8 âw 1 ã老û的På
Reminiscing about the old days æ塵¢
When we fought with our backs to the sea çç
....... O
Twilight falls
Horses gallop away
An old general’s white head
Is seen
Slowly looking up
Out of the dust
(Luo 1981: 61–66)
From the discharge order mentioned in the second poem, we
assume the speaker, like Luo Fu, is a retired soldier. In poems seven
and eight, he looks back from the perspective of middle age on his
heroic youth and contrasts it with his present dejected condition.
However, he also looks toward the future and his inevitable death. In
the face of death, he contemplates the evanescence of human existence
and the vanities of life. The mirror image, so prevalent in Luo’s poetry,
appears in poem six. The image boldly rejects the search for the indi-
vidual, iconoclastic self of the Modernist position. The speaker says he
would like to break the mirror, presumably because it can only reflect
the ravages of time, the impermanence of the individual self. The
speaker’s aged reflection epitomizes the transience of life. Although he
would in a sense stop the flight of time by destroying the mirror—the
marker of time’s passage—in the end, the self remains mortal, for
blood flows from the shattered mirror. There is no stopping time.
Luo Fu is concerned with the abstract and metaphysical but more
so with Chinese literary tradition and history as well as his personal
history and how it represents that of China, as the title poem connotes.
Poems such as “Sharing a Drink with Li He” 與éê共ì, quoted in
part, exemplify this:
I mull over quatrains, quatrains, Cí香蠶ïð的
quatrains as if C著¡。¡。¡。
I were chewing five-piece beans ¹ñò的§¢
In your impassioned eyes ó有1ôõö的÷
Is a jug of newly brewed Huadiao wine õ唐 ù 元 }
From the Tang dynasty to the Song to 最©ü入我這ll的酒
the Yuan to the Ming and to the Qing 我著y¹最¾的1首
At last it is poured into this small 進 12 酒甕¢
cup of mine 搖 1 搖, (wQ霧á升
I try to stuff the seven-character Ì醉 ø
quatrain that you are most proud of 甕破, ¹的D成片
The Poetic Odyssey of Luo Fu 77