts, jade faces” 青 裙玉面 (a variant reading has “green skirts, white faces” 青裙白面) describes both the shiny, creamy texture of the flowers against their dark green leaves and the superimposed image of a woman thus powdered and outfitted. Whereas the earlier ink plum poems narrate the reunion of the Jade Lady and her lover, here, as befits a traveler’s experience, the poem is an enthusiastic celebration of the joyful innocence of “a first acquaintance,” chu xiangshi 初相識. The feeling of “first acquaintance” will serve as a pertinent reference point for Chen’s experience during his approximately one-year sojourn in the Mount Heng area and Shaozhou. As he pushed deeper into the interior of the Nanling Mountains and his encounters with the landscape became more adventurous, he started to self-consciously shed previously acquired habits in his life and his writing, and objects increasingly began to appear to him in their true, genuine form. Through a willing negotiation with his actual, present surroundings, Chen eventually accepted the oddities and unfamiliarities of the southern landscape as part of his own experience and his personal identity.

Venturing Further Afar The need to continuously travel to increasingly more unfamiliar places in the southern mountains helped emancipate his mind from the grasp of his old ways and habits of thinking. Venturing Further Afar 適遠 (#409/656) 處處非吾土 Place after place, not my land, 年年備虜兵 2 Year after year, prepare for barbarian soldiers. 何妨更適遠

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Writing Poetry, Surviving War Why not venture further afar? 未免一傷情 4 You can never avoid wounding the feelings. 石岸煙添色 On the stony banks, mists enhance the colors, 風灘暮有聲 6 From wind-blown beaches comes the sound of dusk. 平生五字律 All my life, I am proud of my five-syllable lines, 頭白不貪名 8 The head is white, no fame is coveted anymore.

The four couplets in “Venturing Further Afar” proceed gradually and linearly, overcoming the regulated verse’s hard-wired impulse toward parallelism. The poem starts with the general situations of war, migration, hurt emotions, and then, in the second half, resolves the concerns by recognizing and describing the neat order in the natural scenery and the calm eventually achieved in the poet’s mind. The claim of confidence in his own art in the last couplet prompted Liu Chenweng to remark: “His pride was indeed profound” 負恃不淺.8 The skillfully crafted third couplet tacitly bolsters that claim. The mists on the stony banks and the descending dusk on the beaches join in the lively evening chorus celebrating the moment. The verbs here are entirely internal to the scene; it is the mists that do the enhancing (tian 添: to add to, to increase, to augment), the beaches that possess the sound (you 有: to have, to own, to possess). The appreciation of the landscape and affirmation of pride in the poem’s second half depend on what is accomplished in the first half. Once the mental block of “not my land” against the thoughts of “venturing further afar” is removed by the liberating suggestion “why not” (hefang 何妨) in line 3, the beauty of the landscape and potential of the adventure are fully unleashed. The mind is freed of all premeditated assumptions and ideas of boundaries and otherness; the perceived alienness in the landscape experiences an instant facelift; it becomes my land and is enhanced and possessed.

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An Inventory of Poems on Poetry That poetry comes back at this moment to again occupy center stage for Chen Yuyi should not be surprising. In the specific context of “Venturing Further Afar,” his statement of poetic pride in the last couplet is preceded by three perfectly constructed parallel couplets that shore up the claim and quietly showcase his technical prowess. On a larger scale, poetry has endured as a pillar of certainty and source of inspiration all along the course of Chen’s travels. If we look back a bit to his Yuezhou period, we find that the topic of poetry occupied a prominent position during his stay there. Of the sixty-nine poems written in Yuezhou, fifteen, or 22 percent, explicitly address the subject: 1. “The Hanlin Academician has left so little scenery for me, / My poems are not yet perfected as I arrive at Ba Mound.”9 2. “I want to compose poems to mourn the past, / The winds are vigorous, the waves are surging, my mind becomes blank.”10 3. “Such beautiful rivers and mountains, yet I am lazy to search for new lines, / Lord Yan must be laughing at my lack of discipline” 如許江山 懶搜句, 燕公應笑我支離.11 4. “I carefully describe this night’s scenery, / To be carried and shown to an old friend” 細題今夕景, 持與故人看.12 5. “From now on nothing shall disturb this old man again, / I will not compose a poem, even the flowers have all fallen in the garden” 從今 老子都無事, 落盡園花不賦詩.13 6. “At dawn the snowflakes flew quietly outside my window, a feast for the listening ears, / Rising up, looking for new poems, I unlatched the door with my own hands” 曉窗飛雪愜幽聽, 起覓新詩自啓扃.14

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7. “I fully understand that spectacular views enhance poetic prosody, / Let it wash clean Yuanhe all the way to Jian’an” 深知壯觀增詩律, 洗 盡元和到建安.15 8. “The swallows cannot withstand the overnight rain, / The crabapple flowers still wait for this old man’s poems” 燕子不禁連夜雨, 海棠猶 待老夫詩.16 9. “No one is there to paint a picture for this Retired Scholar, / Looking for poems at the corner of the pavilion, his sleeves blown full by winds” 無人畫出陳居士, 亭角尋詩滿袖風.17 10. “Waking up, I push open the door, and go out looking for poems, / The tall trees demonstrate their craggy looks in the bright moonlight” 醒來推戶尋詩去, 喬木崢嶸明月中.18 11. “If there are Blue Canvas canopies to receive great scholars, / Why not let the Painted Halberds enter new poems?” 儻有青油盛快士, 何 妨畫戟入新詩?19 12. “In the rustling winds, my mind was jammed up, / Worried and companionless, I composed a poem” 蕭蕭不自暢, 耿耿獨題詩.20 13. “Jackals and tigers will not bring civility to faraway customs, / Mountains and rivers in the end need to know the poet” 豺虎不能寬 遠俗, 山川終要識詩人.21 14. “Lord Heaven is also delighted in me, / Urging a poem by sending out the delicate clouds” 天公亦喜我, 催詩出微霞.22 15. “No need to feel sad as we say farewell, / The road is filled with new poems, all waiting for you to pick up” 不須惜別作酸然, 滿路新 詩付吾子.23 In addition, four of the poems Chen wrote on the road from Yuezhou to Mount Heng refer to his life and work as a poet:

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16. “Not necessarily only Lutang can achieve the goal, / I compose the poem, make the painting, sending them all to you” 未必禄唐能辦此, 題詩著畫寄興公.24 17. “Still to stay, I’ll be a guest for another ten days, / Together, we bring out several years of our poems” 猶能十日客, 共出數年詩.25 18. “Approaching old age, in meeting it is hard to keep it going on, / Let us together restore the poetic prosody, shaking up Xiao and Xiang” 投 老相逢難袞袞, 共恢詩律撼瀟湘.26 19. “All my life, I am proud of my five-syllable lines, / The head is white, no fame is coveted anymore.”27

“No Longer Have Regrets” Chen’s heightened perception of the local landscape was an important factor facilitating his recognition and acceptance of his status as a displaced traveler in an unfamiliar land. “Why not venture further afar?” Once the poet has achieved this internal reconciliation, he can move on with a new attitude, freed of previous habits and entrenched assumptions. “In this faraway journey, I no longer have regrets” 遠遊 吾不恨, he proclaims.28 This mental neutrality is a necessary starting point for the rebirth and regeneration of his self and changes the subtle dynamics of his encounter with the local landscape. To borrow the migrating geese metaphor, Chen no longer laments his inability to return as the geese do when spring comes; he has accepted not-returning as a reality. The psychological breakthrough enables him to engage and reconfigure the alien landscape into material for new ideas of self and home. This response runs counter to almost all earlier literature written by exiles stranded in the south. Sure, earlier exiles like Liu Zongyuan in the Tang, and Su Shi in the Song, adjusted and adapted to life in Hunan, Guangxi, and Hainan, but they never described those alien landscapes in terms of “home.” Chen’s

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surreal moment of recognition is vividly captured in a poem about a visit to a local garden with two of his Luoyang countrymen, “Touring the Liao Family Garden together with Wang Zihuan and Xi Daguang” 與王子煥席大光同遊廖園 (#417/663): “Three old bamboo staffs in our hands, the excitement is fresh, / Elder Wang and brother Xi are both lovely companions. // Standing ‘expatriately’ over the waters of Sizhou Prefecture, / We compose poems, raise wine cups, face the lush green spring” 三枝筇竹興還新, 王丈席兄俱可人. 僑立司州溪水上, 吟詩把 酒對青春. The use of the name Sizhou 司州 can be traced back to the Han dynasty, but as an administrative unit it was first established in the Western Jin, referring to the outlying districts of Luoyang. The word qiao 僑 that starts the third line, the source of the modern Chinese notion of living in a foreign country, also acquired prominence in the aftermath of the large exodus of northerners to the south following the collapse of the Chinese dynasty in 317. The northern emigrants established nominal administrative units in their adopted new homes in the south. Denoting the idea of a person’s displaced status or identity in an alien land, qiao is normally used as a noun. Using it adverbially to describe not the status of identity but the act of standing, as in qiaoli 僑立, translated tentatively here as “standing expatriately,” was a rhetorical innovation that was recognized and praised by Chen’s commentators.29 The innovation goes beyond the phrase and carries over to the remainder of the line and the couplet. In describing the three former Luoyang natives as standing over the waters of their hometown, Chen expresses a subtle change in his frame of reference, turning a potential lamentation over his displacedsojourner status into a moment of discovery and renovation. The local stream and the Liao family garden in the eyes of the three Luoyang expatriates were domesticated and had become part of their new identity. Predicated on this discovery, they take in the lush spring scenery before them, consume it, appreciate it, not as a disappointing substitute for an absent home, but a reality to be dealt with in its own right.

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A Fellow Refugee His close experiences with the local landscape in the deep valleys of Mount Heng and along the Xiang helped shape Chen’s new sense of self. Another influence was the growing number of northern refugees and expatriates streaming into the region, thirsty for recognition and connections. The new opportunities for bonding that presented themselves in the south helped revitalize the patterns of communication we observed earlier in Chen’s work from his years in Kaifeng. Chen’s relationship with Xi Yi 席益 (1089–1139, courtesy name Daguang 大光) is a good example of his revived sense of peer group feeling among the northern refugees. Chen and Xi were both from Luoyang and were colleagues in the Imperial Library in Kaifeng at the start of the decade. He had briefly met with Xi in Dengzhou in 1127 after the Jingkang Catastrophe when Xi was passing through, but the two did not see each other again until the winter of 1129, in the Mount Heng area. The sentiment shown in Chen’s 1129 welcoming poem to Xi, “Traveling by Boat, Lodging in the Wilds, Sent to Daguang,” aptly summarizes the closeness and kindred-spirit nature of this friendship. The momentum for the proposal in the final line, “Let us together restore the poetic prosody, shaking up Xiao and Xiang” (see number 18 of the earlier list of poems written in Yuezhou), builds up gradually through the regulated verse’s first seven lines, which describe a lonely situation that is summarized by the title, “Traveling by Boat, Lodging in the Wilds.” The poem presents a series of objects in the nocturnal river landscape that are observed by the keen traveler but are isolated and lack communication among themselves: the bird-shaped wind vane on the boat that directs the view (l. 1); the lack of sympathy from Heaven and Earth for the aging and tired traveler (l. 2); the piercing sound of the wooden clappers in the silence of the night (l. 4); the imagined conversation of the two friends at their expected imminent reunion (l. 7).30 The proposal that follows and ends the poem represents an act of boldness that derives not only from the speaker’s solitary night journey in anticipation of a reunion, but also his

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heightened perception of the local topography in the present frame. On the other hand, the palpable tension in the speaker’s relationship with his surroundings is augmented by his sense of danger and insecurity in the unfamiliar night landscape. Chen and Xi would part ways again a few months later, with Xi continuing to follow the Xiang upstream to Yongzhou and Chen traveling westward to Shaozhou. In “Bidding Farewell to Daguang” 別大光 (#421/667), he recalls the emotionally charged earlier moment of their reunion: “One year my senior, your dignified stature / Had been away from me for three autumns. // In front of Mount Heng, with disbelief, / We met again, our heads both white” 堂堂一年長, 渺渺三秋闊. 恍然 衡山前, 相遇各白髮 (ll. 1–4).31 Chen ends the poem by imagining their respective solitary existences after the separation: “The river’s rushing streams receive the winds, / Saddened, this lone traveler sets sails again. // If on a future night I miss you, / I shall gaze on the bright moon among the cliffs” 滔滔江受風, 耿耿客孤發. 他夕懷君子, 巖間望明月 (ll. 17–20). “Among the cliffs,” a conventional reference to a recluse’s abode, presages his own secluded status in the mountains of Shaozhou in the near future. Their quick cycle of reunion and separation, joy and sorrow must have felt like déjà vu to Chen and Xi when they were briefly reunited at Mount Heng. Two years before, in the winter of 1127 in Dengzhou, when the news had come that Xi would be passing by Chen had written a poem greeting his good friend in advance: “The winds in the tenth month blew high, the traveler was sad, / An old friend’s letter came, my frowning brows momentarily lifted” 十月高風客子悲, 故人書到暫開 眉.32 His joy at seeing Xi again after the earth-splitting political event is insuppressible: “My heart will be delighted, my body overturned, at the point we meet, / I am not scared by walking through ten leagues of barren forest” 喜心翻倒相迎地, 不怕荒林十里陂 (ll. 7–8).33 In 1127 Xi Yi met with Chen under what were for Xi quite humiliating circumstances. The Songshi has only a one-line mention of him attached to his father’s biography, but according to Bai Dunren’s careful reconstruc-

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tion, Xi Yi actually had a more prominent political career than his father.34 He was prefect of the important middle Yellow River town Hezhong 河中 when the Jin attacked the city in the fifth month of the year and he, like many others, abandoned his post.35 When Chen wrote his greeting poem, Xi was on his way to his new post at Yingzhou, downstream on the Han.36 The imperial edict relieving him of his former post sternly reprimanded him for disregarding his solemn official responsibilities, accusing him of “not thinking of serving the country, being concerned only with saving his own life” 弗思為國, 專主謀生; “sitting [by] to watch millions of people fall into harm’s way and humiliation” 坐令百萬之民, 皆被侵 陵之毒.37 As a friend, Chen showed great sympathy and psychological support by putting Xi’s action into context: “Stop talking about a myriad of things after the break of war; / A cup of wine must be shared as the chrysanthemums wither” 萬事莫論兵動後, 一杯當及菊殘時 (ll. 5–6). The two did not meet when Chen passed by Yingzhou, where Xi Yi was serving as prefect, on his way to Yuezhou in the autumn of 1128. In “Touched by Thoughts on a Spring Night, Sent to Xi Daguang” (#355/576), written in Yuezhou one year later, in 1129, Chen again expressed his thoughts of longing for his friend: “I bitterly miss the old administrator of Western Prefecture, / When shall we see each other again before the lamplight?” 苦憶西州老太守, 何時相伴一燈前? (ll. 7–8).38 Their reunion at Mount Heng later that year obviously meant a lot to both of them. Of the fifteen poems Chen wrote during his brief stint in the Mount Heng area, seven are directly addressed to or about Xi.39 Their paths would cross again later in 1130 when both were recalled by the court and traveled together for the first part of their journey to Zhejiang.40

At the Bottom of Mount Heng The cumulative fatigue from all his travels seems to have gripped the poet on New Year’s Day of 1130. “Five years on end, on New Year’s Day, a homeless refugee” 五年元日只流離, he writes in the first line of “New Year’s Day” 元日 (#420/665), a seven-syllable regulated verse.

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“Shore grasses, bank flowers know the season; / One single body, a thousand sorrows, alone stain my clothes” 汀草岸花知節序, 一身千恨 獨霑衣 (ll. 7–8), he ends the poem. The return of such emotions as “a thousand sorrows” (qianhen), “a thousand worries” (qianyou), “a hundred woes” (bailü), or “a hundred worries” (baiyou 百憂) calls to mind the earlier breaking point in his Chenliu exile, when the frequency of such expressions culminated in his eventual acceptance of his exile status.41 The constancy of the natural world serves both as a contrast to human displacement and as a counterforce neutralizing the negative sentiments. Natural beauty never ceased to function this way for Chen; his passage through Mount Heng was no exception. “Rain on the First Day of Spring” 立春日雨 (#429/675) depicts the gentle spring drizzle in the mountain’s lush foothills. “The spring day rain at the bottom of Mount Heng, / Set off by the green mountains in the distance, slants down like silk threads” 衡山縣下春日雨, 遠映青山絲樣斜 (ll. 1–2). If the enumeration of geographical boundaries in the opening lines of “Ascending the Yueyang Tower” (“East of Dongting Lake, West of the Yangzi River, / The banners and flags are motionless, the sun sets slowly”) represents Chen’s precision poetics in broad strokes, and the opening couplet of “Spring Day” from the early period (“When morning comes, in the courtyard trees, the birds are singing, / Red and green help the spring rise up to the distant forest”) illustrates its visual logic, “Rain on the First Day of Spring” combines the two, demonstrating at once a genuine appreciation of nature and the poet’s microcosmic attention to his position in the space and the rain’s effect on both the landscape and on the poet-observer. The looming mass of the mountains in the background is perceived through the slanting threads of the spring shower, and the raindrops are viewed in turn against the lushly grown mountains in the distance. The effect of slanting rain depends visually on the massiveness of the mountains as much as the mountains need the slanting threads to express their mass. The subtle, intuitive perception of this holistic space is enhanced by the minute motion of the falling raindrops. The visual

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mapping and mental perception of the space are continued in the two parallelistic couplets in the middle of the regulated verse that help put the highlighted presentation of the rain into a larger context, at the same time revealing the traveler’s exact position in the scene. The couplets read, in David McCraw’s sensible translation: “Easily by the riverbank it bullies the traveler’s sleeve; / Distinctly by the sand’s edge it drenches the year’s glories. // The bamboo grove on the road’s far side is covered with fresh water; / The ancient ferry with the empty boat assembles disorderly crows” 容易江邊欺客袂, 分明沙際濕年華. 竹林路隔生新 水, 古渡船空集亂鴉 (ll. 3-6).42 This poem’s remarkable positional and spatial awareness likewise emanates from an observer who is embedded in the scene, a participant in the space and what is happening in it, moving through the lower section of the landscape, “at the bottom of Mount Heng” (Hengshan xian xia 衡山 縣下), as if live-streaming his personal experience from his own limited perspective. The view is not imposed on the reader by a transcendent, omnipresent observer from above. The distinction of this grounded, bottom-up view stands out when we compare it with a poem by Li Bai about the same mountain, in which Li explicitly exploits a top-down view that is enacted from afar, ethereal, as if from a mountaintop-residing immortal, and artificial.43 “Mount Heng rises up unfathomably to the Purple Darkness of Heaven, / Overlooking the Old Man Star of Southern End. // Swirling winds blow away five peaks of snow, / Like flying flowers they fall all the way to Dongting” 衡山蒼蒼入紫冥, 下看南極老人星. 迴飆吹散五峰雪, 往往飛花落洞庭 (ll. 1–4).44

The World Blossoms All By Itself After passing some time around Mount Heng, Chen Yuyi continued to travel westward to Shaozhou. His itinerary in this section of his journey was succinctly outlined by Hu Zhi: “In the fourth year of the Jianyan reign [1130], he traveled from Mount Heng via Golden Pool and Sweet Crabapple to Shaoyang, then passed by Peacocks Beach and arrived at

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Zhenmou, where he took lodging in Shining Purple Mountain” 建炎四 年庚戌, 自衡嶽, 歷金潭, 下甘棠, 至邵陽, 過孔雀灘, 抵貞牟, 即紫陽山 居焉.45 This destination seems to have been planned well in advance, probably while he was still in Yuezhou. In one of the farewell poems written before he left that place, he describes the next stage of his travel: “All of a sudden, my Ba Mound dreams are over, / I will look for the road to Shaoyang soon” 忽破巴丘夢, 還尋邵陽路.46 He was on the road again, traveling from Mount Heng westbound, probably also because of new developments in the larger political situation. The winter of 1129–1130 turned out to be a nadir in the Southern Song’s epic struggle for survival under constant Jurchen attacks. In this round of their campaign, the Jin advanced to prefectural seats as far south as Mingzhou 明州 (modern Ningbo) in Zhejiang and Tanzhou in Hunan. The Jin army’s strategy also shifted to the seizure and destruction of large cities, especially those in the southeast. They “plundered and razed with a savagery that far surpassed the rampages of peasant rebels in the same areas during the early 1120s. Thus, when the Jurchen made a scrappy retreat across the Yangtze in the summer of 1130, they left behind scores of brutally charred cities virtually empty of human settlements.”47 Meanwhile, a Jin force that had penetrated deep into southern Jiangxi turned back and pushed westward into Hunan, taking Tanzhou along the way at the beginning of 1130.48 References to these events, however, are scanty and only vaguely recognizable in the poems Chen wrote on the road from Mount Heng to Shaozhou, most of which are dominated by the local scenery. “On the Way to Golden Pool” 金潭道中 (#423/670) starts with his routine outward scan from a bamboo sedan chair (ll. 1–2). After comprehensively reviewing the surrounding terrain, including the “hills ahead” 前岡 (l. 3) and “ridges behind” 後嶺 (l. 4), the poet turns to the political situation beyond the landscape: “Battles are still vigorously fought within the seas” 海內兵猶壯 (l. 5). That flash of thought, however, quickly yields to the scenery before his eyes: “On the side of the village, the

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year blossoms all by itself” 村邊歲自華 (l. 6). His mind steadied by this routine, the speaker shows a rare sense of humor in poking fun with the flowers: “Turning my eyes back, I see off the peach blossoms” 回眼 送桃花 (l. 8). In this way the observer embeds himself into the scene, becoming the owner of the landscape he has just scanned, sending off the peach blossoms in his newly acquired capacity as their host. Another poem, simply titled “On the Road” 道中 (#422/669), illustrates Chen’s internal serenity by focusing on the perfect affinity between the traveler and the landscape, when objects just exist and events just happen by themselves. “The raindrops recede then intensify; / The stream’s course straightens then curves. // Far off, a road skirts the mountain; / In a vast expanse, blossoms fill up the village. // Breaking the water, shadows of a pair of gulls; / Lifting the mud, sprouts of a hundred grasses. // Streams and plains lie high and low; / In each spot are placed men’s homes” 雨 子收還急, 溪流直又斜. 迢迢傍山路, 漠漠滿村花. 破水雙鷗影, 掀泥百 草芽. 川原有高下, 隨處著人家 (ll. 1–8).49 The scenery unfolds casually. The natural world follows an order that is neither premeditated nor imposed by the observer. As the poet travels, he sees, observes, and takes in the images and events as they occur.50 With the lines “The spring breeze blows silently over a farmer’s house, / If there is poetry there, I am not aware of it. // Several old cypresses block the official highway, / One single trunk of peach blossoms shines over the thatched house” 春風漠漠野人居, 若使能詩我不知. 數株蒼檜遮官 道, 一樹桃花映草廬, Chen describes the scene that meets his eyes as he reaches Cypress Wood Inn.51 Here the poet does not insist on exerting his own notion of identity on the objects he sees. He becomes uncertain (“not aware of,” “do not know,” buzhi 不知) if the scenery he sees can be material for his poems. The objects in the natural landscape, whose traditional mandated role has been to evoke the poet’s thoughts and emotions and then exit the scene, instead stick around and forcefully assert their presence. The attention to the number of the trees—“several

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old cypresses” 數株蒼檜, “one single trunk of peach blossoms” 一樹桃 花—indicates their visual and material dominance in the poet’s mind. The same frame of mind carries over to the moment when he leaves the inn. In “Setting Off from Cypress Wood in Early Morning” 曉發杉木 (#427/673), as the poet travels along the riverside in the “paleness” (dan 淡, l. 1), “purity” (qing 清, l. 2), and “silence” (jiji 寂寂, l. 4) of the early morning, his thoughts are not reflexively directed, as usual, to his graying hair (l. 5), but to the farmer’s life. The statement, “The farmers have their own lives” 田家自一生 (l. 6), represents an important step toward accepting his own traveler’s status as it is, not as what he wanted it to be. The forgetting that follows—“There is poetry here, but I have already forgotten it” 有詩還忘記 (l. 7)—comes naturally as he continues to relegate the writing of poetry to the background.

Deeply Lodged Wishes Chen arrived at Shaozhou on the twelfth of the first month, exactly two years after his escape from the Jurchen soldiers in Fangzhou (which occurred on the same date in 1128). Shaoyang, the seat of the prefectural government, is named for its location on the Shao River, a main tributary of the Zi, which flows north and empties into Dongting Lake. The day after his arrival, he was greeted by a downpour. He conscientiously noted the differences in the local weather in a poem written to mark the occasion.52 “Shaozhou’s wind and air in the first month are unusual” 邵州正月風氣殊 (l. 1), he starts by stating. “Yesterday, I saw the third month’s flowers, / This night I again hear the rain at the fifth watch” 昨日已見三月花, 今夜還聞五更雨 (ll. 3–4). Then in a transformative touch, the sound of the rain metamorphoses into that of the flowing waters at Dragon Gate in his hometown, Luoyang (ll. 7–8). Chen seems to have toyed with the idea of traveling further southwest from Shaozhou to Guilin 桂林, probably because he was concerned about the safety of Shaozhou in the aftermath of the taking of Tanzhou.53 His

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concern, however, was assuaged by the warm welcome he received from his wife’s relatives residing in the area.54 “Within the Four Seas, there are no strong fortresses, / At Heaven’s edge, I have close kin” 海內無堅 壘, 天涯有近親, opens “Passing Peacocks Beach, Presented Respectfully to Zhou Jingzhi” 過孔雀灘贈周靜之 (#433/679, ll. 1–2). “I sleep calmly through the shore-crashing waves, / Having found the lodge for my body of a hundred years” 高眠過灘浪, 已寄百年身 (ll. 7–8). Those “shore-crashing waves” would soon carry him to a little village in Shining Purple Mountain 紫陽山 where the family of his relative Zhou Jingzhi lived. Still on his way, he thinks of the “words of laughter” 笑語 and “warm hospitality” 殷勤 (ll. 3–4) that are awaiting him and, encouraged by the deep, steady strokes of the oars in the water and the spring blossoms on the banks of the river (ll. 5–6), he finds peace; all his previous “hundred worries” (baiyou) and “thousand sorrows” (qianhen) disappear into the exulting splashes of the rapids. Those anticipated “words of laughter” and “warm hospitality” materialized when he and his family arrived at their destination. In “Arriving at Zhenmou at Night” 夜抵貞牟 (#435/681) he expresses both his heartfelt gratitude toward his host and his earnest expectation of a peaceful life that was to follow: “At midnight, a room of blue lamps, / In front of the fence, a pond of white waters. // I earnestly thank the host, / In this little house my wishes are deeply lodged” 夜半青燈屋, 籬前白水陂. 殷勤謝 地主, 小築欲深期 (ll. 5–8). This deeply felt contentment is manifested across the poems written during his stay in Zhenmou. In “Boating on the Shao River” 舟泛邵江 (#432/678), he states: “My happy heart is complete in itself, / Not merely because sequestered from turmoil and noise” 快然心自足, 不獨避囂紛 (ll. 7–8). His undisturbed inner status is predicated on the self-sufficient existence of objects in the natural world: “Before the strand, flocks of wild geese arise; / By the rudder, the stream-blossoms split. // Fallen flowers roost in the traveler’s temples, / A lone boat goes upstream following the returning clouds” 灘前羣雁起, 柁尾川華分. 落花棲客

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鬢, 孤舟遡歸雲 (ll. 3–6).55 It does not matter whether the hair at the traveler’s temples is graying or not, whether the boat has company or is navigating the stream alone; in this complete, fully present moment, the geese just rise, the blossom-studded banks just recede, the flowers just fall on the traveler’s head, the boat just moves, following the reflections of the clouds in the water. In such contemplative moments, the quietness in the natural landscape harmonizes with the poet’s internal reflection and resolution. “Living a stolen life for the past five years, / My determination for solitude and seclusion grows firm” 偷生經五載, 幽獨意已堅, he writes in “This Evening” 今夕 (#438/684, ll. 3–4). “I shall take care of these matters of loneliness / To send off my remaining years” 唯應寂寞事, 可以送餘年 (ll. 7–8), he concludes. In “Evening Colors” 暝色 (#439/684–685), everything that is happening in the evening landscape is mobilized to help “lodge my mind and spirit” 棲心神: “The lingering rays of the sun cross the flat field, / Rising mountain peaks encircle the lush green spring. // At my rustic gate, with a lone bamboo staff, / I lodge my mind and spirit in the day’s end” 殘暉度平野, 列岫圍青春. 柴門一枝筇, 日暮棲心神 (ll. 1–4). The slow, gradual movement of the slanting sunlight across the flat field in the lush spring landscape defines the depth of the space, observed outwardly from the figure positioned at the opened gate. The motion of the sun’s rays depends on the poet’s sedentary posture as much as the poet is set in relief by the subtle changes of color and shadow in the landscape. “The evening colors descend upon the valleys and hills, / High and low, their rugged shapes all darken. // The illuminated waters suddenly reflect the trees upside down, / The mountains are as if leaning upon people” 暝色著川嶺, 高低鬰輪囷. 水光忽倒樹, 山勢欲傍人 (ll. 5–8). Thereupon, the speaker has an epiphany—“The myriad things in the world always seek out one another, / This secluded person’s mind is renewed by itself” 萬化元相尋, 幽子意自新 (ll. 9–10). Having united with family and kin at the sequestered village of Zhenmou in Shining Purple Mountain, as the evening sun withdraws its

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last rays and the poet’s standing silhouette becomes darker, his focus shifts from the world inward to himself. Finally he has found a lodging place for both his body and his mind.

Poetic Perfection This process of internal reflection and resolution is conducted on multiple occasions and at multiple levels. In “Expressing My Thoughts on Recent Events at Zhenmou” 貞牟書事 (#440/686) Chen endeavors to reassess the essentially one-way ethical system of his previous life. The poem’s eighteen lines consist of two parts of eight lines each, plus an additional couplet in the middle that links the two sections and states the poem’s theme: “Loving this unspoiled wilderness of Zhenmou, / I rest my horse here, going no further” 眷此貞牟野, 息駕吾其終 (ll. 9–10). Resting his horse for good is a highly emblematic thought, given the symbolic significance of the horse image in the early stages of his journey. His decision is based partly on the place’s plainly beautiful scenery, which is described in four consecutive subsequent lines: “The gray mountains loom high in the rain, / Green grasses grow lushly on the creek. // In midspring, the waters and trees are beautiful, / Birds are singing in the winds of a clear morning” 蒼山雨中高, 綠草溪上豐. 仲春水木麗, 禽鳴清晝風 (ll. 11–14). And he carefully argues it by reconciling three traditional pairs of conflicting concepts: “office and retirement” 用舍 (ll. 7–8), “disaster and fortune” 禍福 (ll. 15–16), “glory and solitude” 榮寂 (ll. 17–18). All the three are reconceptualized through a pragmatic analogy, the “doubleply rope” 兩合繩 (l. 15), the twin threads of which, intertwined and inseparable, rely on each other for their existence and function.56 The traditionally opposed concepts, with one side favored over the other, office over retirement, glory over solitude, fortune over disaster, are now understood in a new light. “Governing the world is only a secondary matter, / Office or retirement, why does everyone have to follow the same suit?” 撫世獨餘事, 用舍何必同? (ll. 7–8). This is an extraordinary

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statement for Chen to make, because all his life he has been pained by having to choose or justify one, or the lack thereof, over the other. Chen’s new understanding is also suggested in the two historical examples involving Zhang Liang and Mei Fu with which he starts the poem (ll. 1–4).57 Both are used to illustrate the larger point argued later in the poem. In citing them, Chen also brings forth another remarkable thought: “Immortals and gods are no different from ordinary people, / They begin as heroes in the human world” 神仙非異人, 由來本英雄 (ll. 5–6). In the two earlier poems in which he uses “hero” (yingxiong 英雄) —in association, respectively, with Tao Qian and Zhuge Liang—the word marks the outstanding act or trait of a human figure.58 The obliteration of the line between human heroes and gods and immortals represents a new thread in his thought that also obliterates other boundaries: between mind and scene, body and world, this and other, home and foreign land. This lies at the heart of a dawning realization depicted in the following poem. Two Quatrains on Luo River 羅江二絕 (1 of 2) (#444/692) 荒村終日水車鳴 In the remote village, the waterwheels are humming all day long, 陂北陂南共一聲 2 North of the pond, south of the pond, share one single sound. 灑面風吹作飛雨 Flying droplets gently touch my face, blown over by the wind, 老夫詩到此間成 4 This old man’s poetry is complete at this place at last. The feeling of poetic completion is vividly embodied in the third line: the gentle touch of the threads of flying water carried over by the wind from the waterwheels represents a moment of perfect union of person and object, poetry and world, an immersive, holistic experience that nullifies poetry’s reason for existence. The poet’s feeling of enlightenment is achieved through his close contact with the source of inspiration, the waterwheels’ unceasing turning motion. Poetry is finally complete because there is no need for it; the need for poetry disappears because

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the distance between mind and world, symbol and meaning, object and person has disappeared, all converging in the actualities of the present moment and space, cijian 此間: this place. There is no room for worry, only the experience of sound, sight, touch, and feeling. No more, no less. As Michael Fuller wrote in discussing Su Shi’s poetry, “The intercourse of the mind and the world may be highly mediated, but at the end of the chain of exchanges that occur well below the threshold of consciousness comes the moment of the fusion of inside and outside, self and Other.”59 This is Chen Yuyi’s moment of completion. For him it does not need to take place “well below the threshold of consciousness”; it happens right here at this place. The persistent humming of the waterwheels plays a key role in creating and maintaining that sense of perfect unity, a moment of full ownership and possession: Waterwheels 水車 (#470/733) 江邊終日水車鳴 At river’s side, the waterwheels are humming all day long, 我自平生愛此聲 2 I simply love this sound all my life. 風月一時都屬客 Wind and moon for a moment all belong to the traveler, 杖藜聊復寄詩情 4 Staff in hand, I come out again to lodge my feelings.

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Notes 1. “Wang Yingzhong Had Long Wanted to Cross the Lake on Zhang Gongfu’s Boat But Remained Undetermined; Today, I Heard That He Had Finally Boarded the Boat; I Composed the Poem to Send Him Off, Also Sent to Gongfu” 王應仲欲附張恭甫舟過湖南久未決今日忽 聞遂登舟作詩送之并簡恭甫 (#369/591–592), ll. 1–2. Wang was a fellow refugee from the north who lived next door to Chen in Yuezhou. 2. See Robson, Power of Place. 3. Li Bai visited the mountain in the autumn of 758. Du Fu arrived a decade afterward, in the winter of 768, and visited the mountain in the spring the next year. Both wrote poems on the mountain. 4. Fan Zhongyan, “Autumn Thoughts” 秋思 (to the tune “Fisherman’s Pride” 漁家傲). Tang Guizhang, Quan Song, 11. Fan at the time was vice military commissioner of Shaanxi and prefect of Yanzhou 延州. 5. Wing-tsit Chan, Chu Hsi, 396–397. The 149 poems were collected together in Nanyue changchou ji 南嶽唱酬集 (Anthology of poems written at the Southern Marchmount), to which Zhang Shi wrote a preface. For Zhu Xi’s intellectual and personal relationship with Zhang Shi, see Tillman, Confucian Discourse, 59–82. 6. Yu Dacheng, Huainanzi, 226. In his commentary, Yu uses Chen’s poem as evidence of the phrase’s later usage and the evolution of its meaning. The Huainanzi is a collection of essays on the theory and practice of government that resulted from the scholarly debates held at the court of Liu An 劉安, Prince of Huainan, in early Western Han. See Major, Queen, Meyer, and Roth, The Huainanzi. 7. Schafer, Pacing the Void. 8. CYYJJJ, 657. 9. “Ascending the Yueyang Tower: Two Poems” (2 of 2) (#332/551), ll. 7–8. 10. “Ascending the Yueyang Tower Again, I Was Moved and Composed Another Poem” (#335/555), ll. 7–8. 11. “Using the Same Rhymes, I Composed Four More Poems” 用前韻再賦 四首 (3 of 4) (#349/571), ll. 3–4. 12. “Composed at Night, Sent to a Friend” 夜賦寄友 (#356/578), ll. 7–8. 13. “Matching the Rhymes of a Quatrain by Fu Ziwen” 次韻傅子文絕句 (#360/582), ll. 3–4.

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14. “Zhou Yinqian Passed by on a Snowy Day Without Calling on Me; Having Ascended the West Tower, He Composed Poems and Sent Them to Me; I Matched His Rhymes to Thank Him: Three Poems” 周尹潛雪中過 門不我顧遂登西樓作詩見寄次韻謝之三首 (1 of 3) (#361/583), ll. 1–2. 15. Ibid. (2 of 3) (#362/584), ll. 3–4. This is one of the few places where Chen explicitly discusses his views on poetic history. The Jian’an period (196– 220) at the end of the Eastern Han was one of the most vibrant and creative periods in Chinese poetry. The Yuanhe period (806–820) of the midTang was another important era of poetic creativity; its easy, plain style contrasted sharply with the intensity and grandeur of Jian’an poetry. For Jian’an, see Tian, The Halberd; Ge Xiaoyin, Badai, 35–76. For Yuanhe, see Song Liying, Yuanhe. 16. “Facing Wine in Rain, the Crabapple Blossoms in the Courtyard below Withstood the Rain and Did Not Fall” (#365/585), ll. 3–4. 17. “Looking for Poems: Two Quatrains” 尋詩兩絕句 (1 of 2) (#366/589), ll. 3–4. 18. Ibid. (2 of 2) (#367/589), ll. 3–4. 19. “Zhou Yinqian Composed a Poem for Me upon Hearing of My Yingzhou Appointment, in Which He Included a Line with the Lance-Slung-Crossways Reference; I Matched His Rhymes to Thank Him” 周尹潛以僕有 郢州之命作詩見贈有橫槊之句次韻謝之 (#370/594), ll. 5–6. Chen was appointed prefect of Yingzhou in the fourth month of the year, but according to Bai Dunren, the appointment may never have been fulfilled. “Lance-slung-crossways” is an image of military heroism. The first line of Chen’s couplet alludes to a story about the young general Xiao Shao 蕭韶, who treated the senior scholar Yu Xin arrogantly at a banquet by seating himself under a grand blue canvas canopy while putting Yu at a side table. The painted halberd was a ceremonial weapon carried by a provincial governor’s honor guard. 20. “Moored at Songtian Bay, Having Encountered Perverse Winds” (#375/604), ll. 17–18. 21. “Respectfully Presented to Fu Ziwen” 贈傅子文 (#377/607), ll. 5–6. The beasts refer to the Gui Zhongzheng rebels. 22. “On the Eighth Day of the Ninth Month, Ascending the Heights to Celebrate the Double Ninth, Qifu Composed Thirty Couplets; I Picked up His Leftover Ideas and Composed Twelve Couplets as Well” 九月八日登高 作重九奇父賦三十韻與義拾餘意亦賦十二韻 (#391/623), ll. 19–20. 23. “Sending Off Wang Yinshu to Take the Exams” 送王因叔赴試 (#395/631), ll. 7–8.

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24. “Having Already Arrived at Xiangyin, Qifu Sent Me a Letter Advising Me to Come by Way of Lutang; I, However, Traveled by Way of Nanyang for an Unrelated Reason; The Road Was Lined with Pines, Like Walking among Green Silk Screens; Sent to Qifu in Advance” 奇父先至湘陰書來戒由禄唐路而僕以它故由南洋路來夾 道皆松如行青羅步障中先寄奇父 (#400/639), ll. 7–8. 25. “Farewell to Bogong” 別伯恭 (#403/645), ll. 3–4. 26. “Traveling by Boat, Lodging in the Wilds, Sent to Daguang” 江行野宿 寄大光 (#407/653), ll. 7–8. 27. “Venturing Further Afar” (#409/656), ll. 7–8. 28. “Two Poems on Ren Caizhong’s Painting in the Possession of Xi Daguang” 跋任才仲畫兩首大光所藏 (1 of 2) (#414/660), l. 1. 29. Zhongzhai, for example, says that “the use of qiaoli is creative” 用僑立 字新. CYYJJJ, 664. 30. The purpose of the wooden clappers described in line 4, according to Hu Zhi and Bai Dunren, was “to drive fish” 驅魚. David McCraw, citing James J.Y. Liu, mentions a modern practice among southern Chinese fishermen who beat their punting poles against the boats to drive fish into the nets. McCraw, “Poetry,” 315; James J.Y. Liu, Major Lyricists, 71. The poem does not make it clear whether the wooden clappers were used to drive the fish into the nets or away from the boat to clear the waterway. 31. Xi was born in 1189, one year before Chen. 32. “After Receiving Xi Daguang’s Letter, I Wrote a Poem to Greet Him” 得 席大光書因以詩迓之 (#284/490), ll. 1–2. 33. “My heart was delighted, my body overturned” 喜心翻倒 was used by Du Fu to describe his joy on arriving at Suzong’s court in Fengxiang after escaping the An Lushan rebels in Chang’an. 34. “His son Yi, courtesy name Daguang, rose to Assistant Grand Councilor at the start of the Shaoxing reign” 子益, 字大光, 紹興初, 參知政事. Songshi, 347.11017. For Bai’s reconstruction of Xi’s career, see CYYJJJ, 336–340n1. 35. JYYL, 5.28b [110]. 36. Chen wrote another poem when Xi left Dengzhou, “Seeing Off Daguang to His Post in Stone City” 送大光赴石城 (#285/492). Stone City was a colloquial reference to Yingzhou. 37. Wang Zao, “Imperial Decree Dismissing Xi Yi, Prefect of Hezhong” 知 河中府席益落職制, Fuxi, 12.9a. According to Li Xinchuan, the dismissal occurred in the ninth month of 1127. JYYL, 9.6a [170]. The punishment Xi

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received, demotion of rank and reassignment to a lesser prefecture, was relatively lenient compared with the much stricter policies implemented two years later in 1129, which stipulated a punishment of penal servitude for two years or a banishment to a distance of 2,000 leagues for a similar offense. See JYYL, 19.8b [297]. Xi was at the time prefect of Yingzhou on the Han River. After the outbreak of the war, the Song had reorganized their defense against the Jin along three big rivers, the Han, Huai, and Yangzi. The western front was centered on the Han River, hence “Western Prefecture.” We see the two of them, in addition to the events described in the aforementioned two poems, “Traveling by Boat, Lodging in the Wilds, Sent to Daguang” (#407/653) and “Touring the Liao Garden together with Wang Zihuan and Xi Daguang” (#417/663), viewing paintings together (“Two Poems on Ren Caizhong’s Painting in the Possession of Xi Daguang” [#414–415/660]); exchanging poems on the occasion of the new year (“On New Year’s Eve, Unable to Sleep, I Drank a Cup of Wine; Shown to Daguang the Next Day” 除夜不寐飲酒一杯明日示大 光 [#418–419/664–665]); and bidding farewell to each other soon after the new year (“Bidding Farewell to Daguang” [#421/667]). Their relationship continued well after their arrival at court. Both rose to the position of assistant grand councilor, Xi in 1133 and Chen in 1137. Chen would remain in Zhejiang for the rest of his life, but Xi’s later provincial appointments would take him back to Hunan, and to Sichuan. Chen died in the eleventh lunar month of 1138, and Xi in the ninth month of the following year. “A hundred worries” (baiyou) appears in “On New Year’s Eve, Unable to Sleep, I Drank a Cup of Wine; Shown to Daguang the Next Day” (2 of 2) (#419/665): “Ten thousand leagues of mountains, the road to home remains blocked, / Year after year, this great festival is passed amid a hundred worries” 萬里鄉山路不通, 年年佳節百憂中 (ll. 1–2). For examples of the other expressions in earlier works, see “Moon on an Autumn Night” (#205/379): “Stomping to tatters this land of a thousand worries, / I become tired of myself as I get old” (ll. 9–10); “Pacing on the Dike at Night: Three Poems” (2 of 3) (#208/382): “The myriad things in the world grow chaotically, / Thinking of this, I am burned by a hundred woes” (ll. 7–8). McCraw, “Poetry,” 88. “With Various Gentlemen, Seeing Off Vice Commandant Chen to Return to Hengyang” 與諸公送陳郎將歸衡陽. Qu and Zhu, Li Bai, 1066.

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44. Purple Darkness 紫冥 is where the Daoist immortals reside. Old Man Star of Southern End 南極老人星 is the Chinese name for Canopus, the brightest star in the southern constellation of Carina and the second-brightest star in the night sky. 45. CYYJJJ, 666. 46. “Farewell to the Four Masters Tianning, Yongqing, Qianming, and Jinluan” 留別天寧永慶乾明金鑾四老 (#398/636), ll. 3–4. 47. McDermott and Shiba, “Economic Change,” 390. 48. The siege of Tanzhou started on the twenty-fourth of the first month and the city fell less than two weeks later, on the second day of the second month. JYYL, 31.12a [464]. 49. My translation is modified from that by McCraw; “Poetry,” 93. 50. McCraw saw Wang Wei’s heavy influence on Chen’s nature poems in general and on these road poems from Mount Heng to Shaoyang in particular. There is no denying the influence, but Wang Wei is not a poet who pays attention to such minute, mundane happenings in the landscape as a bird’s shadow skimming the water 破水 (l. 5) or sprouts of grasses emerging from the mud 掀泥 (l. 6). As an anonymous reader for Cambria pointed out, it is perhaps more reminiscent of a poem by Du Fu from the Chengdu period, “Expressing My Heart by My Deck on the Water: Two Poems” 水檻遣心二首 (1 of 2): “The clear river, level, lessens the banks; / Secluded trees, though late, have many flowers. // In the fine rain the fish come out, / Swallows slant in the faint breeze. // The city has a hundred thousand households, / But in this spot, two or three homes” 澄江平少岸, 幽樹晚多花. 細雨魚兒出, 微風燕子斜. 城中十萬 戶, 此地兩三家 (ll. 3–8). Xiao Difei, Du Fu, 2178; Owen, Poetry, 3:19. 51. “Approaching Cypress Wood Inn, Gazing into the Local Farmer’s House” 將至杉木鋪望野人居 (#426/672), ll. 1–4. 52. “On the Twelfth Day of the First Month I Arrived at Shaozhou; On the Night of the Thirteenth It Rained Torrentially” 正月十二日至紹州十三 日夜暴雨滂沱 (#430/676). 53. “Shortly after Arriving at Shaoyang, I Met an Envoy Going to Guilin, and Asked Him to Deliver a Letter to Inquire about the Security Situation There” 初至邵陽逢入桂林使作書問其地之安危 (#431/677). 54. Although the poems strongly suggest so, the view that the Zhous they were visiting were Chen’s wife’s close kin is not conclusive. For a recent study on the issue, see Zhou Qingshu, “Shiren Chen Yuyi.” 55. My translation of the poem is slightly modified from McCraw, “Poetry,” 89. McCraw takes chuanhua 川華, “stream-flower,” in line 4 to be the

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figurative water-flowers made in the wake of the boat, which makes perfect sense. It is also possible to take it literally, referring to actual flowers on the banks, as both the view of the riverbanks and the water itself are “split” by the boat’s forward movement. Jia Yi used the double- and triple-ply rope (jiumo 糾纆) analogy for the interdependence of disaster and fortune in his “Rhapsody on the Owl”: “Now disaster’s relationship with fortune—how does it differ from the double or triple strings of a rope?” 夫禍之與褔兮, 何異糾纆. Sima Qian, Shiji, 84.2498. Zhang Liang appeared in “Traveling to Chenliu: Two Poems” (1 of 2) (#185/344). Mei Fu 梅福 was an official in the Wang Mang 王莽 (45 BC– 23 AD) interregnum (9–23 AD) between the Western and Eastern Han who withdrew when his service was no longer appreciated. See CYYJJJ, 687n3. Chen uses the term to reference Tao Qian in “Inscribed on the Wall of the Wine Monopoly Office” 題酒務壁 (#204/376), written in 1125 in Chenliu: “The magistrate of Pengze at the time / Must indeed have been a heroic person!” 當時彭澤令, 定是英雄人 (ll. 3–4). He sees Zhuge Liang as a hero in “Expressing My Thoughts on Recent Events at the West Pavilion of Dengzhou: Ten Poems” (10 of 10) (#233/426): “Gusts of evening wind blow over the land Zhuge once walked, / In a thousand years, between Heaven and Earth, how many heroes have lived?” (ll. 1–2). Fuller, “Pursuing,” 6.

Part Three

Aftermath

Chapter 8

Breaking Through When we examine the sources of Chen Yuyi’s joy and pain over the course of his career, we find that his worries before the Jingkang Catastrophe came mainly from the vicissitudes in his political career. Politics served as something like the North Star of his moral firmament, providing direction and order for his emotional life. After Jingkang, the parameters of his world were radically revised and he gained increasing freedom from his former, depressing political concerns. Although this new, more balanced post-Jingkang paradigm would tilt toward the political again as the general situation improved after the turn of the 1130s, the core of his new post-Jingkang outlook would persist and continue to guide his life and writing. The unity of person and world Chen achieved in Zhenmou was not absolute. It had both temporal and spatial constraints built into it, as suggested by the qualifying phrases yishi 一時, “for a moment” (“Wind and moon for a moment all belong to the traveler”) and cijian, “this place” (“This old man’s poetry is complete at this place at last”). It is thus not surprising that his equilibrium could be disrupted again with further changes in the political situation, as it was when the Southern Song court started to recall its stranded officials from all over the non-

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Jin-occupied southern provinces after the retreat of the Jin armies to the north side of the Yangzi River in early 1130. The survival of the dynasty seemed to have been secured.

Another Psychological Turn In the third month of the year, 1130, an overjoyed Chen celebrated the double recalls of Xi Yi and Li Desheng 李德升 in the poem “On the Twentieth Day of the Third Month, Composed and Sent to Li Desheng and Xi Daguang, after Hearing of Their New Appointments, Both Residing in Yongzhou” 三月二十日聞德音寄李德升席大光新有召命皆寓永州 (#447/693–694). Chen ends the verse with good wishes and a plea: “From Lingling two Saving Hands of the Empire are recalled at the same time, / Please be diligent with your strategies, the Nine Imperial Temples have not been restored yet” 零陵併起扶顛手, 九廟無歸計莫疎 (ll. 7–8).1 The reentrance of such grand political concepts as “Saving Hands of the Empire” 扶顛手 and “Nine Imperial Temples” 九廟 indicated a mental shift that would resonate through Chen’s poems and life in the following year. The poem’s political overtones have been building since the first half. In the second couplet, Chen writes, “Heaven and Earth have slightly let off this year, / Let me sweep my room and start reading my books” 又蒙天地寬今歲, 且掃軒窗讀我書 (ll. 3–4). Books and reading figured regularly in his poems before the Jingkang Catastrophe but they appear less frequently in poems from the post-Jingkang period.2 The linkage between reading and government affairs (zhengshi 政事), only suggested in lines 3–4, is explicitly stated in the next line: “Since ancient times, security has been key to government affairs” 自古安危關政事 (l. 5). The reemergence of a forward-looking political activism marks another psychological turning point in Chen’s now five-year-old journey. The new spirit manifests itself fully in “Thunderous Storm: A Ballad” 雷雨 行 (#451/698), a poem that uses the occasion of a springtime downpour to exuberantly symbolize the emotional tempest inside the poet.

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The first twelve of the poem’s twenty-six lines are devoted to describing Emperor Gaozong’s hardship and tribulation since the start of the war, from his being charged with the restoration of the empire in 1126 to his safe return from the sea in early 1130 after the retreat of the Jin army. The next four lines express the poet’s relief and joy on hearing the news of the emperor’s return, with the opportune thunderstorm being interpreted as Heaven’s approval of the imperial generosity in announcing an amnesty, and the image of the downpouring rain seamlessly blending into the streaming tears of His Majesty’s grateful subjects. At this point, the poem turns inward, to the thunderstorm’s power to galvanize the poet’s spirit. Conceding his own deficiencies, the poet calls on his able colleagues to rise to the occasion by emulating the great deeds of their ancient predecessors, sweeping away the humiliating dust that had befallen the Son of Heaven. This heroic attitude is matched in the ending couplet by what the poet envisions in the lost capital of Kaifeng: “Haven’t you seen, dragons following tigers atop the hills outside the Eastern Gate of Kaifeng, / Where the kingly vapors are always lush and green?” 君不見夷門山頭虎復龍, 向來佳氣元葱葱? The poem’s intense emotional profile prompted the usually levelheaded Bai Dunren to utter a rare, impassioned comment in which he resorts to a series of highly descriptive four-character phrases in its praise: chenyu duncuo 沉鬱頓挫, shengqing diedang 聲情跌宕, cangliang beizhuang 蒼涼悲壯. “There are not many seven-syllable ancient-style poems in Chen’s collected works,” Bai wrote. “This poem’s profound, forceful, emotional profile is much like that in Du Fu’s poems. Its rollercoaster-like, heart-felt expression of sound and feeling makes it especially close to pieces such as Du Fu’s ‘The Winter Hunt.’ It is really a marvelous work” 簡齋集中七古不多, 此詩沉鬱頓挫, 頗似少陵, 其聲 情跌宕, 蒼涼悲壯, 尤與冬狩行諸篇為近, 蓋力作也.3

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Internal Turbulence The magnitude of the poet’s internal turbulence gets a dramatic expression in the following poem: Breaking the Wall to Make a Window, and I Named It Far Pavilion 開壁置窗命曰遠軒 (#452/706) 鍾妖嗚吾旁 Devil Zhong wails on my side, 楊獠舞吾側 2 Monster Yang dances on my flank.4 東西俱有礙 East and West, obstacles everywhere, 羣盜何時息 4 When will the bunches of bandits cease to rise? 丈夫堂堂軀 A great man’s dignified body, 坐受世褊迫 6 For no reason receives all the world’s restraints. 仙人千仞崗 The immortals on top of the thousand-yard hill, 下視笑予厄 8 Must be looking down and laughing at my strangulation. 誰能久鬱鬱 Who can endure this depressed status for long? 持斧破南壁 10 I grab an axe and break open the southern wall. 窗開三尺明 A window opens three feet of brightness, 空納萬里碧 12 Its void takes in ten thousand leagues of emerald. 嵓霏雜川靄 Clouds on the cliffs mix with mists in the valley, 奇變供几席 14 Extraordinary changes fall before my mat and table. 誰見老書生 Who ever sees a scholar of advanced age 軒中岸玄幘 16

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Wear a high black headcloth askance inside the chamber?5 蕩漾浮世裏 In this rocking, floating world, 超遙送茲夕 18 I send off this evening carefree and with leisure. 倚楹發孤嘯 Leaning against the pillar I give out a lone whistle, 呼月出荒澤 20 Summoning the moon out of the barren marshes. 天公亦粲然 The Lord of Heaven also breaks into smiles, 林壑受珠璧 22 Forest and valley all receive the pearls and jade disk.6 會有鶴駕賓 May a crane-riding immortal 經過來見客 24 Come over and meet with me! In his poem “Getting Rid of Thornplants” 除草, Du Fu demonstrates his fierce tenacity by staging a physical fight with the stubborn weeds surrounding his house.7 “In cool dawn I walked through the woods in front, / The look of the river did not dispel my melancholy. // These thorns were right before my eyes, / How could I wait until autumn was at its height?” 清晨步前林, 江色未散憂. 芒刺在我眼, 焉能待高秋 (ll. 5– 8). “Hoe over shoulder, I went ahead of my boy, / When the sun went in, we were still attacking them” 荷鋤先童稚, 日入仍討求 (11–12). “Cutting them away should not be overlooked, / Truly I hate their evil like an enemy” 芟夷不可闕, 疾惡信如讎 (ll. 19–20). Unlike Du Fu’s struggle, Chen Yuyi’s battle is not with any particular object but with his enveloping sense of constraint and oppression. It receives a dramatic, violent release in the bold action depicted in line 10 of “Breaking the Wall to Make a Window”: “I grab an axe and break open the southern wall.” Whereas Du Fu describes his all-out war with the weeds from the very start of the poem, morning till dusk, Chen slowly and patiently builds his case against his perceived entrapment until he

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breaks out of it at the climactic point in the middle of his poem. The last time we saw him so frustrated and feeling so constrained was in his Chenliu exile, but then he went only as far as inscribing the wall, not breaking it.8 Now his feeling of confinement, which he builds up through a series of explicit words such as ai 礙 (obstacles, obstruction, l. 3), bianpo 褊迫 (squeezed, cramped, constrained, l. 6), e 厄 (oppression, entrapment, strangulation, l. 8), and yuyu 鬱鬱 (depressed, dejected, l. 9), is so strong that breaking open the wall seems to be the only reasonable option. The rest of the poem describes the heartwarming effect and liberating power of this violent release. The breaking open of a window not only brings the distant mountains into view (hence the name “Far Pavilion”) but also elicits a series of positive reactions from the poet and from the other parties. As the master of the newly opened and newly christened “Far Pavilion,” the speaker continues his rebellion by wearing his headcloth askance (l. 16); by whistling (l. 19); and by summoning the moon out (l. 20)—while a cooperative Lord of Heaven smiles in obvious approval (ll. 21–22). The change in the power dynamic between the poet and the thousand-yard-hill-residing immortals clinches the result of the rebellion: just a few lines earlier the speaker feared being looked down on and laughed at by them (ll. 7–8) but now he is imagining their coming down to meet with him (ll. 23–24). The boldness in these imagined acts spills over into other poems. In “Letting Loose My Hair” 散髮 (#460/719), for example, the poet states: “Life’s hundred years are but a temporary lodge, what can one do? / Loosening up my hair, getting crazy, there’s really nothing wrong with it” 百年如寄亦何為? 散髮輕狂未足非 (ll. 1–2).

Perfecting the Route of Communication with the World Forming something like a sequel, two subsequent poems further explore the practical utility of the newly opened window. In “Second Composition” 再賦 (#453/708) the poet tests the window as he would a new instrument before its first use. “In the early morning I sit in the southern chamber, /

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Gazing at the mountains I tilt my head several times” 清曉坐南軒, 望山 頭屢側 (ll. 1–2). He adjusts the angle of his view to make sure the new window, and his new route of communication with the far mountains through its opening, are functioning properly. No matter whether or not the poet actually chopped open a window in the wall of his room, the consistency with which he describes the window in consecutive poems reminds us of earlier attempts at maintaining such referential continuity (for example, in his comprehensive mapping of the local topography in the Fangzhou mountains). Because the window is broken open on the “southern wall” (l. 10) in the first poem, here in the second the speaker sits in the “southern chamber” (l. 1) gazing off into the mountains. After opening the window and testing its function, the poet gives us another episode: what the speaker does in his new windowed chamber. In “Yet Another Composition” 又賦 (#454/710), we read: “Yesterday at Mount Heng, / My heart was saddened on the side of the thoroughfare. // How lucky that I end up being at this place: / In one sitting, I perform several thousand breathings” 我昨在衡山, 傷心衢路側. 豈知得此地, 一 坐數千息 (ll. 1–4). The poet sits in his windowed room and gets himself into a protracted session of breathing meditation. A proven way to overcome the lingering sorrow from another time and another place is surely to immerse fully in this place (cidi 此地, l. 3). Then the poet invokes the famous nine-year-long meditation the Zen patriarch Bodhidharma reputedly performed in a stone grotto in Mount Song before he achieved enlightenment, and determines to do the same himself: “I will bring this body of ten thousand leagues, / To alone face the walls for nine years” 要將萬里身, 獨面九年壁 (ll. 9–10). A stilled body and mind provide the ground for action: “I summon the mountains in front of me, / To make the floating emerald fall on my mat” 招呼面前山, 浮翠落衾席 (ll. 13– 14). In another poem, “Mountain Lodge” 山齋 (2 of 2) (#459/718), the speaker does not merely interact with the natural landscape, he alters it to make it work better for him: “I trim the trees at the corner of the wall with my own hands, / To completely bring in the mountains west of the creek” 自剪牆角樹, 盡納溪西山 (ll. 3–4).

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The Recall Chen Yuyi, after hearing of Xi Yi and Li Desheng’s reinstatement, probably sensed it would be only a matter of time before his own recall. Matters of court and government, in the traditional images of miaotang 廟堂 (imperial ancestral temples and government halls), begin to appear in his poems more frequently.9 His actual recall came in the fifth month of 1130, but he initially declined the offer on grounds of ill health before finally accepting it. Chen left Shaozhou in the fall and traveled via Yongzhou and Daozhou 道州 in Hunan, crossed the Nanling, and arrived at Hezhou 賀州 in Guangxi (Guangnan West Circuit 廣南西路) toward the end of the year.10 On his way, he visited several famous sites, including the Wu Creek 浯溪 in Yongzhou, which flows north into the Xiang and is known for its pristine water and rocks. The Tang official Yuan Jie 元結 (723– 772) was so enchanted by the creek’s natural scenery that he asked Yan Zhenqing 顏真卿 (709–785), a famous calligrapher and a close friend, to write out an essay he had composed after the end of the An Lushan Rebellion, “Eulogy on the Restoration of the Great Tang” 大唐中興頌, and had it inscribed on a cliff by the creek. In an essay commemorating the inscription, Yuan recounts his accidental discovery of the creek on his way to Daozhou and how he fell in love with it at first sight. He even created a new character, wu 浯, out of its homonym wu 吾 (me, my), to name the creek, emphasizing the term’s sense of ownership, so that it could be “in my sole possession” 唯吾獨有.11 By the time Chen Yuyi arrived at Wu Creek, almost four hundred years had passed and the site had been visited by many people. Its cliff walls had been graced by more works by famous poets and calligraphers, including his eminent Northern Song predecessors Mi Fu 米芾 (1051– 1107) and Huang Tingjian.12 The theme of Yuan Jie’s essay, the great Tang restoration after the An Lushan Rebellion, obviously struck a chord with Chen as he stood by the creek admiring the literary and calligraphic work by Yuan and Yan Zhenqing. “Five years, a little scholar’s worrying

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tears, / Fall this day as I lean on my staff by the creek. // I want to search for remarkable verse lines to thank the two masters— / The winds are rising, the waves are surging, my heart is empty and sad” 小儒五載憂 國淚, 杖藜今日溪水側. 欲搜奇句謝兩公, 風作浪湧空心惻.13 Yuan Jie and Yan Zhenqing’s literary and artistic creation seemed to transcend not only the grand historical deeds their work depicts but also the four hundred years separating them from their late-coming new visitor: “After four hundred years, they look as if having been newly created” 四百年來如創見 (l. 7). The poet is so overwhelmed by the moment’s tranquil intensity that he is rendered wordless: “I want to search for remarkable verse lines to thank the two masters— / The winds are rising, the waves are surging, my heart is empty and sad” (ll. 11– 12). The tears of the emotional visitor prove to be too feeble a weapon against the storm raging both internally and before his eyes.

New Journey After passing Daozhou, the southernmost prefecture under Jinghu South Circuit, Chen crossed the Nanling Mountains and arrived at Hezhou. Crossing the Nanling Mountains 度嶺 (#489/754) 年律將窮天地溫 The year is about to end, Heaven and Earth are warming up again, 兩州風氣此橫分 2 The winds and airs of the two provinces are distinctly divided here. 已吟子美湖南句 Having already chanted Du Fu’s South-of-the-Lake lines, 更擬東坡嶺外文 4 I again set out to imitate Su Shi’s Beyond-the-Ranges writings. 隔水叢梅疑是雪 Across the stream, the clusters of plums look like snow, 近人孤嶂欲生雲 6 The lone peak near the traveler is on the verge of spouting out clouds.

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The Nanling claims no unified center or main peak, consisting instead of a series of broken mountain ranges that stretch west to east from modern Guangxi to Jiangxi. Generally considered the geographical and drainage divide between the Pearl River basin and the Yangzi River valley, it also serves as the climatic and cultural boundary between central China and the Lingnan area, a fact that is richly referenced in the poem’s opening couplet. Abruptly rising low peaks and meandering valleys and streams define the mountains, which are in general of moderate altitude and thus passable along the gorges and valleys between their peaks. The description in the third couplet of the plum blossoms on the other side of the narrow stream and the solitary high-rising peaks at close proximity to the traveler captures the terrain in vivid poetic terms. Since the Qin dynasty at the beginning of the Chinese empire, five ancient roads had led from the Central Plains to Lingnan, giving names to the five mountain ranges consisting of Nanling that are still used today. The one Chen crossed was the Mengzhu Range 萌渚嶺, the second range from the west, which from ancient times had been the main path between southern Hunan and eastern Guangxi (he would cross back through the easternmost, Dayu Range 大庾嶺 in the summer of next year). Invoking Su Shi alongside Du Fu in the poem’s second couplet serves as another geographical and cultural reminder because, like Su Shi’s journey a few decades before (via a different route), Chen’s travels would bring him to Guangzhou and the open sea.14 At the southern edge of the Song empire, the Lingnan area was associated with political banishment; exiling members of the political opposition there had become an increasingly common practice in the last few decades of the Northern Song. As Ari Daniel Levine wrote, “By the middle of 1103, the majority of the blacklisted antireformists were on their way to Ling-nan.”15 By expressing his intention to “set out to imitate Su Shi’s Beyond-the-Ranges

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writings” (l. 4), Chen demonstrates his forward-looking attitude, seeing the trip as the starting point of a new journey, bringing new sentiments and new possibilities. Although the road ahead is still long (l. 7), he stops to enjoy the evening glow (l. 8) in a spontaneous act that is neither hastened by nor contingent on other events. Traveling from Hezhou to Guangzhou brings up bittersweet emotions as well. In a poem on a reunion of fellow refugees and reinstated officials in Hezhou, Chen describes the surreal feeling of recognizing old friends despite their changed appearance: “The books and poems in the chests are scattered all over, / At Heaven’s edge, despite our looks and appearances, our spirits are high” 篋裏詩書總零落, 天涯形貌各昂藏.16 Another poem expresses a similar feeling of disbelief, with the characters, as if waking up from a long dream, having to reacquaint themselves with one another: “Before the lamps, old faces are being acquainted again” 燈前顏面重 相識.17

Feelings of a Lifetime Chen celebrated his arrival at Guangzhou in the first month of 1131 in a poem on ascending the city’s landmark Mountain and Sea Tower. Ascending Mountain and Sea Tower 登海山樓 (#496/765) 萬航如鳧鷖 Ten thousand sails look like ducks and gulls, 一水如虛空 2 One single expanse of water an empty void. 此地接元氣 This place is connected with the vital force, 壓以樓觀雄 4 Topped by the spectacular view on the tower. 我來自中州 Having come from the central states, 登臨眩沖融 6 I climb and look out, dazzled by its dizzying vastness.

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Writing Poetry, Surviving War 白波動南極 White waves stir up the Southern End, 蒼鬢承東風 8 Eastern winds blow on my graying temples. 人間路浩浩 In the human world, the roads extend with no stop, 海上春濛濛 10 On the seas, spring grows out of indistinguishable mists. 遠遊為兩眸 Traveling afar is for the views like this, 豈恤勞我躬 12 How should I pity my laboring body. 仙人欲吾語 The immortals desire to speak with me, 薄暮山葱瓏 14 As dusk descends, the mountains reveal their verdant shapes. 海清無蜃氣 The sea is clear, no mirage vapors, 彼固蓬萊宮 16 That is indeed the Penglai Palace!

As the poet breaks through multiple geographic, climatic, cultural, and psychological barriers and arrives at Guangzhou, he is greeted by a vast, open panorama whose busy energy seems at first too challenging and unruly for him. The maritime scenery contrasts with almost everything he is used to. His “central states” (l. 5) sensibility is shattered by all that fills his eyes—not only the white waves but all the “empty void” (xukong 虛空, l. 2), “dizzying vastness” (chongrong 沖融, l. 6), “extending blankness” (haohao 浩浩, l. 9), “indistinguishable mists” mengmeng 濛濛 (l. 10) that accompany it—so much so that he feels disoriented. Even the majesty of the view from the tower (l. 4) seems unable to overcome all the motions of bobbing, rocking, and floating, and the invocation and symbolic recognition of Penglai Palace at the end of the poem (l. 16) fails to mitigate the sense of disorder. The poet quickly recovers from his initial shock, however, and regains his composure, sense of direction, and internal balance in a second poem.

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Another Composition on the Mountain and Sea Tower in Rain 雨中再賦海山樓 (#498/768) 百尺闌干橫海立 The hundred-foot-high railing stands overarching the sea, 一生襟抱與山開 2 The feelings of a lifetime unfurl along with the mountains. 岸邊天影隨潮入 Heaven’s shadows enter with the tide beyond the shores; 樓上春容帶雨來 4 Looks of spring come onto the tower, carried by the rain. 慷慨賦詩還自恨 Vigorously I compose a poem, but self-regret strikes me again; 徘徊舒嘯却生哀 6 Pacing back and forth, I go up whistling, yet sadness grows. 滅胡猛士今安有 Where are the fierce barbarian-quenching soldiers today? 非復當年單父臺 8 No more the Shanfu Terrace of yesteryear.18 The intense emotions expressed in the poem’s second half play off of the orderly presentation of the landscape and the space surrounding the poet on the tower. Order is achieved partly through the framing and tranquilizing power of the regulated verse form in which the poem is written. Chen also achieves order, more prominently in this case, through his precise, multilayered mapping and surveying, which brings the chaotic scene under syntactic, aesthetic and prosodic control. The imposing height and overarching posture of the tower; the gradual, rippling movement of the tide along the shore that brings the sky’s reflection with it; the “looks of spring” carried to the tower by the rain—all these elements rely on the poet’s secure footing and vantage point on the tower and his methodical enunciation of the scene and its components. As McCraw summarizes, “His perch, the scene, his vision, and his mood are all lofty and expansive. From the tower’s high vantage,

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sea and sky seem to mingle until the tide bears in the sky and the spring atmosphere brings rain.”19 Despite the restlessness of the second half of the poem, Chen Yuyi exerts calm authorial command in this poem through another of his familiar tactics: his subtle reworking of lines from Du Fu. In “Respectfully Waiting for Grand Master Yan” 奉待嚴大夫, Du Fu characteristically throws a question to his potential patron, the Grand Master Yan in the title: “Body old, our age in peril, I long to see you, / The feelings of a lifetime to whom else can I divulge?” 身老時危思會面, 一生襟抱向誰開? (ll. 7–8; emphasis added).20 Chen implicitly answers Du Fu’s question by stating his commitment not to any particular person, but to what he sees in the natural landscape: “The feelings of a lifetime unfurl along with the mountains” 一生襟抱與山開 (l. 2). As he eliminates the uncertainty in Du Fu’s question, he reaffirms his ultimate allegiance, not to Du Fu, but to the mountains with which his feelings and ambitions are now lodged, the empowering and tranquilizing natural landscape that has accompanied him faithfully in the past five years. The long-delayed reappearance of Du Fu does not bring disturbances anymore onto his mind. The constant, reliable presence of the mountains and the beauty of the natural landscape now anchor his experience and provide navigation for his emotional and moral firmament.

