Qu P oe t ry : s ong P oe m s o F tHe y uan Dy na s t y 341humorous poetic version of his curriculum vitae. Of most interest about this re-
tired scholar is that, in order to articulate his rejection of the civil service exami-
nation system, he has to borrow a whole set of vocabulary from that system. For
instance, to thumb his nose at the academic honor, he boasts of the honor of not
being honored for academic success. He titles himself the “highest graduate of the
college of clouds and mists,” only to show how little he cares about the same title
in the mundane world. Even when he is drunk, he remains sober enough to claim
himself the “sage of wine,” trusting that his readers will see the new meaning of
“sage,” a loaded term in the Confucian tradition.
The poet’s tongue-in-cheek tactic is quite effective. By using the discourse of
the established value system to attack the system itself, he makes his stance very
clear that success in a public career means nothing to him and all he wants is the
simple life of a recluse. It is hard to doubt his sincerity when he talks about the joy
of “finding everywhere the Zen of poetry,” which could not be found in the busy
world of officialdom. However, when he compares, in line 7, the talking and joking
in his leisurely life with the official duties in the Imperial Academy of Compila-
tion (a more literal translation of the line reads, “Talks and jokes are my Imperial
Academy of Compilation”), a problem arises: the poet cannot simply relish the
joy of his life without comparing his leisure with the burdens of official duties.
The last line brings this out more sharply. Granted that the expression “writing
commentaries on the wind and the moon” is a cliché connoting the literary elite’s
elegant enjoyment of nature, the kinetic details suggested by the two verbs—pi (to
correct with a writing brush) and mo (to write or to cross out), meaning “to com-
ment”—are reactivated by their contextual association with the daily routine in the
Imperial Academy (line 7). It is amazing that the poet, not a bureaucrat himself
in real life, would know so well the thrill of wielding an editorial brush. The wit of
the metaphor drives his point home, yet one cannot but wonder why, to illustrate
the pleasure of a recluse, the natural beauty of the wind and the moon should be
turned into lifeless papers and documents. Does the poet know of no other way to
define his life besides keeping an anxious eye on what the social climbers—whom
he despises so much—are doing and gloating over their misfortune? Shouldn’t a
true recluse, who has nothing to do with the world of fame and gain, be more con-
fident in the value of his quiet and plain life and leave alone the world he considers
inferior and undesirable? The semantic field that Qiao Ji carefully builds in “Of
Myself ” betrays some inner conflict: his unconscious obsession with the value he
consciously, and vigorously, rejects.
There is a reason for the perhaps overzealous scrutiny of the inner realities
of a self-glorifying recluse. Although eremitism has a long tradition in Chinese
literature, the disproportionately great number of songs in this category found in
the bulk of sanqu works reflects the awkward situation in which Yuan intellectu-
als found themselves. Unlike other non-Han peoples before them, who embraced
Chinese culture after taking over the control of the heartland of China, the Mon-
gol rulers never really trusted the Han populace. It was very difficult for Confu-
cian scholars to enter, as their Song predecessors had, the civil service, even after