390 a s y n tHe sis
trees, crows, and sunset) and bygone imperial extravagance (nighttime excursion
and pleasure boats on the willow-flanked canal). By juxtaposing these two worlds,
the poet amplifies his mockery of the emperor’s foolish, self-destructive pursuit of
pleasure.
In the last couplet, the auxiliary 2 once again combines two lines into a complex
subject + predicate. In line 7, “if he would run into” ushers in yet another subjunc-
tive clause, “Beneath the earth, if he would run into the Latter Lord Chen,” while
“how could it be fitting” turns line 8 into a rhetorical question. This subjunctive
clause, like that in the second couplet, leads us into the realm of imagination. The
imagined meeting between the two emperors is an ingenious play of irony. Lord
Chen, notorious for his debauchery, was the last emperor of the Chen dynasty. The
new companion he might meet in the underworld is none other than Emperor
Yang, who defeated and overthrew his empire. Here the reader may fancy seeing
Lord Chen gleefully saying to himself upon this meeting: “My conqueror now
lost his empire for exactly the same sins that had led to my own downfall.” This
play of irony continues in the next line: “How could it be fitting to ask about ‘Rear
Courtyard Flowers’?” “Rear Courtyard Flowers,” a song composed by Lord Chen, is
a well-established symbol for extravagance and debauchery. By raising this rhetori-
cal question, the poet means to say that Emperor Yang, upon meeting Lord Chen,
would nonetheless consult him on matters of corporeal gratification. This, then,
shows that Emperor Yang was totally oblivious to the irony of his fate and com-
pletely beyond repentance. Even though in life he could not sail his pleasure boat
to “heaven’s end,” he was obviously determined to do so in the underworld. With
this poignant rhetorical question, the poet brings his ridicule of Emperor Yang to
a climax.
Our reading of “Sui Palace” shows that the auxiliary 2 is anything but auxiliary
as far as the entire poem is concerned. Although it is ancillary to the literal sense
of an individual line, the auxiliary 2 is of pivotal importance in the construction of
complex subject + predicate sentences in the poem. Without the help of these sen-
tences, Li Shangyin could not have moved so smoothly between past and present,
between reality and fiction, and, in the process, blended narration and commen-
tary into an enchanting vision of history.
In my view, the other heptasyllabic rhythm, 4 + 3, should be reserved solely for
describing lines in which the tetrasyllabic segment is self-cohesive and detachable
from the trisyllabic segment. This line configuration strikes us as an expanded
version of the 3 (+ xi) + 2 lines of early Chuci works. Indeed, it, too, produces a
top-heavy dynamic in both sound and sense. The combination of two self-cohesive
segments necessitates a relatively longer pause in between than the one that exists
between 2 + 2 and 3. Certainly this pause is not as long as that created by the pause
indicator xi in a Chuci line. Yet it seems sufficient to produce a similar impact on
the syntax: breaking the line into an initial main and an ensuing supplementary
part. The following poem, composed almost entirely of 4 + 3 lines, displays this
bipartite syntax: