128 chapter three
wild flowers underground
burn all the way up above ground
Wild flowers burn onto your face
burn you and hurt you
what a wonderful world
morning in a mountain cave
is a man-trampling dappled deerFormally, the poem is held together by the modified return of the first
couple of lines in the last couple of lines and indeed by the resonance
of the entire first stanza in the last, with the significant addition that the
wild flowers turn out to burn you and hurt you (⚻Ӹ)—just like in «The
Wheatfields and the Poet» (呺ഄϢ䆫Ҏ, 1987), the speaker is scorched
and hurt (♐Ӹ) by the unforgiving wheat that other people... find mild and
beautiful.^53 The flowers burning to the light of day and out of the cave
denote more than just bright colors. Dramatic tension between their
loveliness and the pain they inflict on the speaker-protagonist echoes
the role of the dappled deer, with its trampling of the speaker’s fore-
head and face destroying connotations of pretty innocence and any
pristine qualities of the morning hour it is said to represent. Elsewhere
in Haizi’s oeuvre, too, the speaker’s relation to the natural world is
ambiguous, involving opposing forces such as creation, nurture and
comfort on the one hand, and violence and destruction on the other.
In light of his pain, the speaker’s repeated exclamation what a wonder-
ful world, which strengthens the cohesion of the first and last stanzas,
invites an ironic reading. In this poem and throughout Haizi’s oeuvre,
however, the tone of the poetic voice is one not of irony but of utmost
sincerity. As such the said exclamation conjures up an experience of
ecstatic self-destruction. I take the first-person and second-person pro-
nouns to refer to the same, passive speaker-protagonist, who moves
from individual experience, in my forehead and my body, to omniscient
observation in happiness you cannot possibly see and beyond. In the second
stanza, the action moves into the soil, connected by the wild flowers to
the cave where the speaker finds himself. «Moved» derives its strength
from the conjunction of loveliness and horror.
Let’s now turn to a text that is much more famous than «Clasps
a White Tiger» or «Moved», presumably because it suits a romantic
(^53) Haizi 1997: 355-356.