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Notes 1. Lingling is an archaic name for Yongzhou. 2. Books or reading are mentioned fifteen times in the 219 pre-Jingkang poems but only six times in the 228 poems (including this one) from Shangshui up to this point. 3. CYYJJJ, 699n1. For Du Fu’s “The Winter Hunt: A Ballad” 冬狩行, see Xiao Difei, Du Fu, 2988–2989; Owen, Poetry, 3:289–291. 4. A rebellion led by Zhong Xiang 鍾相 and Yang Yao 楊幺 broke out in the Dongting Lake area in the second month of 1130. Although Zhong was captured shortly afterward in the third month of the year, the rebellion was not put down until the defeat and capture of Yang Yao five years later, in 1135, by elite government troops led by the young general Yue Fei 岳飛 (1103–1141). See Haeger, “Between North and South.” 5. Anze 岸幘, a high-peaked headcloth with the top tilted to expose the forehead, had been a symbol of the unbridled scholar since the early medieval period. It became especially popular among scholars in Song times. According to McCraw, this article of clothing, in various styles, appears nineteen times in Chen’s poems. McCraw, “Poetry,” 248. The irony in the image depicted here is that the chamber where the speaker is situated is an enclosed, indoor space, not the usual site for demonstrating such unrestrained behavior. 6. Referring to the stars and the moon. 7. Xiao Difei, Du Fu, 3342–3343; Owen, Poetry, 4:47–49. 8. “Inscribed on the Wall of the Wine Monopoly Office” (#204/376): “In the songs of the orioles, the season has changed; / On the apricot leaves, the vapors are fresh. // Fine lines of poetry suddenly fall before me, / As I chase and imitate them, they are no longer genuine. // With my own hand, I inscribe them on the west chamber wall, / Not to be mixed up with the dust of the Xus and Yus” 鶯聲時節改, 杏葉雨氣新. 佳句 忽墮前, 追摹已難真. 自題西軒壁, 不雜徐庾塵 (ll. 9–14). The Xus and Yus enjoyed great imperial favor during the Six Dynasties period, and because of this their integrity was considered to be contaminated. 9. For example, in “Spring Lamentations” 傷春 (#455/713). 10. Hezhou had been under Guangdong or Guangnan East Circuit 廣南東 路 in the Northern Song until 1108. 11. Yuan Jie, Cishan, 6.1b–2b.

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12. Mi Fu, “Passing by Wu Creek” 過浯溪, Baojin, 30. Huang Tingjian, “On the Stone Inscriptions of Wu Creek” 書摩崖碑石, Yuzhang, 8.69–70. 13. “Visiting the Wu Creek with Fan Zhiyu and Shan Lü” 同范直愚單履遊 浯溪 (#484/745), ll. 9–12. 14. Su Shi passed by Hukou in Jiangxi and crossed the Dayu Range in the fall of 1094 en route to his exile in Huizhou 惠州 in southeastern Guangdong. He would spend seven years in the area, first in Huizhou and then across the strait on Hainan island. See Egan, Word, 213–221. 15. Levine, “Reigns,” 576. 16. “Thanking Lü Juren by Matching His Rhymes; Juren at the Time Resides in Hezhou” 次韻謝呂居仁居仁時寓賀州 (#492/758), ll. 3–4. Juren was the courtesy name of Lü Benzhong 呂本中 (1084–1145). 17. “On a Small Boat in Kangzhou, during a Night Talk with Geng Boshun, Li Desheng, Xi Daguang, and Zheng Dexiang, We Composed Poems Using Geng Chang Ai Zhu Hong [The Hours Stretch, We Cherish Candle’s Red] as Rhyme Words (I Got Geng)” 康州小舫與耿伯順李德升席大光 鄭德象夜話以更長愛燭紅為韻得更字 (#494/762), l. 3. The quoted verse line is from Du Fu’s “Answering Meng Yunqing” 酬孟雲卿: “As our joy reaches its peak, we lament white hair, / The hours stretch out, we cherish the candle’s red” 樂極傷頭白, 更長愛燭紅 (ll. 1–2). Xiao Difei, Du Fu, 1126; Owen, Poetry, 2:41. 18. The Shanfu Terrace reference borrows from Du Fu’s “Wanderings of Long Ago” 昔遊: “Fierce soldiers longed to destroy the barbarian Hu, / Commanders looked hopefully on the Three Terraces” 猛士思滅胡, 將 帥望三台. Xiao Difei, Du Fu, 4111; Owen, Poetry, 4:299, slightly modified. The Three Terraces are symbols of high offices. 19. McCraw, “Poetry,” 147. 20. Xiao Difei, Du Fu, 3115; Owen, Poetry, 3:337.

Chapter 9

Standing Alone After leaving Guangzhou, Chen Yuyi traveled along the southeast coast and arrived at Gaozong’s court in Zhejiang in the summer of 1131. He wrote only twenty-nine of the poems in his collection during the months between leaving Shaozhou and arriving in Zhejiang. His productivity dropped even more steeply after that: we have just fifty-four poems in total from the next seven and a half years, from the time Chen arrived in Zhejiang until his death at the start of 1139 (end of 1138 by traditional Chinese calendar). Of those poems from his last years, a subset of seventeen poems written between the summer of 1131 and the end of 1132, covering a wide range of emotional ground, sets the tone for his work at the end of his creative life. The poet’s general state of mind in these compositions can be summarized as intellectually peaceful but emotionally torn. In “Seeing Off Erudite Xiong to His Post as Magistrate of Rui’an” 送熊 博士赴瑞安令 (#512/783), the first poem from Zhejiang, Chen writes: “Reunion and dispersal, a pillow of dream is broken at the same time; / Joyful or sad, we each recite ten years of our poems” 聚散同驚一枕夢, 悲歡各誦十年詩 (ll. 3–4).1

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Feelings of joy mixed with sadness, exacerbated by bewilderment and disbelief, dominated the poems from his initial days and months in Zhejiang. In his next poem, “Composed at Night in Illness” 病中夜 賦 (#513/787), Chen adds sickness to the general situation of seasonal decline: “The year is late, the lamps and candles burn brightly; / The sky stretches, saddening the migrating geese. // The scholar cherishes the months and days, / Leaning against the pillow, his mind turns blank” 歲晚燈燭麗, 天長鴻雁哀. 書生惜日月, 欹枕意茫哉 (ll. 5–8). The poem presents a series of incongruous thoughts and images that lead nowhere: the lateness of the year is followed by the brightness of the lamps and candles, which are followed, in turn, by the hard journey and sorrow of the migrating geese; the cherishing of time by the scholar leads to a weary blankness of mind. The emotional pendulum can swing quickly to the other end. In “Delighted by Rain” 喜雨 (#514/788), the wet glow on the muddy early morning road to court is read metaphorically, as an auspicious sign for dynastic restoration. “The mud turns under my feet on the early morning road to court, / Squelching, glistening, as if spitting out light. // The Gray Dragons Tower is shrouded in darkness, / Auspicious vapors extend to the Southern Fields. // The thousand officials file in one following another, / Colors of happiness on their foreheads and eyebrows” 泥翻早朝路, 瀰瀰 光欲吐. 鬱然蒼龍闕, 佳氣接南畝. 千官次第來, 豫色各眉宇 (ll. 11–16).2 The happy convergence of nature, mythological landscape, and personal journey disappears in “Drunkenness” 醉中 (#515/789–790), where the remarkable view of the Kuaiji Mountains near the city of Shaoxing, the makeshift seat of Gaozong’s imperial court from 1130 to 1131, brings forth a sense of loss and sadness.3 “The Kuaiji Mountains carry away the city from east to west, / Marvelous clouds rise from the Yu Cave, morning till dusk. // Having journeyed ten thousand leagues south, I, however, lack a writing brush, / Gazing off blankly into the distance, I cannot bear the sadness” 稽山擁郭東西去, 禹穴生雲朝暮奇. 萬里南征無賦筆, 茫 茫遠望不勝悲 (ll. 5–8).4 The speaker drunkenly perceives the unique

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topographical features of the city, where the outlying mountains blend indistinguishably with the surrounding suburbs, giving the impression that the city is held in the gentle arms of a caring lover, while clouds continuously arise on the nearby mountaintops. But this wonderful view does not lead to poetry, the speaker so claims, due to the symbolic absence of a writing brush.

Sorrow Fills up the Eastern Winds The feeling that something is intrinsically preventing him from performing the task of composing poetry defines Chen’s first year in Zhejiang. The poet looks around intensely, but his gaze does not penetrate; the lines of communication are inexplicably blocked. In the following poem, he seems at first to be bringing the reader back to the romantic memory of his water-ink plum quatrains, but the illusion is quickly dispelled. Plum Blossoms: Two Poems 梅花二首 (1 of 2) (#517/791) 鐵面蒼髯洛陽客 Iron-faced, gray-bearded traveler from Luoyang, 玉顏紅領會稽仙 2 Jade-skinned, red-collared immortal maiden of Kuaiji. 街頭相見如相識 Meeting each other on the street as if old acquaintances— 恨滿東風意不傳 4 Sorrow fills up the eastern winds, intentions untransmitted. The language, imagery, and intense floral figuration all resemble those in the third of Chen’s ink plum quatrains, with the beautifully depicted, “beamingly brilliant” Jade Lady from Southland in the earlier poem reappearing as the “Jade-skinned, red-collared” (yuyan hongling 玉顏紅 領) local maiden (l. 2). The story line, however, is almost totally flipped in the new poem here. Rather than a hoped-for reunion it instead describes an accidental street encounter in which the possibility of fulfillment is

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preemptively thwarted. The narrative now centers on the traveler, the disheveled, “iron-faced, gray-bearded” (tiemian cangran 鐵面蒼髯) man dislodged from the north (l. 1), who replaces the woman as the party that bears the marks and stains of the travel. In the poem’s dreamlike unreality, a vivid example of what literary scholars called “southern estrangement” in describing a similar earlier period, sorrow becomes the only entity that exists and registers.5 The easterly spring breeze, traditional messenger for romance and spontaneous communication, those compassionate conveyors of the poet’s intentions in the past, is now filled with sorrow and loses its powers of communication.6 The perfect unity Chen reached at the small village of Zhenmou between emotion and scenery, person and world, eludes him again. He does not specify the source of the estrangement in the poem, but his general concern over the individual’s position in an ever-changing world undoubtedly plays a role. The radical swing of emotions and these conditions of contradiction and conflict will play out in more painful terms during the rest of his time in Zhejiang. The unanticipated and fateful intersection between his life and historical events during the previous five to six years will be repeatedly referenced—sometimes obsessively recalled—in his poems, and the failed communication shown here will continue to be acutely felt. In the larger picture, the situation described symbolically in “Plum Blossoms” represents the actual political and human strife occurring at the time in Zhejiang, where unexpected street encounters among the throngs of northern refugees in their newly adopted southern home, and the sense of déjà vu and unreality they caused, became the new normal in the first years and decades of life in the Southern Song.7 The freezing that comes with the spring winds can affect various objects and other situations. In “Rain” 雨 (#519/792–793) Chen writes, “Those hundred-foot-tall waterfalls in the mountains of my old home, / Are you in drought or rain?” 舊山百尺泉, 不知旱與雨 (ll. 11–12). The waterfalls

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have turned into an abstract image that has lost connection with the real southern rain that is falling before the poet’s eyes. In “Inscribed on a Painting” 題畫 (#528/804), familiar-looking objects in the painted landscape lead to a painful recognition that the road back home is forever closed. “The towers and pavilions apparently look like Dragon Gate, / It even shows a winding stream hugging the village. // Ten thousand leagues of mountains, no road back home, / Ten years of thoughts, with whom shall I divulge?” 分明樓閣是龍門, 亦有江流曲抱村. 萬里家山無 路入, 十年心事與誰論? (ll. 1–4). It is not that the southern scenery is not pleasing to the eyes, but the poet has to constantly fight the futile thought of going back. His sadness grows internally and cannot be resolved by itself. In “Crossing the River” 渡江 (#523/797), Chen confirms this: “It’s not that Southland is not good, / Sorrow grows inside the visitor of Chu himself” 江南非不好, 楚客自生哀 (ll. 1–2), comparing himself with the exiled Chu statesman and poet Qu Yuan.8 Feelings of estrangement are not triggered only when sadness grips his mind. “Composed on Horseback on a Leave Day” 休日馬上 (#527/804) reveals the deeply lodged loneliness that can come over him on the city’s busy streets: “Ten thousand people travel on the busy thoroughfare, / But who shares the gorgeous scenery with me? // Having no way of speaking to them, / I silently entrust my songs to the rustling winds” 九 衢行萬人, 誰抱此懷勝. 不得與之語, 蕭蕭寄孤詠 (ll. 9–12).

Non-Abiding There are no poems in Chen’s collected works from the years 1133 and 1134 (and none, for that matter, from 1137). He wrote the next poems in 1135 and 1136. When his request for sick leave was approved by the imperial court in the sixth month of 1135, Chen Yuyi chose to move to a small town named Qingdun 青墩 (Green Mound) in eastern Huzhou. Qingdun, and its neighbor Wudun 烏墩 (Black Mound), were among the oldest

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settlements in the area, dating to the sixth century, and they were the site of a major military garrison in the Tang.9 Their names derived from the great mounds in the landscape on which they were first built. The prosperous towns also benefited from being located along a watercourse connected to the Grand Canal, which runs through the area. At the beginning of the Southern Song, as Richard von Glahn noted, “many gentry families fleeing the devastated north settled there and began to build magnificent villas and gardens”; the prosperity of the place “reached its zenith during the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.”10 In addition to its popularity among northerners who fled to the south, Chen’s choice to settle there was probably also influenced by his short stint as prefect of Huzhou immediately before his sick leave (which lasted from the ninth month of 1134 to the third month of 1135). During this first stay in Qingdun Chen Yuyi adopted a second style name, Wuzhu 無住, or “Non-Abiding.” The change from Simplicity Studio, which he started to use in Dengzhou in 1127, to Non-Abiding was symbolic of a larger change in his attitude after returning to official service. Minimalistic as it is, “simplicity” still denoted some value that was desirable to him. Now, with the second name, he let everything go. Chen seems to be ready to disengage himself from the world. His year of sick leave in Qingdun is a key period for the development of this new mindset. In “Composed on Double Ninth, Shown to Dayuan Hongzhi” 九日示大 圓洪智 (#532/810), he confesses to his friend the Chan master Hongzhi: “Ever since I obtained the mind-tranquilizing method, / I have been at peace and stopped writing poems. // Suddenly, the Double Ninth Day comes, / How can I resist the chrysanthemum branches!” 自得休心法, 悠然不賦詩. 忽逢重九日, 無奈菊花枝 (ll. 1–4). The newly acquired “mind-tranquilizing method” temporarily loses its efficacy in the face of those chrysanthemum flowers. The poem stops there without providing further clues regarding the result of the staged battle between the allures of the flowers and his newly gained mental power to render them null. His brief mental slip, however, does not seem

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to pose any long-term danger, now that he has the new wisdom that if you do not dwell on those allures, they will not abide in you. Flowers occupy a special position in this new mind-calming, “nonabiding” enterprise; aesthetic beauty has always played a central role in defining Chen’s identity and his material existence. “Ye Nan Kindly Bestowed Me Flowers” 葉柟惠花 (#550/832): “The old Retired Scholar in Non-Abiding Hut / Has entered into stillness since the start of spring, not raising a cup. // Wenshu and Wangming are both folding their hands, / The flower branches on this day have summoned me back” 無住菴中老 居士, 逢春入定不銜盃. 文殊罔明俱拱手, 今日花枝喚得迴 (ll. 1–4).11 The following poem seems to describe the reverse process, so to speak, by which the poet enters into a state of absolute stillness. Night Sitting with Master Hongzhi and Tianjing 與智老天經夜 坐12 (#535/814) 殘年不復徙他邦 In my declining years, I no longer migrate to other places, 長與兩禪同夜缸 2 At length I share the night lamps with the two Chan masters. 坐到更深都寂寂 Sitting until the night is deep, and everything quiets down: 雪花無數落天窗 4 Countless snowflakes fall on the skylight windows. The long night session of silent sitting is a process of gradual reduction. The goal of achieving supreme stillness is realized slowly, by overcoming the noise and thoughts that come onto the mind when the poem starts. As the focus of the sitter’s thoughts shifts from old age and his guest status to the nighttime ambience and the sitting itself, complete quietness descends on the room. In this perfectly spontaneous state, he simply observes the fall of the snowflakes, including their number and their manner of descent, without any further thoughts; the thoughts do not really register, nor does he act on them. This is an example of the “silent illumination” (mozhao 默照) method of meditation that was gathering

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followers in Chan Buddhist circles in the Northern and Southern Song transitional period.13 Unlike Su Shi and Huang Tingjian and many other Song poets whose poetry shows a profound and explicit Buddhist influence throughout, we do not find a similar explicit Buddhist layer in Chen’s works until toward the end of his career. Thus equipped, the material attractions of the outside world are not to be feared but fully appreciated, as starting points for the exploration of mental stillness and meaning. “Watching Snow” 觀雪 (#536/815): “The scenery before Non-Abiding Hut is fresh and new, / Jasper towers, jade pavilions, everything is dustless. // Opening the door, leaning on my staff, I stand watching the day go by— / I am the wealthiest man in the world!” 無住菴前境界新, 瓊樓玉宇總無塵. 開門倚杖移時立, 我是人間富貴人 (ll. 1–4). After standing and watching, his surging excitement at the realization of his wealth and glory rises not from the snow-blanketed landscape but from inside the observer himself, from a dustless interior world of clarity and insight that illuminates the landscape. In this crystal clear, “dustless” (wuchen), “nonabiding” (wuzhu), “nondependent” (wudai 無待), “unlodged” (wuji 無寄) state, things just appear and occur, at the moment, in this place.14 In “Receiving a Letter of Proofreader Zhang” 得張正字書 (#542/822), Chen writes: “The year is drawing to its end, the pagoda stands alone; / The winds rise, the crows fly in all directions. // At this moment, Proofreader Zhang’s letter, / Arrives at the door of my countryside abode” 歲暮塔孤立, 風生鴉亂 飛. 此時張正字, 書札到郊扉 (ll. 5–8).15 In a world in which “The skies are cold and the traces of people scarce” 天寒人迹稀 (l. 2), where “The myriad things are all without motives” 萬事已無機 (l. 4), the arrival of a cousin’s letter just happens.

