reCent-style Shi Poetry: HePtasyllabiC regulateD verse 197
nowned for its jade. The story of a hero named Chang Hong tells how, after he was
unjustly killed, his blood turned to jade. The tale of a girl named Purple Jade tells
how she returned as a spirit after her death to clear the name of her would-be lover,
Han Zhong, of a charge of tomb robbery. Moved by Han Zhong’s earnest grief,
she appeared to him in spirit and gave him a pearl from her grave hoard. When
her mother rushed forward to embrace her, she dissolved like smoke. Another
text often cited as a possible point of reference is the comment by Dai Shulun
(732–789) that the scenes of poetry are like the mist that rises from the fine jade
of Lantian in the warmth of the sun; they can be gazed at from afar but cannot be
placed immediately before the eyes.
Li Shangyin seems to admit here that he himself has a difficulty similar to that
we face as his readers: while the compression of his poetic language leads us to
infer a latent intensity of emotion, that same compression obliterates the particu-
larity of reference, and in the end the exact source and nature of this feeling eludes
any attempt—by poet or reader—to pin it down once and for all. The problem of
indeterminacy of poetic meaning, in this view, is ultimately a counterpart of the
indeterminacy of feeling and memory: the heart, like the poem, is a zither with too
many strings. Late Tang writers were indeed drawn to the poetic fragment; what
we can see more clearly now is the way they seem haunted as well with a sense of
the fragmentation of experience itself.
Robert Ashmore
notes
- Such rhyming first lines are optional in all regulated verse, but in practice they are a bit more
common in the heptasyllabic forms, where the longer line seems to make it more desirable to
establish the rhyme in the first couplet. - The exception to this rule occurs in line type II (│ │ ─ ─ │ │ ─), where an oblique-tone third
syllable (or first syllable in the pentasyllabic line) requires alteration of the fifth syllable (or third
in the pentasyllabic line) from oblique to level tone to preserve euphony. See the discussion on the
four lüshi/jueju line types in chapter 8. - In fact, we can see anticipations of what we might call a Song manner in such works by Du
Fu. A comparison of this poem with Lin Bu’s “Small Plum Tree in a Garden in the Hills, No. 1”
(C15.1) suggests some of the “hereditary” connections between Du Fu and Song poetry. - For a sense of the literary legacy of these Han sites, see the discussion of Sima Xiangru’s “Fu
on the Imperial Park” (C3.1). - Huang Zhouxing (1611–1680), Tang shi kuai (Pleasures of Tang Poetry), cited in Tang shi hui-
ping (Collected Commentaries on Tang Poetry), ed. Chen Bohai (Hangzhou: Jiangsu jiaoyu chuban-
she, 1995), 2:1948. - For another classic example of this mode of poetry in the ninth century, see the discussion
of Du Mu’s heptasyllabic quatrain “Red Cliff ” (C10.15).
suggest eD reaDings
e ng l i sH
Graham, A. C., trans. Poems of the Late T’ang. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1965.
Liu, James J. Y. The Poetry of Li Shang-yin: Ninth-Century Baroque Chinese Poet. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1969.