forth across the border on the other. And it is in this space that the
drinking and singing might occur.
Wai-leung Wong mentions this poem in an article that illustrates
Zheng’s intertextual relationship with traditional Chinese poetry,
in particular Song ci&', illustrating the delicateness of Zheng’s
imagery and his ability to create modern images that retain an indebt-
edness to the poetic tradition (Wong 1979: 276–277). The “traditional”
dimension to Zheng’s poetry has been remarked upon by nearly all
critics of Zheng’s verse. But what Wong does better than most is, first,
to isolate in a detailed way exactly how he is traditional, or how his
poetry is related to the tradition; second, to establish a specific body of
texts to which Zheng is particularly indebted, the Song lyric (though
not to the exclusion of other traditional Chinese poetry); and, third,
to articulate the subtle manner in which Zheng is beholden to his
forebears. This last element of the argument is crucial, for Zheng must
be beholden in such a way as not to replicate the forms or semantic
properties of traditional poetry in a wholesale fashion, or he would
not be a modern poet. Rather, what Zheng expresses in his own work
are the sort of “patterns of rhetoric” to which Cynthia Chase refers in
her discussion of intertextuality in the work of John Keats, the “view-
less wings of poesy” on which the new forges forward while still
utilizing the old (Chase 1985: 208–225). This intertextuality takes the
form not so much of specified literal references to past poets as it does
particular rhetorical styles of poetic structuring. In Keat’s case, Chase
argues, these are prosopopoeia and apostrophe (215–216 and passim).
Wong is careful to convey how the “vocabulary and syntax” of Zheng’s
poetry “are unmistakably modern” (Wong 1979: 276), and that,
although imagery may be derived in raw form from the ancients (a
point also made by Yang Mu, see especially Yang 1974: 11, 15, 22–23,
and 36–37), he shows how they are reworked in a modern mode.^1 In
so doing, Wong demonstrates how Zheng was both traditional and
radical at the same time, displaying a maturity of language that few
Chinese poets up until mid-century had done. In other words, one way
to understand Zheng’s poetic oeuvre is by examining it as an extended
straddling of the border between the traditional and the modern. It
could be averred, therefore, that the relationship between tradition
and modernity is another tempting but still risky border. Modern
Chinese poetry was vociferously reviled in the first half of the twentieth
century, and its practitioners tended to be the most culturally
revolutionary intellectuals. (Hu Shi, for example, a doyen of the May
Fourth movement, was the first to extensively propound vernacular
poetry that assiduously avoided the trappings of traditional poetry.)
44 Christopher Lupke