190 t He tang Dy na s t ywind curtain leftover candle across frost clear 風簾殘燭隔霜清 (fēng lián cán zhú gé shuāng qīng)
not need wildly/in vain make Gou mountain thought 不須浪作緱山意 (bù xū làng zuò gōu shān yì)
Xiang zither Qin panpipe self have feeling 湘瑟秦簫自有情 (xiāng sè qín xiāo zì yŏu qíng)
[Tonal pattern IIa, see p. 172]
Several of Li Shangyin’s most distinctive heptasyllabic regulated verses are left
untitled. Other poems, like this one, have enigmatic titles drawn from phrases in
the poem’s opening lines. As we have seen, the customary function of the title in
classical Chinese poetry is to state the poem’s occasion—or at the very least, as
in the case of yuefu poetry, to give clear generic signals as to how to go about read-
ing the poem. To leave a poem untitled, or to give it an enigmatic title, is therefore
a pointed gesture. Many critics of Li Shangyin, taking this gesture as a challenge
to the reader to ferret out some actual context of composition that the poet with-
held, have read such poems as veiled expressions of erotic or political meanings
that were too scandalous to be stated more openly. For our purposes, however, it
would seem more promising to look at these untitled or ambiguously titled poems
in a different way: by suspending the usual relation between title and poem, Li
Shangyin has created a form in which he can explore disorienting poetic textures
and images that deliberately allow for a multiplicity of readings. This poem, for
example, might be (and has been) read as a yongwu poem on the syrinx, as an
occasional poem upon hearing syrinx-playing (Li He had written several fantastic
poems on listening to music that might have served as models), as a poem on
roaming transcendents, or as a poem about, or in the voice of, a lover longing for
an absent beloved.
If the general atmosphere of chilly, nighttime mysteriousness recalls Li Shang-
yin’s debt to Li He, the middle couplets show a compression and multivalence
that recall late Du Fu. Line 3 involves the shattering of a dream—but were those
“other years” something dreamed of, is a dream once dreamed in other years now
recalled, or do those “other years” themselves appear now like a broken dream?
While the idea of a causal link between the sound of the bird’s cry and the waking
is there if we choose to take it up, what the lines convey more immediately is the
awakening mind’s state of disorientation. The bird’s cry, in turn, can be either a
literal birdcall or a figure for the sound of the syrinx. The sense of temporal dis-
orientation in particular is developed in the following couplet, where the terms
“familiar” and “dwindling” both point to unspecified spans of past time, the first
on the scale of a life, and the second on the scale of one night (and the dream that
unfolded as the candle was burning down). Beneath the surface of these images
lies that commonplace dear to Late Tang storytellers and poets alike: life is like a
dream.
The final couplet involves a flurry of allusions to traditions about immortals.
The penultimate line refers to Prince Jin (also known as Prince Qiao), a Daoist
transcendent and master syrinx player who rode into heaven on a white crane
on the seventh day of the seventh month from Mount Gou. In the final line, the
phrase “zither of the Xiang” refers to the consorts of the legendary sage-king Shun,