144 t He siX Dy na s t i e s
ten to a yuefu title, was much more decorous than many of the quatrain songs in
the court music repertoire, but it nonetheless belonged to such a tradition.
“Jade Stairs Resentment” describes a woman yearning for her absent beloved.
Everything points to her loneliness: the lowering of the bead curtain implies that
no one is coming and she is ready to retire, the flying and resting of the glow-
worms denote the passage of time, and the sewing of clothes through night sug-
gests sleeplessness. Everything becomes a sign of something else that is kept well
hidden, just like the resentment (yuan) of the woman. In lines 1–3 of the poem, the
only word that might suggest the woman’s feelings is the term modifying “night,”
which she perceives as “long.” This subjective sense of “long” prepares the reader
for the last line, which breaks into a rhetorical question: “This longing for you—
when will it ever cease?” The emotional power of the ending is very much intensi-
fied by the holding back of the first three lines.
For the informed reader, there is much more to the poem. In ancient Chinese
lore, glowworms were believed to be produced by rotten grass—an indication that
the lady’s courtyard is overgrown with weeds, yet another sign of her having no
visitor. Since glowworms generally appear in late summer, their inclusion in the
poem also functions as a marker of the season; autumn is a time not only of cool-
ing passions but also of decay. Her resentment (yuan) of the absent lover is, there-
fore, strengthened by this subtle reminder of the brevity of youth, beauty, and
human life itself. The larger temporal background, however, invests her sewing
with a sense of irony: it is, after all, not a piece of warm clothing for the approach-
ing cold weather but a “gossamer dress” appropriate only for summer. Does this
anachronistic gesture bespeak a desperate desire to prolong the summer days? Or,
as the ancient saying goes: “A woman adorns herself for the one who loves her.”
Is she cherishing the hope that one day her beloved will return and that she will
wear the dress for him? Or does the line suggest that she is soon to be put away
like the gauze dress? In this quatrain, we hear the echo of a yuefu poem attrib-
uted to Lady Ban (ca. first century b.C.e.), in which a gossamer fan worries that it
will be discarded once the cold season arrives. These interpretations do not neces-
sarily exclude one another but altogether contribute to the richness of the image of
sewing.
Xie Tiao’s poem exemplifies one particularly desirable quality for a quatrain,
which is the use of simple language to create a world of complex nuances. Al-
though one may still detect Xie Lingyun’s influence in some of Xie Tiao’s land-
scape poems, on the whole Xie Tiao’s poetry is characterized by a refined elegance
that differs remarkably from Xie Lingyun’s exuberant density. Xie Tiao was one of
the most revered poets in the early sixth century; his graceful, measured expres-
sion of feelings in simple, clear diction became the new poetic ideal for the court
poets of the Liang dynasty (502–557).x i a o g a n g
The major theme of Xiao Gang’s poetry is transience. It is a Buddhist theme, but it
is also a universally human one. To identify the major theme of Xiao Gang’s poetry