Pure Spontaneity The next poem is another celebrated example of spontaneously occurring thoughts and actions.

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Upon Thinking of Tianjing and Master Hongzhi, I Thereby Go Visit Them 懷天經智老因訪之 (#547/828) 今年二月凍初融 This year, in the second month, the earth has just thawed, 睡起苕溪綠向東 2 Waking up from sleep, the Tiao Brook’s green waters are rushing east. 客子光陰詩卷裏 The passage of the traveler’s days and nights appears in his poetry scrolls, 杏花消息雨聲中 4 The tidings of the apricot blossoms are carried over by the sound of the rain. 西菴禪伯還多病 In Western Hut, the elder of Chan is still troubled by sickness, 北柵儒先只固窮 6 At North Enclosure, the Confucian scholar remains poor and content. 忽憶輕舟尋二子 All of a sudden, I remember the two, and on a light boat, go look for them— 綸巾鶴氅試春風 8 Black silk ribbon scarf, crane’s down cloak, embraced by the spring breeze. The East Tiao and West Tiao pass through Huzhou before flowing into Lake Taihu in what is modern Jiangsu province. On waking up, the speaker sees the green waters rushing east. Remembering his friends, he takes immediate action by jumping into a boat to look for them. Written in early 1136, this poem is among the most critically acclaimed of all Chen’s works. In evaluating Chen’s artful use of regulated verse, David McCraw wrote, “His verses display a superb technique with couplets, a special knack for prosodic effects, an eye for vivid imagery, and an ear for graceful language.”16 This poem demonstrates all these qualities. Chen’s

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contemporary commentators piled praises especially on the second couplet.17 The couplet was admired not merely because of its skillful parallelism and prosodic elegance. Fang Hui summarized its aesthetic appeal by arguing that it creates a perfect union of emotion and natural beauty (qing and jing), object and self (wu 物 and wo 我), two tandems in poetic critical terminology that were gaining currency during the period and appealed particularly to critics of late imperial and modern times.18 The poem focuses on the inspiration for and thoughts before the visit while leaving the actual visit out of the picture. An idea prompted by the Tiao Brook’s flushing spring waters is immediately acted upon; the poem celebrates the unhesitating immediacy and natural instantaneity from yi 憶 (to remember) to xun 尋 (to look for) stated in lines 7–8, and huai 懷 (to think of) to fang 訪 (to visit) in the title. It starts with the spontaneity of the flowing waters and ends with the spontaneity of the speaker charging into the spring breeze in his romantically described outfit of “black silk ribbon scarf” (guanjin 綸巾) and “crane’s down cloak” (hechang 鶴氅). The poem stops right there, with the speaker fully immersed in the fluidity and flamboyance of the moment. The second and the seventh lines wonderfully embody this impulse toward unmediated thought and meaning. The only two lines in the poem that break the seven-syllable’s normal four-plus-three meter, they illustrate how the spontaneity of the springtime moment spills over to the metric and syntactic levels, creating a pleasant surprise in the reading experience. The reader is first naturally pushed toward the four-plus-three meter and then, realizing the difficulty, overcomes that tendency and recognizes the logic of the unusual, off-balance twoplus-five construction underlying the apparent four-plus-three meter, unconsciously transforming 睡起苕溪 plus 綠向東 (“Waking up from sleep the Tiao Brook” plus “green rushing east”) into 睡起 plus 苕溪綠 向東 (“Waking up from sleep” plus “the Tiao Brook’s green waters are rushing east”). Similarly, the oddness of 忽憶輕舟 plus 尋二子 (“All of a sudden I remember a light boat” plus “go look for them”) is overcome

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when the line is semantically realized as 忽憶 plus 輕舟尋二子 (“All of a sudden I remember [the two]” plus “and on a light boat, go look for them”).

Standing Alone Watching the Peonies Chen Yuyi was still in Qingdun in late spring of 1136. In “Cherries” 櫻 桃 (#549/831), he writes with a rare cheerfulness that stands out from his generally down-to-earth, pragmatic style, celebrating the season’s floral abundance and the bounty of local produce: “In the fourth month Southland’s yellow birds are getting fat, / Cherries fill up the markets, glowing in the morning light” 四月江南黃鳥肥, 櫻桃滿市粲朝暉 (ll. 1– 2). In the following poem, “Peonies,” another of his best-known works, the speaker’s emotionally charged gaze and his tranquil posture reach a subtle balance that is characteristic of the poems written in the last years of Chen’s life.19 Peonies 牡丹 (#551/832) 一自胡塵入漢關 Ever since the barbarian dust entered the Han passes,20 十年伊洛路漫漫 2 For ten years, the road to Yi and Luo has become remote.21 青墩溪畔龍鍾客 An old, feeble sojourner by Green Mound Creek, 獨立東風看牡丹 4 Stands alone in the eastern winds watching the peonies. The gaze is fixed on the peonies, the communication between observer and object, frozen. The poet has turned himself into a character in the poem who just stands and looks, his almost ubiquitous bamboo staff gone, nearly irrelevant. The apparent stillness of the moment and its hidden emotional intensity prompted Liu Chenweng to exhale the pithy comment, “Superbly matchless!” 語絕!22 The gaze has a target but no focus. The thoughts of the past, of person and nation, of Yi and Luo are led back and stop right there by Green Mound’s creek, in the image

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of an old man standing alone, looking. The speaker evokes history and political geography, recognizes his senility and the frailty of his body, and names names—Green Mound, Yi, Luo, road, creek, winds, peonies, even the hackneyed Hu 胡 (“barbarians”) and Han 漢 (“Chinese”) dichotomy—but he does not hold onto them, not residing in them. The prominent historical connection between peonies and Luoyang does not disappear altogether but is relegated to the background, rendered almost meaningless in this moment of perfect stillness, mental tranquility, and nonabiding presence.23

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Notes 1. Xiong was an old friend from Chen’s Kaifeng years. Chen once held the same position as Xiong, as erudite of the Imperial College. Rui’an was a county in southern Zhejiang. 2. Gray Dragons refer to the mythological animal guardians that sat atop the towers of the eastern gates of an imperial capital. The Southern Fields were located in the suburbs of the capital; traditional imperial agricultural ceremonies were held there. 3. For the establishment of Shaoxing as a makeshift capital, see Ridgway, “A City of Substance,” 236–240. 4. The Kuaiji Mountains are a low-lying range of mountains that stretch east-west, south of the city of Kuaiji, Shaoxing’s archaic name. The Yu Cave, the alleged burial place of the sage king Yu, is located in the mountains. According to legend, Yu died there after convening an assembly of the feudal lords to assess their merits. 5. For “southern estrangement,” see Wang and Williams, “Southern Identity.” 6. “Eastern winds” (dongfeng 東風) appears three times in our previous discussions, in all cases functioning as an effective carrier of the poet’s emotions. “Setting Out from Shangshui” (#220/397): “On Shangshui’s West Gate road, / Eastern winds stir the willow branches” (ll. 1–2); “Stopping at Wuyang” (#221/399): “From the head of my horse, eastern winds arose, / The green colors deepened with every passage of the day” (ll. 3– 4); “Ascending Mountain and Sea Tower” (#496/765): “White waves stir up the Southern End, / Eastern winds blow on my graying temples” (ll. 7– 8). It will appear one more time in the last poem discussed in this chapter. 7. Qian Jianzhuang describes in detail the struggles that northern emigrants faced in their painful cultural acclimation during the early years of the Southern Song. See Nansong chuqi, 5–86. 8. Chen crossed the Qiantang River 錢塘江 with the court and moved back from Shaoxing to Hangzhou at the start of 1132. 9. The names were later changed to Qingzhen 青鎮 (Green Town) and Wuzhen 烏鎮 (Black Town) to avoid the name taboo of Emperor Guangzong, Zhao Dun 趙惇 (r. 1190–1194). 10. Von Glahn, “Towns and Temples,” 183.

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11. Wenshu, or Manjusri, and Wangming were two Buddhist bodhisattvas known for their power to bring people out of deep meditation, but even they failed to bring the poet back. Folded hands in front of the chest is a symbol of deference. 12. Tianjing was the courtesy name of Ye Mao 葉懋, Ye Nan’s brother and another frequent interlocutor of Chen’s at Qingdun. 13. On the method, see Schlütter, “Silent Illumination.” 14. “Evening Gaze into the Distance from a Small Pavilion” 小閣晚望 (#540/819): “The myriad things are all nondependent” 萬象各無待 (l. 9); “The secluded mind remains remote, unlodged” 幽懷眇無寄 (l. 15). 15. Proofreader Zhang refers to Zhang Nie, Chen’s cousin and the author of his tomb inscription. Proofreader was an entry-level position in the Imperial Library. 16. McCraw, “New Look,” 1. 17. Zhu Xi, for example, recounted that Gaozong liked it the most. Zhu Xi, Zhuzi, 3330. 18. Li Qingjia, Yingkui, 1145. 19. Yoshikawa, Hargett, and McCraw all included or translated “Peonies.” Yoshikawa, Introduction, 141; Hargett, “Poetry,” 49; McCraw, “Poetry,” 148. 20. Referring to the Jurchen invasion of the Song. 21. Both the Yi and the Luo are rivers near Chen’s native Luoyang. 22. CYYJJJ, 834. 23. Ronald Egan has a chapter on the Northern Song discourses on and obsession with Luoyang peonies, in Problem of Beauty, 109–161. For peony poems as a set metaphor mourning the loss of the north among Southern Song literati writers, see Lu Chengwen, Yongwu wenxue, 169– 176.

Epilogue

Chen Yuyi was recalled from his sick leave in the sixth month of 1136, reinstated at his preleave rank, and a few months later promoted to the Hanlin Academy, where he was given the duty of drafting edicts. Two months after that promotion, at the start of 1137, he was again promoted and appointed to the State Council as assistant grand councilor, the highest position he ever held. He was in that role, however, for only a little over a year before he was dismissed and given a provincial appointment in Huzhou again, in the third month of 1138. He served as prefect of Huzhou for three months before requesting retirement owing to his quickly worsening health. He moved back to Qingdun and died there a few months later. Chen left ten poems during his short second stay in Qingdun. In them we see a familiar mind that has eliminated desire, with the momentum of his urges often not acted on but simply observed or displayed. The same quiet optimism that is visible in his early works, and that served as his anchor after the Jingkang Catastrophe, sustains the poet at the end of his life. Despite his serious illness, a sense of inner wealth shines through Chen’s last poems. We can see this in the following select passages or brief profiles from those ten poems, presented here by way of concluding this book and as a remembrance: 1. “Sick to the Bones” 病骨 (#556/839): “In the flourishing woods, the willow calyces are red; / Under the drizzling rain, the golden stonecrop becomes wet” 茂林柳萼紅, 細雨離黃濕 (ll. 5–6). 2. “Rising in the Morning” 晨起 (#557/840): “Silence shrouds the east chamber, I rise late in the morning, / The plants and trees look dark among the sparsely lined fences. // The winds come, the multitude of greens are stirred at the same time: / A perfect time for the master to

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wake up from a good night’s sleep” 寂寂東軒晨起遲, 蒙籠草木暗疎籬. 風來眾綠一時動, 正是先生睡足時 (ll. 1–4). 3. “Climbing the Pavilion Tower” 登閣 (#558/841): what he sees and feels is good weather (l. 1), perseverance of southern plants and trees (ll. 3– 4), and the crisp air of an autumn day (l. 5). 4. “Hibiscus” 芙蓉 (#559/841): “The hibiscuses are blooming exuberantly outside the walls, / In the ninth month, leaning on the railing, I am not afraid of the wind” 芙蓉牆外垂垂發, 九月憑欄未怯風 (ll. 3–4). 5. “Splendors of the Year” 歲華 (#560/842): the sadness prompted by the unstoppable decline in the natural world (l. 1) and in his body (l. 3) is overcome by the view generated by yaozhan (“faraway gazing,” l. 5), by the shrunken looks of autumn (ll. 5–6), and the prospects of the coming spring (l. 7). 6. “I Obtained Two Periwinkles and Planted Them in Front of the Window” 得長春兩株植之窗前 (#561/842–43): taking advantage of the opportune autumn rain, he plants two changchun 長春 (“ever-springs”), the flowering plant’s Chinese name, creating a virtual spring scene in autumn. 7–8. “Two Quatrains Playfully Composed on the Eighth Day of the Ninth Month, Shown to My Wife and Child” 九月八日戲作兩絕句示妻 子 (#562–563/843): although very ill, he is positively thinking forward, advising his wife: “Do not treat the Double Ninth hastily tomorrow, / How many poems are left for me to compose?” 重陽莫草草, 剩作幾篇 詩? (1 of 2, ll. 3–4). 9. “Frost-Resisting Flower” 拒霜 (#564/844): “Between Heaven and Earth everything is withering and winding down, / Among grasses and trees there are still fragrances” 天地雖肅殺, 草木有芬芳 (ll. 3–4).1 “Drinking Alone, Appreciating Laurels in Drizzle” 微雨中賞月 桂獨酌 (#565/845) 人間跌宕簡齋老

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Stumbling through the world, Master Simplicity has gotten old, 天下風流月桂花 2 Gloriously blooming All-under-Heaven are the moon laurel flowers. 一壺不覺叢邊盡 A bottle of wine, without realizing it, is empty by the clumps, 暮雨霏霏欲濕鴉 4 The evening drizzle almost soaks the returning crows. “Drinking Alone, Appreciating Laurels in Drizzle” is Chen Yuyi’s last poem, his juebi 絕筆. According to his tomb inscription by Zhang Nie, “In the winter of the year, his illness seriously worsened. On that day of the eleventh month, he passed away in a monastery room at Wudun. He was forty-nine” 是年冬, 疾大甚. 十一月某甲子, 薨於烏墩之僧舍, 年四十九.2 That day was the twenty-ninth day of the eleventh month of 1138, or January 1, 1139, on the Western calendar.

The Laurel Flowers Bloom Gloriously In the concluding notes of a lifelong panegyric on the wonders of nature and human life, Chen Yuyi offers a symbolic, broad-brush sketch of his personal history: his rise and fall, success and failure, pain and joy, distilled in the phrase renjian diedang 人間跌宕 (“stumbling through the world”). His hardships and suffering may have worn out his body, but his mind and spirit vehemently refuse to be defined by them, finding their ultimate solace in the magnificent, quietly blooming laurel flowers and the composition of poetry. At the end of Du Fu’s seventy-two-line juebi, “Lying on My Sickbed in the Boat With a Wind Illness, Writing My Feelings in Thirty-Six Couplets: Respectfully to be Shown to My Friends in Hunan” 風疾舟中 伏枕書懷三十六韻奉呈湖南親友, the Tang master lets his tears stream down unchecked, ending his poem with: “I have achieved nothing and my tears fall in a downpour” 無成涕作霖 (l. 72).3

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Chen Yuyi chronicles his last moments with the same intense emotions but expresses them with much more restraint. He turns not to his failures but sings his last song about the beauty of the world in his characteristic rational, calm, measured style. The picture is forever frozen on this sadly beautiful moment, in the gentle, unhurried, ever-lasting fall of the evening drizzle. Traditional Chinese poetry rigorously places the natural landscape in the service of the poet’s inner feelings, making observing and describing the world almost the poet’s moral duty. Through keenly perceived and carefully presented images, the poet reassures and guides himself and the reader toward a certain vision of the world. Chen’s lifetime’s work both epitomized this traditional endeavor and represented a new type of writing, bringing intuitive encounter, conscious craftsmanship, and precise language equally into the equation. At the end of our travels with Chen, we reach the seemingly selfevident conclusion that Song poetry reads so differently from its Tang counterpart because it is written so differently. I hope this journey has offered a glimpse of how that was achieved by one of the finest poets the tradition produced.

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Notes 1. Because of its late-autumn blooming time, the hibiscus was known popularly in China as “frost-resisting flower” 拒霜花. Su Shi expounded on the meaning of the name in “A Companion Piece to Chen Shugu’s ‘FrostResisting Flower’” 和陳述古拒霜花: “A thousand forests are swept into a singular color of yellow, / The hibiscuses are blooming all alone by themselves” 千林掃作一番黃, 只有芙蓉獨自芳 (ll. 1–2). Su Shi, Su Shi shiji, 380. 2. Zhang Nie, “Chengong,” 984. 3. Xiao Difei, Du Fu, 6094; Owen, Poetry, 6:237.

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Index

ailanthus, 78, 97 “affective image,” xvii “An Account of the Yueyang Tower,” 207 An Lushan Rebellion, xiv–xv, xx, 53, 149, 167, 171, 260, 274 Analects, 18, 49, 52, 54 Anhui, 56 Anyang, 123 Ba Mound, 199, 202, 217, 225–226, 231, 237, 241, 250 Bai Dunren, xxii, xxv, 7, 49, 85, 97–98, 117, 140, 166, 195, 217, 228, 230, 246, 259–260, 269 Bai Juyi, 48, 95 Bao Zhao, 13, 51 Baochan Mountain, 207, 227 Beijing, 193 Bian Canal, 3, 85, 160 Big Dipper, 134 Bingzhou, 165 “Biography of Master Brushtip,” 58 Black Mound, 287 Black Sands, 217, 230 Black Town, 295 Bo Le, 58 Bo Yi, 18, 52 Bodhidharma, 273 Bogong, 260 Bol, Peter, 48, 53, 55 Bozhou, 123, 160 Buddha, 71, 117 boundary-crossing, xii, 135–136, 184, 276

Cai Jing, 48, 102 Cai Zhengsun, 171 Caizhou, 53, 129, 136, 195 Cangwu, 219–221, 230 Cao Cao, 77, 97, 230 Cao Pi, 49, 134 Cao Zhi, 7, 20, 49, 52 Capital Luo, 39–40, 42, 193 Central Capital of Jin, 193 Central Plains, xxi, xxiv, 135–136, 237, 276 Chan Buddhism, 273, 288–291 Chang E, 77, 96–97 Chang’an, xx, 22, 50–52, 72, 133–134, 144, 147, 167–168, 260 Changqing, 97 Changsha, 197, 235–236 changyin, 190, 216 Chao Buzhi, 33 Chao Duanyou, 33–34 Chaves, Jonathan, 12, 34, 50, 56, 95 Chen Guozuo, 16–17, 80 Chen Shidao, xxvii, 142 Chen Shugu, 301 Chen Xiliang, xxvi Chen Xuan, 42, 58 Chen Yan, xiii, xxvii, 82–83, 98 Chen Yixin, 163 Chen Yuneng, 67, 94 Cheng Hao, xxii–xxiii, 55 Chengdu, 262 Chenliu, 3–4, 6, 61, 93, 101–108, 111–112, 116–117, 123–124, 128, 142, 148, 151, 159–161, 211, 228,

326

Writing Poetry, Surviving War

Chenliu (continued), 248, 263, 272 Chenzhou, 124 Chongning, 50, 202 Chongqing, 163, 225 Chu lyrics, xvii–xviii, xxviii, 55, 117 Cold Food Festival, 51, 95, 229 community, 3, 14, 16 Confucius, 18–19, 52, 54, 58, 193 Cuiweng, 215, 226, 229, 231, 234, 236–237 Cypress Wood Inn, 251–252, 262 Dan River, 182, 186–187 Daozhou, 274–275 Dayu Range, 276, 282 Deng Yan, 194 Dengzhou, 57, 124–125, 128, 135–140, 153, 161, 164–166, 169–170, 172, 180, 182, 184, 197, 211, 228, 234, 245–246, 260, 263, 288 diaogu, 139–140, 198, 213 dingli, 30, 35 Dingyuan, 160 Dong Zhongshu, 25–26 Dongjing meng hua lu, 56 Dongting Lake, 186, 198–201, 205–207, 209, 212, 219, 221, 223–224, 226, 229–231, 233–235, 248–249, 252, 281 Double Ninth Festival, 50, 72, 77, 97, 170–171, 193, 224, 226, 234, 237, 259, 288, 298 Dragon Gate, 71–72, 252, 287 “Drinking Wine,” xviii Du Fu, xx, xxvii, xxix, 8, 17–18, 20, 22–23, 49–53, 63–65, 72, 74, 80, 89, 91–92, 94–95, 97, 99, 117, 125, 135, 138, 140–141, 143–147, 149–151, 161, 163–167, 171,

Du Fu (continued), 188–189, 194–195, 199–201, 203–204, 209–211, 226–228, 236, 258, 260, 262, 269, 271, 275–276, 281–282, 299, 301 influence of, xiii, 7, 225 canonization of, xiii late Northern Song obsession with, xiv, 132 emulation and impersonation of, xiii–xvi, xxi, 131–134, 172 weight and importance of, 172–176 borrowings from, 19, 78, 132, 280 Duan Chengshi, 97 Dye, Daniel Sheets, 99 Eastern Han, 55, 57, 136, 259, 263 Egan, Ronald C., 58, 296 Eight Passes Temple, 112, 118, 125, 161 Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang, 206 Emperor Wu of Song, 43 eremitism, 94 experiential core, 64, 69, 108 experimentation, 61, 99 Erudite Xiong, 283 Ezhou, 228, 230 Fan Chengda, xiii Fan Zhongyan, 139, 165, 207, 227, 236, 258 Fang Hui, xxvii, 199, 225, 292 Fang La, 138, 165 Fangzhou, 169, 172–173, 175–179, 182–184, 195, 221, 224, 228, 252, 273 Far Pavilion, 270, 272 Fengjie, 163 Fengxian, 20, 51, 53

Index Fengxiang, 51, 149, 167, 260 fenyun fude, 98 Five Dynasties, 45, 67, 99, 193 Four Ordinal Directions, 194 fu, xxviii, 6, 20, 31–32, 49–53, 70, 87–88, 94–95, 97, 99, 136, 158, 161, 163–167, 195, 197, 225–228, 262–263, 281–282, 301 Fu Bi, 193 Fu Jishen, 169, 193 Fu Ziwen, 258–259 Fuchun, xix Fujian, 128 Fuller, Michael A., xiii, xxvii–xxviii, 163, 230, 257 Fusang Pool, 149, 151–152, 182 Fuzhou, Shaanxi, 149 Fuzhou, Sichuan, 57 Gaozong, 128, 160–161, 183, 195, 215, 269, 283–284, 296 “gardens and fields,” xviii–xix Geese Turning Peak, 236 Geng Boshun, 282 Gentleman Pavilion, 215, 229 Gernet, Jacques, 162 gewu zhizhi, 34 Golden Pool, 249–250 Golden Toad, 78, 97 Graham, A.C., 55 Grain Avoiding Immortal, 117 Grand Canal, 3, 288 Grand Master Yan, 280 Gray Dragons Tower, 284 Great Locust Kingdom, 73, 95 Great Wall, 193 Green Mound, 287, 293–294 Green Town, 295 Grotto Court Lake, 206 Gu Yanxian, 57 Guangdong, 128, 281–282

327 Guanghua, 153, 159, 169, 176, 182, 224, 228, 238 Guangnan East Circuit, 281 Guangnan West Circuit, 274 Guangxi, 243, 274, 276 Guangzhou, 186, 276–278, 283 Guangzong, 295 Gui Zhongzheng, 216, 229–230, 259 Guilin, 252, 262 Guizhou, 57, 73 Hainan, 243, 282 Han River, 124, 135, 153, 170, 172, 182–187, 192, 197, 234, 247, 261 Han Xin, 52 Han Yu, 26–27, 48–49, 57–58, 95, 132, 168 Hangzhou, 45–46, 98, 128, 139, 161–162, 183, 195, 215, 295 Hanlin Academy, 297 Hanzhang palace, 43 Hargett, James M., xv, 61, 75, 98 Harrist Jr., Robert E., 35 Hartman, Charles, xiii, xxvii, 49, 168 Hawkes, David, 31, 55, 117 He Jingming, 227 Hebei, 124 Hengyang, 236, 261 Hengzhou, 57 Hezhong, 247, 260 Hezhou, Guangxi, 274–275, 277, 281–282 “Hidden Fragrance,” 59 homogeneity, 3, 13, 48 Hongzhi, 288–289, 291 Hu Yinglin, 140, 166, 210, 225, 227 Hu Yuanmao, 16–17, 80 Hu Yunyi, xxvii Hu Zhi, xxv, xxvii, 7, 49, 96, 98, 166, 228, 249, 260

328

Writing Poetry, Surviving War

Hu Zhiyu, 38, 57 Hu Zi, 37, 56 Huai River, 3, 53, 124, 184, 195, 229 Huainanzi, 236, 258 Huaixi campaign, 136, 164 Huang Tingjian, xxi–xxii, xxvii, xxix, 31–35, 38, 41, 49, 52, 55, 57, 73–74, 84, 96, 98, 131, 142, 163, 165, 199–204, 208, 215, 219, 225, 274, 282, 290 Huarong County, 218, 230–231 Huarong Pass, 217, 230 Hubei, 184, 206, 230 Huizhou, 282 Huizong, ix, xxv–xxvi, 16, 37, 123, 160, 164, 169–170, 193 Hukou, 73, 282 Hunan, 38, 57, 128, 184, 206, 215, 225–226, 236, 243, 250, 261, 274, 276, 299 Huzhou, xxv, 287–288, 291, 297 Imperial College, ix, xxvi, 3–4, 38, 48, 61–62, 67, 75–76, 95, 98, 295 Imperial Library, 4, 76, 82, 90, 101, 104, 143, 195, 245, 296 ink plum paintings, 38–40, 42, 44, 57, 285 ink plum poems, 37, 39, 41, 43, 45, 47, 82, 239, 285 Jade Lady, 40, 42, 239, 285 Jade Mountain, 72–75, 78 Ji Kang, 23–25, 49, 53, 119 Ji Yun, 65, 195, 225 Jia Yi, 25–26, 54, 197, 225, 263 Jian Chu style, 12–16 Jian’an, 242, 259 Jiande, 14 Jiang Kui, 59 Jiang Yan, 161

jianghu, 214, 222–224, 230–231 Jiangnan, 39, 41, 202, 226, 285, 287, 293 Jiangsu, 291 Jiangxi, 73, 215, 226, 250, 276, 282 Jiangxi school, the, xi, xiii–xiv, xvii, xx–xxii, xxiv, xxvii, 5, 84, 199, 204 Jianyan, xxv, xxix, 160, 169, 193, 210, 249 Jiayu, 49, 217, 230 Jin, Chinese dynasty, 40, 50, 119, 152, 167, 244 Jin, Jurchen state, xxvi, 128, 160–161, 165, 168, 173, 184, 193, 215, 231, 247, 250, 261, 267–269 Jingdong, 124 Jinghu, 184, 226, 275 Jinghu North Circuit, 226 Jinghu South Circuit, 226, 275 Jingkang, xv, xxii, xxv, 15, 30, 123, 128, 135, 143, 160, 163, 168, 178, 211, 267–268 Jingkang Catastrophe, x–xi, xiv, xxi, xxv, 37, 69, 80, 93, 107, 117, 125, 128, 133, 140, 142, 172, 245, 267–268, 297 Jingxi South Circuit, 184 Jingzhou, 202, 206 Jiufang Gao, 44, 58 Jiuyi Mountains, 203, 206, 230 “Journey North,” 52, 150, 152, 167, 176, 194 Junshan Mountain, 199–200, 202–206, 208, 210, 215, 218–221, 230 Junyang, 182–184, 186, 188–189, 191, 197, 216, 228 Jurchen, x–xi, xiv, xxiv, xxvi, 123–124, 136, 138, 148, 160–162, 164, 168–169, 171–172, 175, 179,

Index Jurchen (continued), 183, 193, 215, 250, 252, 296 juyan, 12, 29 Kaide, ix, xxvi, 4–6, 10, 61, 66, 76, 94 Kaifeng, ix–x, 3–5, 12, 16, 36–37, 47–48, 56, 61, 68, 70–71, 75, 79, 85, 94, 98, 106, 123–124, 128, 134–138, 148, 153, 160–162, 165, 169–171, 182, 185, 228, 245, 269, 295 Kaiyuan, 98, 165 Kang Yuanzhi, 226 Kangzhou, 282 King Wu of Zhou, 19 King Xuan of Qi, 58 King Yama, 76, 96 Knechtges, David, 40, 57, 136, 164, 225 Kracke Jr., E.A., 162 Kuaiji Mountains, 284, 295 Kuizhou, xx, 99, 131–134, 163, 209, 225 Kunlun, 167 Lady of Wei, 57–58 “Lament for Qu Yuan,” 197 Lan River, 72 Langfeng Terrace, 149, 151, 182 Lantian, 72 late Northern Song, x, xiii, xvii, xx, xxiv, 5, 15, 27, 47–48, 50, 54, 72–73, 83, 132, 142 late Tang, xx, xxviii, 45, 57–58, 146–147 Levine, Ari Daniel, xxvi, 56, 276, 282 Li Bai, 200–201, 212, 225, 230, 236, 249, 258, 261 Li Chaowei, 206

329 Li Desheng, 268, 274, 282 Li Gang, 184 Li Gonglin, 35, 56 Li Mengyang, 227 Li River, 206 “Li sao,” xviii, 117, 151 Li Shangyin, xx, 57–58, 63, 72, 95, 118, 146–147, 166 Li Xinchuan, xxv, xxix, 124, 216, 260 Li Yong, 20, 52 Li Yuan, 156, 158, 168 Li Zhong, 160 Lian Po, 139, 165 Liao, Khitan state, ix, xxvi, 165, 168, 193 Liezi, 49, 97, 118 “Life’s Splendid Blossoms,” 66–70, 87, 100, 126, 161 Lin Bu, 45–46, 58–59 Lin Xiangru, 139, 165 Lingnan, 57, 73, 276 Little Jade Mountain, 72–75, 78 Liu An, 258 Liu Chenweng, xxvii, 98, 106, 115, 117, 126, 131, 166, 175, 194, 240, 293 Liu, James T.C., 55, 166 Liu, James J.Y., 166, 260 Liu Xie, 30, 94, 208 Liu Xiu, 136 Liu Xizai, 80, 97 Liu Yi, 206 Liu Yuxi, 48 Liu Zongyuan, xxviii, 48–49, 243 Longmian Mountains, 35, 56 Lord Yan Tower, 207, 216, 229 Lou Yue, 38, 57 Lu Ji, 40, 57, 94, 119 Lu Su, 206 Lu You, xiii, xxix, 92, 96

330

Writing Poetry, Surviving War

Lu Yun, 119 Luo River, Henan, 190, 195, 293, 296 Luo River, Hunan, 256 Luoyang, x, xxvi, 39–40, 42, 57, 68, 70–71, 76, 87, 94–96, 98–99, 119, 162, 165, 173, 193–194, 197, 228, 243–245, 252, 285, 293–294, 296 Lü Benzhong, 282 Ma Qiangcai, 166 Ma Zhong, 162 Manjusri, 296 “Matching the Rhymes,” 6, 9, 12, 51, 89, 228, 231, 258 Mather, Richard B., xxviii, 40 McCraw, David R., xv, xxi, xxvi–xxvii, 50, 63, 66, 75, 94, 96, 107, 167, 190, 192–193, 201, 209, 214, 225, 229, 249, 260, 262, 279, 281, 291 Meandering Valley, 168 Mei Fu, 256, 263 Mei Yaochen, 95 Mencius, 49, 161 Meng Jiao, 48–49 Meng Yuanlao, 37, 56 Meng Yunqing, 282 Mengzhu Range, 276 Mi Fu, 51, 274, 282 Mid-Autumn Festival, 77, 96–97, 132 Milky Way, 91, 189–191, 195 Miluo River, 197, 206 Ming Archaist movement, 227 Mingzhou, 250 Mo Lifeng, 140 Mongol conquest, xxvi, 117, 162 Mount Heng, 235–239, 242, 245–250, 262, 273 Mount Song, 273

Mountain and Sea Tower, 277, 279, 295 Mountain Villa, 35 nandu shiren, xii, xxvii Nanling, 57, 128, 235, 239, 274–276 Nanyang, 135, 139, 150, 164, 187, 260 Nanyue, 235, 258 Neo-Confucianism, xxii, xxviii, 34, 55, 208, 236 nianpu, xxv, xxix, 50 Nichuhe, 172, 195 “Nine Arguments,” 31–32, 50 Nine Imperial Temples, 268 Nine Regions, 48, 161, 174 Nine Splendors in a Jug, 73–75 “Nineteen Old Poems,” 134 Ningbo, 250 Non-Abiding, 287–290 North Sands, 229 “One Progenitor, Three Patriarchs,” xxvii Ouyang Xiu, 31–32, 168 Owen, Stephen, xx, xxviii, 7, 32, 34, 49–56, 94–97, 99, 141, 161, 163–167, 195, 208, 225–228, 262, 281–282, 301 Palace of Preserving Authenticity and Layered Blossoms, 78–79 Peacocks Beach, 249, 253 Pearl River, 276 Pease, Jonathan, 227 Penglai, 79, 97, 152, 278 Pengze, 263 pianzhou, 187–188 Ping, Foong, 191 Pingyang, 162

Index plum blossom makeup, 43 poetic activism, 112 poetic present, 131 poetics of precision, xxiv, 5, 12, 34, 86, 248, 300 political activism, ix, 139, 268 Poyang Lake, 73, 226 Preceptor Zhou, 9–10, 12–13, 17, 62–64, 71 Prefect Dou, 188 Preserving Authenticity Pond, 79–80, 82–83, 150, 230 Prince of Huainan, 258 Princess Shouyang, 43 Pure and Bright Festival, 36, 56 Purple Darkness, 249, 262 Qian Jianzhuang, 295 Qian Zhongshu, xiv, xxi, xxvii–xxviii, 41, 55, 58, 75, 88, 91, 96, 99, 171, 194, 199, 210, 225, 227 Qiancang, 128, 162 Qiantang River, 295 Qifu, 226, 234, 236–237, 259–260 Qiji, 45–46, 58 Qin, 21, 50, 80, 135, 163, 276 Qingdun, 287–288, 293, 296–297 qingjing jiaorong, xii, 70, 82, 129, 159, 205, 256–257, 267, 292, 294, 300 Qingzhen, 295 Qinling, 187 Qinzong, 123, 160, 164, 169–170, 193 qiuhuai, 9–11, 13, 16, 26, 62–63, 71 qiyan gushi, 76, 269 qiyan jueju, xiii, 33, 83–85, 98, 137, 202, 214, 224 qiyan lüshi, 62–63, 69, 71, 94, 107,

331 qiyan lüshi (continued), 133, 199, 210, 247, 292 Qu Yuan, xviii–xix, 106, 117, 151, 197, 225, 287 Qutang Gorge, 225 recluse, xviii, 26, 53, 158, 181, 246 Red Cliff, 230 Red Pine, Han dynasty Daoist master, 117 Red Pine, modern poet, 58 refugee, xi, xv, 127, 129, 180, 182, 184, 193, 217, 244–245, 247, 258, 277, 286 Ren Caizhong, 260–261 Ren Yuan, 55 Renzong, xxvi, 139 Resting Horse Ridge, 182–183, 195 Restoration poets, xiii Retired Scholar of West Lake, 45 retrospective lens, xiii, xvi “Rhapsody on the Autumn Sounds,” 31–32 “Rhapsody on the Owl,” 197, 263 Rivers and Lakes school, 231 Ru River, 190, 195 Ruan Fu, 143, 166 Ruan Ji, 146, 166 Rui’an, 283, 295 Ruyang, 53 Ruzhou, 4, 6, 67, 70–71, 77, 94, 153, 159, 176, 193, 224, 238 Sang Weihan, 67 “Scattered Shadows,” 59 Scholar Zhou, 77, 97 scholar-official, x–xi, 3–4, 13, 19, 48, 101, 119, 127, 174 Seven Masters of the Ming, 211, 227

332

Writing Poetry, Surviving War

Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove, 53, 166 Shaanxi, 236, 258 Shan Tao, 23–25, 53 Shanfu Terrace, 279, 282 Shangshui, 124–130, 133, 159, 281, 295 Shao Ping, 10–11, 50 Shao River, 252–253 Shaoxing, prefecture in Zhejiang, xxvi, 161, 284, 295 Shaoxing, reign title of Gaozong, 160, 260 Shaoyang, 249–250, 252, 262 Shaozhou, 237–239, 246, 249–250, 252, 262, 274, 283 Shields, Anna M., 48 Shijing, xvii–xviii, xxviii Shilin guangji, 171 Shining Purple Mountain, 250, 253–254 shiyan, 12 Shu, 198, 206 Shu Qi, 18, 52 shuhuai, 16, 54, 137–138 Shun, sage king, 20, 203, 230, 236 Si River, 124 Sichuan, xxvi, 57, 163, 202, 225, 261 Siku quanshu, xii, xxvii “silent illumination,” 289, 296 Sima Qian, xviii, 52–53, 117, 167, 225, 263 Simplicity Studio, xxvii, xxix, 38, 57, 117, 141–144, 154, 166, 288 Six Dynasties, 13, 166, 281 Sixteen Prefectures of Yan and Yun, 193 Sizhou, 244 “Snatching the embryo and changing the bone,” 55

sojourner, 3, 5, 19, 28, 35–37, 47, 50–51, 66, 70, 85, 93, 112, 161, 199, 219, 223, 239, 244, 293 Song poetry revival movement, xiii, xxvii, 83 Songtian Bay, 217, 230, 259 South Town, 107–108 Song Yu, 9–10, 31–32, 50, 55, 63 “southern estrangement,” 286, 295 Southern Fields, 284, 295 Southern Marchmount, 235, 258 Southern Song, x, xii–xiii, xv, xxii, xxv–xxvi, xxviii, 37, 54–56, 59, 82, 84, 97–98, 106, 126, 128, 140, 160–161, 169–171, 183–184, 194–195, 215, 230, 236, 250, 267, 286, 288, 290, 295–296 spontaneity, xvi, xxi–xxii, xxiv, 11, 30, 62, 81, 84, 156, 191, 208, 210, 277, 286, 289–290, 292 “Spring Gaze,” 144 stanza distribution, 80, 110, 149–150 “Stirred by Autumn: Eight Poems,” 133, 163–164 Stone Bell Mountain, 34 Stone City, 260 Sturman, Peter, 15, 51 Su Duan, 89–90 Su Shi, xxvi, 26–27, 34–35, 51, 54, 56–57, 73–74, 84, 92, 96, 98, 142, 243, 257, 275–276, 282, 290, 301 Sun Xindao, 169, 180–181, 193–195 Supreme Capital of Jin, 193 Suzong, 51, 167, 260 Taihu Lake, 291 Taiyuan, 138, 153, 165 Taizhou, 227 Tan Daoji, 161 Tang models, xv–xvi, xxiii, xxvi, 5,

Index Tang models (continued), 133, 204 Tangzhou, 164 Tanzhou, 215, 236, 250, 252, 262 Tao Qian, xviii–xix, xxviii, 9–10, 26, 50, 119, 184, 195, 256, 263 technicality, xvii, xxi, 84, 241 Teng Zongliang, 207 Three Gorges, 163, 225, 276 Three Hall, ix, xxvi, 4, 48–49, 61 Three Kingdoms, 139, 206 Three Terraces, 282 Tian Lanfang, 146 Tian, Xiaofei, xvi, xxviii Tianjing, 289, 291, 296 tianya, 146, 185, 253, 277 Tiao Brook, 291–292 Tongcheng, 56 “transforming iron into gold,” 55 Treaty of Chanyuan, ix, xxvi Vice Commandant Chen, 261 von Glahn, Richard, 168, 288 Wang Anshi, 36, 207, 227 Wang Cun, 48, 228 Wang Daoji, 182, 195 Wang Dongqing, 195 Wang Fu, 3, 102 Wang Fuzhi, xxvii Wang Han, 20, 52 Wang Jie, 215 Wang Mang, 263 Wang Sheng, 24, 53 Wang Wei, xv, xxviii, 35, 98, 262 Wang Xiangzhi, 195 Wang Yi, 55 Wang Yingzhong, 258 Wang Yinshu, 259 Wang Zao, xxv, 260 Wangming, 289, 296 Wei Ji, 22–23, 52–53

333 Wei Qingzhi, 84, 98 Wei River, 22, 51–53, 167 Wei Yingwu, 82, 98 Wen Tianxiang, 194 Wenshu, 289, 296 Wenzhou, 162 West Lake, 45 West Pavilion of Dengzhou, 137–138, 140, 228, 263 West, Stephen, 37, 193 Western Han, 24–25, 52–53, 197, 258 Western Jin, 40, 50, 119, 152, 244 Western Xia, xxvi, 168 “what the eyes see and the ears hear,” 34–36 White Dragon Sands, 171, 193 Winding Valley, 173 Wu, 198, 201, 206 Wu Creek, 274, 282 Wu Diaogong, 166 Wu Wenying, 54 Wudang Mountains, 182 Wudun, 287, 299 Wusheng Military Prefecture, 164 wuyan gushi, xxiv, 6, 29, 52, 78, 80, 82–83, 104, 113, 134, 150, 154, 164, 167 wuyan jueju, 45 wuyan lüshi, 63, 66, 125, 240 Wuyang, 129–130, 132–135, 150, 295 Wuzhen, 295 Xi Yi, 231, 244–247, 260–261, 268, 274, 282 Xia Zhihong, 195 Xiang River, 186, 206, 234, 238, 243, 245–246, 274 Xiang goddesses, 203, 219–220, 226 Xiangyi, 85, 96, 98

334

Writing Poetry, Surviving War

Xiangyin, 260 Xiangzhou, Henan, 123 Xiangzhou, Hubei, 228 Xiao River, 206, 234, 243, 245 Xiao Shao, 259 Xikun school, xx, xxviii Xie Lingyun, xviii–xxi, xxviii, 56 Xie Tiao, 40, 57 Xie Wenji, 6, 8–9, 13 Xu Jingheng, 57 Xu Yinfang, 190–191 Xuanhe, 123 Yan Yu, xiii, xxvi Yan Zhenqing, 274–275 Yan Zhitui, 166 Yang Lun, 210, 227 Yang Shouzhi, 146 Yang Wanli, xiii, 85, 88, 99 Yang Xiong, 20, 25, 49, 52 Yang Yao, 281 Yangzhou, 128, 183, 195, 215, 228 Yangzi River, 3, 50, 73, 99, 128, 131, 163, 183, 186, 197–198, 200, 202, 205–206, 209–210, 212, 215, 223, 225–226, 230–231, 248, 250, 268, 276 Yanjing, 171, 193 Yanyu Heap, 202, 225 Yanzhou, 258 Yao, sage king, 20, 237 Ye Mengde, 33–34, 55–56, 98, 150, 162, 167 Ye Mao, 296 Ye Nan, 289, 296 Yecheng, 154, 168 Yellow River, ix, 3, 29, 52, 123, 153, 160, 164–165, 184, 195, 247 Yi River, 296 Yingchang, 129 Yingtian, 128, 160, 183

Yingzhou, 228, 235, 247, 259–261 yizhang, 76, 78, 89, 96, 186, 290 Yongjia, xix, xxviii Yongning, xix yongshi shi, xxiv, 152 yongwu shi, xxiv, 39 Yongzhou, 206, 246, 268, 274, 281 Yoshikawa Kōjirō, xv, 36, 202 Yu, sage king, 236, 284, 295 Yu Guanying, 164 Yu Xin, 259 Yuan Jie, 274–275, 281 Yuan River, 206 Yuan Zhen, 48 Yuanfeng jiuyu zhi, 48, 228 Yuanfeng, 13, 48, 165, 228 Yuanhe, 242, 259 yuanyou, 106, 117–118, 191, 243 Yue, 27, 51, 206 Yue Fei, 281 Yuelu Mountain, 235 Yueyang Tower, 198–209, 212–216, 221, 224–226, 230–231, 233, 235, 237, 248, 258 Yudi jisheng, 195 Yuezhou, Hunan, 197–200, 202, 204–207, 211–213, 215–217, 221–222, 224–228, 230, 233–235, 237–238, 241–242, 247, 258 Yuezhou, Zhejiang, 161 Zeng Minxing, 38, 57 Zhang, Cong, 184 Zhang Fuxun, xiii, xxvii Zhang Hua, 9–10, 50 Zhang Gongfu, 258 Zhang Guichen, 37, 39, 41, 43, 45, 56, 67, 94 Zhang Heng, 14, 135–136 Zhang Juchen, 12–15, 19, 25, 56, 67,

Index Zhang Juchen (continued), 89, 94 Zhang Jushan, 195 Zhang Liang, 104–105, 117, 152, 256, 263 Zhang Nie, 101, 117, 296, 299, 301 Zhang Shi, 236, 258 Zhang Shizhi, 24, 53 Zhang Yuangan, 161 Zhang Yue, 207, 227 Zhang, Yunshuang, 142, 166 Zhanghua Terrace, 217, 230 Zhao Dun, 295 Zhao Gou, 169 Zhao Qiping, xiii, xxvii, 59, 92, 99 Zhao Xiyuan, 57 Zhejiang, x, xxv, 128, 138, 162, 247, 250, 261, 283–286, 295 Zheng Dexiang, 282 Zheng Gu, 58 Zheng Qian, modern scholar, xxix, 98

335 Zheng Qian, Tang official, 211, 227 Zhenghe, ix, 16 Zhengzhou, 162 Zhenmou, 250, 253–255, 267, 286 Zhong Xiang, 281 Zhongli Chun, 58 Zhongmou, 75, 96 Zhongnan, 17, 22–23, 51–52 Zhongzhai, 175, 194, 260 Zhongren, 38, 44, 46, 57 Zhou Jingzhi, 253 Zhou Xiaotian, 98 Zhou Yinqian, 228, 231, 259 Zhu Xi, xxii–xxiii, xxix, 38, 52, 54, 56, 166, 236, 258, 296 Zhuangzi, 11–12, 14, 50–51 Zhuge Liang, 139–140, 256, 263 Zi River, 206, 252 Zou Hao, 57 Zuo Si, 152 Zuotong, 195

Cambria Sinophone World Series General Editor: Victor H. Mair (University of Pennsylvania) The members of the editorial board are: • Michael Berry (UCLA) • Wendy Larson (University of Oregon) • Jianmei Liu (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) • Christopher Lupke (University of Alberta) • Haun Saussy (University of Chicago) • Carlos Rojas (Duke University) • Tansen Sen (NYU Shanghai) • Shu-mei Shih (UCLA) • Jing Tsu (Yale University) • David Der-wei Wang (Harvard University)

Books in the Cambria Sinophone World Series Writing Poetry, Surviving War: The Works of Refugee Scholar-Official Chen Yuyi (1090–1139) by Yugen Wang Monstrosity and Chinese Cultural Identity: Xenophobia and the Reimagination of Foreignness in Vernacular Literature since the Song Dynasty by Isaac Yue Shaping Chinese Art History: Pang Yuanji and His Painting Collection by Katharine P. Burnett Remapping the Contested Sinosphere: The Cross-cultural Landscape and Ethnoscape of Taiwan by Chia-rong Wu

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Writing Poetry, Surviving War

Locating Taiwan Cinema in the Twenty-First Century edited by Paul G. Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang The Great Leap Backward: Forgetting and Representing the Mao Years by Lingchei Letty Chen The Chinese Lyric Sequence: Poems, Paintings, Anthologies by Joseph R. Allen Rethinking the Sinosphere: Poetics, Aesthetics, and Identity Formation edited by Nanxiu Qian, Richard J. Smith, and Bowei Zhang Reexamining the Sinosphere: Transmissions and Transformations in East Asia edited by Nanxiu Qian, Richard J. Smith, and Bowei Zhang Insects in Chinese Literature: A Study and Anthology by Wilt L. Idema The Poetics and Politics of Sensuality in China: The “Fragrant and Bedazzling” Movement (1600–1930) by Xiaorong Li Spatial Imaginaries in Mid-Tang China: Geography, Cartography, and Literature by Ao Wang Texts and Transformations: Essays in Honor of the 75th Birthday of Victor H. Mair edited by Haun Saussy Chinese Women Writers and Modern Print Culture by Megan M. Ferry Reading Lu Xun Through Carl Jung by Carolyn Brown Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics edited by Mabel Lee and Liu Jianmei Imperfect Understanding: Intimate Portraits of Chinese Celebrities edited by Christopher Rea Zhang Yimou: Globalization and the Subject of Culture by Wendy Larson The Borderlands of Asia: Culture, Place, Poetry by Mark Bender Buddhist Transformations and Interactions: Essays in Honor of Antonino Forte edited by Victor H. Mair Chinese Avant-garde Fiction: Quest for Historicity and Transcendent Truth by Zhansui Yu Eroticism and Other Literary Conventions In Chinese Literature: Intertextuality In The Story Of The Stone by I-Hsien Wu

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The Sinophone Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien: Culture, Style, Voice and Motion by Christopher Lupke Supernatural Sinophone Taiwan and Beyond by Chia-rong Wu Cosmopolitanism in China edited by Minghui Hu and Johan Elverskog “The Immortal Maiden Equal to Heaven” and Other Precious Scrolls from Western Gansu by Wilt L. Idema Chinese Ethnic Minority Oral Traditions: A Recovered Text of Bai Folk Songs in a Sinoxenic Script by Jingqi Fu and Zhao Min with Xu Lin and Duan Ling China and Beyond in the Mediaeval Period: Cultural Crossings and Inter-Regional Connections edited by Dorothy C. Wong and Gustav Heldt Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora: Literary Transnationalism and Translingual Migrations by Karen An-hwei Lee Modern Poetry in China: A Visual-Verbal Dynamic by Paul Manfredi Sinophone Malaysian Literature: Not Made in China by Alison M. Groppe Infected Korean Language, Purity versus Hybridity: From the Sinographic Cosmopolis to Japanese Colonialism to Global English by Koh Jongsok (translated by Ross King) The Chinese Prose Poem: A Study of Lu Xun's Wild Grass (Yecao)  by Nicholas A. Kaldis Gao Xingjian: Aesthetics and Creation by Gao Xingjian (translated by Mabel Lee) Rethinking Chineseness: Translational Sinophone Identities in the Nanyang Literary World by E. K. Tan A Study of Two Classics: A Cultural Critique of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and The Water Margin by Liu Zaifu (translated by Shu Yunzhong) Confucian Prophet: Political Thought in Du Fu’s Poetry (752–757) by David K. Schneider The Classic of Changes in Cultural Context: A Textual Archaeology of the “Yi jing” by Scott Davis