c i P oe t ry : long s ong ly riC s on ob j eC t s 301is reminiscent of the following lines from a song lyric set to the tune “Ruihe xian”
(The Immortal of the Auspicious Crane):
... clear-weather threads pull on my chaotic feelings;
Facing the setting sun over the Cang River,
blossoms fly and my love is far away;
Drooping willows darken the Wu Palace.
[WMCCJS, 10–11]
As the last strophe moves from the “clearing mist” to comparing the traveler’s
thoughts to trailing willow catkins, such thoughts naturally embody feelings of
separation, and the idea of lament is implied in the passing of spring, the gen-
eral theme of the first stanza. It should be clear by now that to fully understand
the stanza’s richness, we cannot simply progress from strophe to strophe as they
unfold in the sequence of the song lyric. Rather, we must understand that the
lines externalize the poet’s inner state through parallels between the surface sig-
nificance of the images and the allusive meaning of phrases and expressions de-
rived from Wu Wenying’s other works. And the poet’s lament, like his reminiscing
about the past and his travels with a woman he loved, is itself a recurring mental
activity.
Also divided into four strophes, the second stanza describes, by focusing on
four focal points, the joy of meeting. In the first stanza, although the images are
associated with past experiences, the present moment is clearly its starting point.
By contrast, the second stanza consists of flashbacks only. The first three lines
present a summary of the poet’s romantic life in Hangzhou: “charming dust and
yielding vapor” present a beautiful image of the lovely misty scenes around West
Lake and the dust stirred up by carriages carrying revelers (especially ladies). In
another song lyric, set to the tune “Yi jiuyou” (Remembering Old Journeys), Wu
Wenying wrote about the same kind of activity:
On the road over Broken Bridge by West Lake,
I reckon, the drooping willows where I tied my horse
Must still be leaning.
[WMCCJS, 336]In the second strophe, Wu Wenying devotes his attention to one unforgettable
encounter with a woman on a river near West Lake. As in another poem, set to the
tune “Du jiangyun sanfan” (Three Shifts of the Mode of “River-Crossing Clouds”),
the lyric speaker abandons his horse, gets into a boat, and is summoned into a
fairyland-like residence. In that poem, there are the following lines:
Where the old dike forks like the tail of a swallow,
Laurel oars move with the hovering terns—
My horse’s halter leans against broken clouds.
[WMCCJS, 4–6]