Qu P oe t ry : s ong P oe m s o F tHe y uan Dy na s t y 343Using his skills as a playwright, the author is able to create a dramatic scene in
this poem with economy. The persona does not explain why her lover deserves to
be called an “ingrate.” It could be that she is just playing a game with him so as to
heighten the pleasure of lovemaking. More probably, her lover has a fickle heart,
and she decides that his frivolity should not pass unpunished. Still, she finds it
hard to reject him.
The bittersweet experience of love is captured in the dialectic structure at the
end. It should be noted that the metrical tune title of the song, “A Half,” requires
that any piece written to the tune end with “half... ; half.. .” In fact, “On Love”
is selected from a quadruple song sequence, each poem of which deals with one
aspect of a complicated love affair. In the first song, the persona tells that her re-
lationship with her “cute wretch sweetheart” (which is itself an excellent example
of the “half... half ” contradiction) has been “half pain and half fun.” In another,
she complains that, because of her lover’s absence, her bed is “half-warm and half-
cold,” just like their unstable relationship. In the last song of the sequence, she
simply admits that there is no way to know his heart, for “half of it is true while the
other half is false.”15
We thus have another example showing how the formal properties of the tune
patterns became an integral part of the poetic expression of sanqu works. Statistics
support this observation. Of the forty-three extant song poems written by eleven
poets to the tune “A Half,” thirty-nine take love and boudoir sentiments as their
subjects. Twenty-nine of these bear thematic titles, of which thirteen use the word
“love,” seven use “spring” in the amorous sense of the word, and the rest are about
the lovelorn sentiments of female personae touched off by fallen flowers or wine,
and tears over tokens of love like a kerchief or a letter, and so on. All of them fully
exploit the ambivalent “half... half ” in the coda, which is stipulated, or, rather,
guaranteed, by the tune pattern. Unique as it might be, the case of songs composed
to the tune “A Half ” provides a wonderful example of the interaction between the
thematic content and the formal pattern in the creation of sanqu. On the one hand,
the special features of a tune pattern (which originated in music) facilitated and
encouraged the use of the pattern for certain topics; on the other, songwriters’
conscious experimentation with the pattern sharpened (or, paradoxically, in less
successful cases, stylized or fossilized) the expressive power of such special formal
features.
The second love song is by Guan Yunshi (1286–1324), also known by his Uighur
name, Sewinch Qaya, the most outstanding of several non-Han sanqu poets, whose
achievements compare with those of other poets on an absolutely equal footing.
His versatile style enabled him to show distinctive personal traits in his treatment
of such conventional subjects as romantic love and the celebration of rustic life.
His mastery of language, especially his ability to use individual speeches to en-
liven dramatic scenes, sets him apart from other sanqu writers.