How to Read Chinese Poetry A Guided Anthology

236 t He tang Dy na s t y

In line 16, when a new rhyme begins, the poet reappears, and we begin what

might be thought of as a poem within a poem: a quatrain written on the traditional

theme of climbing high—the same thematic subgenre as that invoked in Chen

Zi’ang’s poem “A Song on Ascending Youzhou Terrace.” Unlike Chen Zi’ang, how-

ever, Li Bai does see and is able to behold (guan) precisely what the genre dictates:

the inexorable onward flow of a river.

With this nearly seamless transition from an anticonventional stance to the de-

cisive borrowing of a convention, the poet makes a strong claim to ancient authen-

ticity: both his own, as a poet openly demonstrating his mastery of the genres that

constitute poetic writing in his day, and that of the ancients, who sit at the starting

point of these generic practices.

It is this personal vision that forms the next couplet:

Yellow clouds for ten thousand miles,

stirring the color of wind, 黃雲萬里動風色  (huáng yún wàn lĭ dòng fēng sè)

White waves along the Nine Rivers,

flowing snowcapped mountains. 白波九道流雪山    (bái bō jiŭ dào liú xuĕ shān)

This is the only truly parallel couplet in the poem—that is, parallel in the intri-

cate way we usually associate with regulated poetry of the Tang—and it closes the

quatrain within the poem. The crux of this couplet lies not in the obvious parallel

imagery but in the ambiguity arising from the parallel positioning of the two verbs

dong (to stir, to move) and liu (to flow). By playing with these two verbs—the pos-

sibility of their being either transitive or intransitive, or of being either verbs or

modifiers—one arrives at (at least) two other possible interpretations:

Yellow clouds for ten thousand miles—

the dynamic color of wind, 黃雲萬里動風色   (huáng yún wàn lĭ dòng fēng sè)

White waves along the Nine Rivers—

flowing snowcapped mountains. 白波九道流雪山    (bái bō jiŭ dào liú xuĕ shān)

Or

Yellow clouds for ten thousand miles—

the color of the moving wind, 黃雲萬里動風色    (huáng yún wàn lĭ dòng fēng sè)

White waves along the Nine Rivers—

mountains of flowing snow. 白波九道流雪山   (bái bō jiŭ dào liú xuĕ shān)

The difficulty of deciding from among these interpretations is not a sign that the

poem is somehow flawed, or that the reader does not know how to choose the best

reading. The convergence of these multiple readings is precisely what yields the

intoxicating sense of the impossibility of discerning, with our eyes, the causes of