294 t He F i v e Dy na s t i e s anD t He s ong Dy na s t y
nese throughout history. In the poetry of Tang poets, notably Li Bai (701–762) and
Wang Jian (ca. 767–830), plum blossoms sometimes carry associations with exile,
displacement, and the frontier.14 More immediately relevant to “Dappled Shadows”
is a section from the song lyric “Yan’er mei” (Charming Eyes), composed by the
Northern Song emperor Huizong on his way north as a captive of the Jurchens:With people gone, the flower city is desolate;
My spring dreams go around the Tartar sands.
Where is my homeland?
How can I bear to listen to the barbarian flute
Playing to the end of “The Plum Blossom”?
[JBSCXZ, 348]
These lines summon the same chain of connections (the barbarian flute, plum
blossoms, the loss of home and country) as found in the poems by Li Bai and
Wang Jian. It seems probable that Jiang Kui also had Emperor Huizong’s song
lyric in mind when he incorporated textual allusions from Du Fu’s poem on Wang
Zhaojun. Although Jiang Kui wrote “Secret Fragrance” and “Dappled Shadows”
sixty-five years after Emperor Huizong, Emperor Qinzong, and their palace ladies
were taken prisoner by the invading Jurchens, the Southern Song government’s
policy of buying peace from the invaders prevented poets from writing about this
humiliating national tragedy in any explicit manner. If this line of interpretation is
valid, the inner state that Jiang Kui points to in the first half of “Dappled Shadows”
involves not just his personal unhappiness but also a political lament symbolized
in the suffering of such famous people as Wang Zhaojun and Emperors Huizong
and Qinzong.
What is peculiar about the use of textual allusions in the first stanza is the swift
shift from one expression of time to another. On the surface, the first two stro-
phes depict what the poet sees in the present moment, although the allusions to
the Zhao Shixiong story and to Du Fu’s “Beautiful Lady” have infused a sense of
the past into this beginning section of the song lyric. The third strophe explicitly
plunges the reader into a thoroughly different mode of past time. The link be-
tween the plum blossom and Wang Zhaojun is not made clear until the fourth
strophe (and the possible relevance of the story about the last two emperors of the
Northern Song is left totally ambiguous). Since here it is not Wang Zhaojun herself
but her spirit who returns to become the blossom, the third strophe presents that
“other” and past time coexisting with the images of the present. Although there is
mention of “dusk” in the second strophe and “moonlit nights” in the fourth, these
references to specific moments do not form an integrative temporal rhythm for
the entire first stanza. The coherence of the first half of “Dappled Shadows” relies
on the parallelism, juxtaposition, and correspondence of the strophes and their
association with the themes of loneliness, separation, and homesickness. Thus the
first stanza operates as a spatial design.
The second stanza sheds more light on this structural strategy. It opens with an
allusion to the following story: