124 t He siX Dy na s t i e s
The poem concludes with an affirmation of the freedom gained by withdrawal.
The term ziran in the last line may refer to nature (supported by the descriptive
couplets), one’s own nature (harking back to the first couplet), and/or freedom (by
extension of the first two referents). This tripartite pattern (explanation of natural
disposition, description of pastoral life, and affirmation of choice of lifestyle) was
often borrowed by Tang writers of farmstead poetry, such as Wang Wei (701?– 761)
and Chu Guangxi (fl. 726), who likely found this logic of representation effective
in vindicating an alternative way of life, reclusion.
Not all of Tao’s farmstead poems are structured in the same manner, but they
consistently display a rhetorical simplicity that approaches oral language. The use
of the reduplicative binomes (diezi) aiai and yiyi in the seventh couplet moreover
draws on a certain archaic plainness and rhythm associated with the Shijing and
Han ancient-style verse, in which such descriptive phrases are common. Redupli-
cative binomes are a standard feature of ancient speech; their use here heightens
not only the archaic but also the colloquial effects of the poem. The copious use
of parallelism, it should be noted, is unusual for Tao’s poems but typical in late
Six Dynasties poetry; besides the first two and the last couplets, all are parallel,
although lines 7–8, 11–12, and 13–14 are not perfectly so. Even in such instances
in which technique is evident, the overall effect impresses the reader with a cer-
tain artless grace. The lack of craft in Tao’s farmstead poems blatantly opposed
contemporary aesthetic taste, which prized artful refinement; his works were thus
generally dismissed as the “words of a mere farmer.”3 Yet Tao seems to have found
that simplicity and directness of expression accorded best with the basic, rustic
life he portrays in his poems. Interestingly, the absence of apparent artifice in
Tao’s compositions, once scorned by most, became centuries later one of his most
admired trademarks. This attribute supported the interpretation of Tao’s poetry as
ziran (natural or spontaneous) in the Song dynasty (960–1279) and onward, which
in turn helped establish his inimitability; the significance of this conviction in the
elevation of Tao to an absolute poetic model can hardly be overstated.
Images of rustic scenes constitute a significant part of Tao’s representation of
his retirement, as in “Returning to Live on the Farm”; yet he is at times more
concerned with conveying the feel of the rustic setting than the look of it. With the
lines “In a haze lie the distant villages, / Indistinct is the smoke above the houses,”
he gives the idea of a small rustic village without defining it in a visually precise
way. Emphasis here is thus placed on yi zhong zhi jing (the scene within the mind).4
When Wang Wei reworks this couplet for one of his own farmstead poems cen-
turies later,5 greater attention is given to the crafting of imagery, which not only de-
fines to a great extent the poetic art of his era but also reveals a difference between
Tao’s farmstead poetry and the High Tang (713–755) adaptation of it.
The rustic setting in Tao’s farmstead poems, built by recurring descriptions of
such various props as agricultural fields, plants, and animals, provided the poet a
space in which he could discourse on a philosophy of reclusion as well as obser-
vations on man and nature. No poem in Tao’s oeuvre is more abundant with such
meditations than perhaps his most oft-cited poem on wine drinking: