Sh i P oe t ry : anC i e n t anD r e C e n t s t y l e s 321cial. As we can tell from the title, the poem was occasioned by a visit Lu You paid
early that spring to the mountainous countryside outside his hometown.
Starting with the opening line, the poet takes the side of the rustic peasants he
walks among, some of whom evidently invite him into their homes and treat him
to food and wine. They take in this stranger, and he, reciprocating, writes about
their world with a sympathetic eye (not that they could have read what he wrote).
The poet’s attention really is focused on the rural domain he has entered. We note
that the two middle couplets wholly concern the landscape he passes through
and the peasant ways he finds there. Unlike so much regulated verse of the Tang
period, these key couplets of parallel lines do not seek to present a fusion of the
poet’s personal life and feelings with the sights before him (thematic table of con-
tents 5.1). Lu You is content to leave himself largely out of the picture he conveys.
Consequently, we sense his curiosity about a way of life that has little connection
with his own and his reluctance to say anything about himself other than to convey
his appreciation of this other way of life.
Lines 2 and 3 are particularly celebrated. There are poetic precedents for such
lines—the sudden discovery of a path or an opening when none had seemed pos-
sible—but not any that are as ingenious and effectively constructed as Lu You’s,
featuring a contrast between massive landscape forms (mountains, river) and tiny
dots of colored vegetation that somehow point the traveler to a “way through.”
But there is more. I spoke earlier about the “intellectuality” of Song poetry. Many
critics through the ages, from Lu You’s own time down to the present, have inter-
preted these lines abstractly, as evoking a “truth” or “principle” (li) concerning the
existence of solutions to seemingly insurmountable difficulties if only we have the
persistence to keep looking for an answer. Here we glimpse again the prevalence
of the intellectual or even philosophical element embedded in Song poetry. Is it
possible that Lu You did not intend such a secondary meaning when he wrote the
lines? Yes, it is possible. But the fact remains that he constructed the lines in such
a way that they lend themselves to this interpretation, as we see in the remarks of
knowledgeable and responsible critics.
One might wonder about the relationship between “An Outing to Villages West
of the Mountians” and “As Dawn Approached on an Autumn Night, No. 2.” How
could the same writer use the poetic form for such different types of expressions,
showing himself to be distraught in the preceding poem over the plight of his na-
tion and caring only, in this poem, for simple rustic life? It is not necessarily that
Lu You changed his outlook from one period of his life to another. To answer the
question, we must understand the role of poetry in Lu You’s life. During his long
span of eighty-four years, Lu You composed nearly 10,000 poems. Poetry was to
him a medium for giving shape to innumerable moments of thought and feeling
that he experienced, as it was for many Chinese poets. There is hardly anything
definitive about any one of these moments or the poem that corresponds to it. It is
pointless to try to ascertain which of the two voices we find in these poems is the
more genuine or representative of the essential Lu You. Both are equally part of