P e n ta s y l l a biC Sh i P oe t ry : l anD s C a P e anD Fa rm s t e aD P oe m s 137vernal look transform the attitude of the birds that sing there. This couplet, with
an apparently disarming simplicity, appears refreshingly spontaneous in a poem
laden with symbols, allusions, alliteration, and complex phrases. The popular
story about its origin would support the view that an impression of natural beauty
is the object of the couplet: Xie dozed off after having worked for days on the lines
of his poem. He then dreamed of his cousin Xie Huilian (397–433), also a famous
poet, and awoke with these two lines, later crediting them to divine inspiration
rather than to his own language. This is only a tale, but it reveals an admiration for
spontaneity (even in artful lines) rather than obvious effort in Chinese aesthetics.
The spontaneous nature of the couplet is wonderfully problematized by its com-
pressed syntax, which yields a certain ambiguity to its meaning. My translation
merely offers the neatest interpretation, but the couplet has also been rendered as,
“Upon the pool, spring grass is growing, / The garden willows have changed into
singing birds.”22 In this interpretation, the garden willows seem to have turned
into singing birds, which populate the trees and fill them with sound. Xie may
well have had this poetic image in mind, but one wonders about the replacement
of willows by birds, which causes the former to disappear from the picture and
privileges the aural over the visual. This spring scene surely needs the copresence
of birds and willows. This translation moreover ignores the lines’ parallel relation-
ship. The relationship among the components in each line (the subjects, verbs, and
objects they act on) is usually assumed to be parallel in a parallel couplet. Yet an-
other translation, more mindful of their parallel relationship, reads: “The pond is
growing into springtime plants / Garden willows have turned into singing birds.”23
The interpretation of sheng as “grow into” stretches the semantic range of the word
even more than a reading of bian as “turn into”; hence, this translation was ex-
plicitly presented as a poetic reading of the lines. The poeticalness of this couplet,
however, derives less from an unusual usage of verbs than their ingenious choice
and part in the syntactic composition. As verse eyes, the two verbs not only ani-
mate their lines but play with signs of the season (pond, grasses, trees, and birds)
in a way that truly captures the mood of early spring. Although earlier readers have
been fond of commenting on the apparent simplicity of these lines, what has con-
tinued to captivate readers is their surprising ambiguity.
Xie’s landscape poetry is marked by certain formal characteristics, such as veri-
similar description, abundant use of allusions, animating verse eyes, and difficult
phrasing, and by a conceptual feature, the poet’s contemplative engagement with
a signifying nature. His extensive use of the Yijing is part of both his reading and
his representation of nature. Later writers in the genre, which was popular in the
Six Dynasties and peaked during the Tang, did not necessarily adopt Xie’s stylistic
form and conceptual framework in their entirety, adapting the genre according
to their individual styles. But vivid descriptions of the landscape and meditations
on nature, its workings, and their relevance to one’s view of life remain constant
markers of the genre. The culmination of the development of landscape poetry
coincided with that of farmstead poetry during the High Tang, whose poets, in
exploring the basic spirit shared by the two traditions—a return to nature and