How to Read Chinese Poetry A Guided Anthology

Sh i P oe t ry : anC i e n t anD r e C e n t s t y l e s 325

wealthy households, the festival is marked with much gaiety, as the girls come out
at night to beseech the Weaving Maid (zhinü) in the sky for skill in sewing. In the
farmhouses, the doors are bolted at dusk—because everyone is too tired to stay up.
The girls in those families already know how to sew, the poem observes, and the
boys how to herd oxen. They have no time to celebrate the annual romance of the
Weaving Maid and her celestial Herd Boy lover.
There is, of course, a long tradition of poetry that describes the hardships of the
common people, even those caused by the very officials who are supposed to look
after them. In Fan Chengda, we find this poetic mode taken to an unusual degree
of specificity about the realities of peasant life that made it so onerous. This is a
different manifestation, informed by social class and political consciousness, of
the capacity for writing about the domestic and everyday aspects of experience that
we glimpsed earlier in Mei Yaochen.
Ronald Egan

notes

1. Quan Song shi (Complete Shi Poetry of the Song), 72 vols. (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe,
   1991–1998). The compilation runs to 45,698 pages, with, on average, four poems per page.


2. Quan Tang shi (Complete Shi Poetry of the Tang), 25 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1960).


3. The subject has been exhaustively and masterfully written about by Maggie Bickford, Ink Plum:
   The Making of a Chinese Scholar-Painting Genre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).


4. Wang Zhifang, Wang Zhifang shihua (Poetry Talks of Wang Zhifang), no. 28, in Song shihua
   quanbian (The Complete Collection of Poetry Talks of the Song Dynasty), ed. Wu Wenzhi (Nanjing:
   Jiangsu guji chubanshe, 1998), 2:1147.


5. Ban Gu, Han shu (History of the Han Dynasty) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1962), 96A.3873.


6. Ban Gu, Han shu, 41.2072; Sima Qian, Shiji (Records of the Grand Scribe) (Beijing: Zhonghua
   shuju, 1959), 95.2659.


7. Most commentators assume that line 2 refers to Hua Mountain, rather than to any other of
   the sacred mountains or even, conceivably, all of them together, because of the frequent pairing of
   the Yellow River and Hua Mountain in Lu You’s poetry, and because the height Lu You gives for the
   mountain matches that given for Hua Mountain in early writings.

suggest eD reaDings

e ng l i sH
Egan, Ronald C. Word, Image, and Deed in the Life of Su Shi. Harvard-Yenching Studies, vol. 39.
Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, and Harvard-Yenching
Institute, 1994.
Fan Chengda. Stone Lake: The Poetry of Fan Chengda (1126–1193). Translated and edited by J. D.
Schmidt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Fuller, Michael A. The Road to East Slope: The Development of Su Shi’s Poetic Voice. Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 1990.
Lu Yu. The Old Man Who Does as He Pleases: Selections from the Poetry and Prose of Lu Yu.
Translated by Burton Watson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1973.
Yang Wan-li. Heaven My Blanket, Earth My Pillow: Poems by Yang Wan-li. Translated by Jonathan
Chaves. Buffalo, N.Y.: White Pine Press, 2004.
Yang, Xiaoshan. Metamorphosis of the Private Sphere: Gardens and Objects in Tang–Song Poetry.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003.