132 chapter three
in the small hours, 3 to 4 am,” the specificity of the moment before
dawn contributing to the romantic image of the poet. By all accounts,
it was the last poem Haizi wrote. Zou Jianjun’s admiring, exclusively
biographical = thanatographical reading—he says the poem shows
Haizi “going bravely unto his death”—illustrates how such informa-
tion can reduce the poem to a document of human interest and fail to
do it justice as literature. Poet-critic Yu Jian, one of Haizi’s most vo-
ciferous detractors, does something similar, but in derogatory fashion.
He refuses to take the image of ten children Haizi as anything but an
instance of megalomania and vanity on the part of an author whose
poetic oeuvre he calls “The Flowers of Evil, grown in the Mao Era,”
calling attention to the interface with orthodoxy with much aggression
and little nuance. Yu presumably borrows Baudelaire’s phrase to sum-
marize his assessment of Haizi’s work rather than point to any textual
kinship with the French symbolist’s oeuvre.^59
As is true for «Ancestral Land», there are textual triggers in «Spring»
that lead to association with Haizi’s life, and with his suicide: a family of
six, ten children Haizi come back to life and a child Haizi... admiring death, as
well as the poem’s general tone of despondency. The last line, for in-
stance, yields two distinct readings. One intimates that in spite of what
you said, the light of dawn doesn’t appear. The other questions the
light of dawn as an archetypal moment of hope and new beginnings,
which Haizi does in a 1986 diary entry as well: “Daybreak is not at all
a beginning, she should be the last one to get there, the one that clears
away the night’s corpse.”^60
But if the said textual triggers may be seen as another “prophesy of
death,” this is where the similarity with «Ancestral Land» ends. I find
«Spring» an infinitely better poem, hard-hitting with an entirely dif-
ferent kind of power, which I attribute to its original imagery and its
personal, private style, as well as to a sense of proportion. The speaker
produces no clichéd, predictable phraseology, but lays out despair
without marshaling the loud and none too subtle strategies of persua-
sion encountered elsewhere in Haizi’s oeuvre. As such, of the three
(^59) «Peach Blossom» (ḗ㢅) is dated 15 March 1989, but should be taken as part
of the “peach blossom” and “peach tree” series commenced in 1987 (Haizi 1997:
448-455). Zou Jianjun 1999: 236-237. Yu Jian’s presentation at the International
Institute for Asian Studies Workshop on modern Chinese poetry (Leiden, September
1995) and personal communication (February 1997), Yu Jian 1995c: 140-141.
(^60) Haizi 1997: 880.