28 Pr e - q i n t i m e s
This poem is more disjointed and obscure than any we have examined. Images
that may have been familiar to the early Zhou audience have grown strange to us.
This has naturally attracted readers and led to many varied interpretations over the
centuries. Given the proper textual contexts, however, we can see that this is the
song of a bride who is excitedly preparing for the traditional visit back to her par-
ents’ home three days after being married. The key to understanding the poem lies
in the xing: “The kudzu vine is grown longer / Spread to the middle of the valley.”
The kudzu vine was used in a ceremony celebrated by the Zhou dynasty nobility in
which the bridegroom personally received the bride.7 At this ceremony, the bride’s
mother would receive several pairs of kudzu-vine sandals and then have her daugh-
ter tread in them (symbolizing conjugal relations). Thereafter, the mother would
give the daughter various instructions about how to comport herself, receive her
daughter’s obeisance, and finally place the bride’s hands in those of the groom,
who would then lead his wife from the room.
The vine itself produces many narrow pods filled with seeds, which symbolize
fertility (the word zi means both “seeds” and “children”), and its fiber is durable,
symbolizing a strong relationship between the wife and her husband. In this
poem, the affective image is also meant to suggest (by comparison) the initial suc-
cess of the marriage, in which the bonds have already grown stronger in the first
few days of the relationship, as the vines have grown longer. The vines may also
suggest the ties to the bride’s new family, as they clearly do in “Ge lei” (Kudzu Vine
and Bean Creeper [Mao no. 71]). Although the nature of the persona’s relationship
to her in-laws depicted in “Ge lei” differs from that in “Ge tan,” the image of the
kudzu as the new entwinements of the bride with her in-laws is the same. Line 3
of “Ge tan” emphasizes the successes the bride is having with her new family, the
luxuriant leaves echoing the same image (and same significance) seen earlier in
“Tao yao.”
Birds in flight (line 4) are sometimes compared with the appearance of humans,
especially in ritual situations (as in “Zhen lu” [Egrets in Flight, Mao no. 278], dis-
cussed later). The flight of these yellow birds (probably siskins) may symbolize
the bride’s joining the new flock of her husband’s family. Now settled after the
bustle of the marriage ceremony, the family is in harmony, as are the birds in their
song.
The second stanza reiterates the harmony of the marriage in lines 1–3, echoed
by the repeated rhyme scheme (xabbab, xaccac). But in line 10, we move to the
making of clothes from the kudzu, also perhaps a marriage ritual. The coarse and
fine cloth and the persona’s willingness to wear either without tiring may be some-
thing similar to the vows we exchange in marriage: “For better or for worse, for
richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do us
part.”
In the final stanza, there is an immediacy and urgency absent in the two pre-
vious stanzas. The shi shi in line 13, translated as “duenna,” would normally have
indicated a Zhou dynasty official in charge of instructing noblewomen. But here,