24 Pr e - q i n t i m e s
14 He did not stop by to see me, 不我過 (bù wŏ guò)
His wailing will become my song. 其嘯也歌 (qí xiào yě gē)
[MSZJ 1.16b–17a]Line 1 of this poem, along with its variants (lines 6 and 11), has been identified as a
xing. It also functions as a comparison (bi), linking the lover, who is often absent,
to the River (the ancient name of the Yangtze River), which has branches that wan-
der off from the main channel. Perhaps the wayward lover is a merchant. Each
stanza of the poem is in trimeter until the final line, which reverts to tetrameter.
Yet even these final lines break on the particle ye, yielding a 3:1 rhythm, the final
syllable constituting a kind of exclamation: “And afterward... regret!” and so on.
If the final lines are scanned so, in performing the poem there seems to be great
potential for controlling the audience. The listeners would have empathized with
the persona and hoped that her unfaithful mate would somehow be punished. If
the singer stressed the ye (which, as a particle, would normally be unstressed), if
he or she held this word longer before revealing to the audience the negative effects
on the unfaithful lover, the power of the poetic justice would have increased with
this suspense. The final line of the third stanza would thereby reveal the ultimate
surprise: that the errant lover’s anguish would become the plot for a song—this
song. Although the emotions weigh down the reader, the effect of rhyming nearly
every line (axaaa, bxbbb, cxccc) lightens the mood and prepares for the almost
mocking closing line.
Structurally, there is here, too, a kind of incremental repetition. In the first
stanza, although branches of the river depart from the main channel, they return.
In contrast, the lover seems to have left for good. His initial emotion will be merely
regret. In the second stanza, the many channels between the islets may suggest
the lover’s coursing between more than one love interest. Because of this, he did
not even try to soften his departure with a final rendezvous. This, the persona tells
us, will cause him more anguish even than leaving her. Finally, in the last stanza,
there is a suggestion that the river has joined with someone else (as the Tuo joins
the River) and that he did not even stop by to see his former lover before leaving.
As a result, his anguish will someday cause him to wail, a sorrow that the persona
promises to put to song. The more he demonstrates his coldness toward her, the
more she wants to believe he will eventually suffer. The force of this reading lies
in the contrast between the reality of the first four lines of each stanza and the
singer’s fantasy in the final lines.
This poem has also been interpreted as the lament of a young female relative of
a bride who has left the relative behind as the bride headed off to be married (line 2
of each stanza could also be read, “She has gone to be married,” as in “Tao yao”).
It was a common practice for a bride to take along several young women of her
family, who became the husband’s secondary wives or concubines. This reading
comes no doubt in part because this poem immediately follows a related poem,
“Xiao xing” (Little Stars [Mao no. 21]):