c i P oe t ry : long s ong ly riC s 279posing himself as a modest noncontender. He laments how much he has declined,
claims that he is aloof from the world of fame and gain, and seeks solace in nature,
as would a hermit. After listening to him more carefully, we find that each of his
statements carries an overtone suggesting that he is far apart from the common
herd.
The tension between the serene surface and the undercurrent of agitation
continues in the second stanza. The image presented in lines 11–13 is taken from
Tao Qian’s poem “Halting Clouds”: a lonely drinker, eager for his friend to come,
scratches his head restlessly, just as that anxious lover in the Shijing (The Book
of Poetry) does when waiting for his fair lass. With this image, the poet again as-
sumes the air of a hermit and implies his longing for a true friend who under-
stands him.
It is interesting to note that although this key image is borrowed from Tao Qian,
the poet unabashedly takes it as his own. He does not want to say that it is he who
resembles Tao Qian; instead, he “presumes” that Tao Qian would be in the same
mood as he is now. This self-centered stance is not unlike that in the first stanza
when he commandingly “expects” that the green mountains should consider him
charming. He thus makes the “ancient” Tao Qian come to see him. He really wants
to be admired in this way, for the “special flavor” he now “relishes” (the literal
meaning of cishi fengwei [ line 13]) is the thrill of being an elitist solitary drinker.
The use of the phrase cishi fengwei shows how dearly he treasures this special mo-
ment: he wants to prolong and savor every bit of it.
This is also why, in lines 14 and 15, he snorts with contempt at “those on the
south side of the Yangtze who got drunk only to seek fame.” The similar political
and military situation of Tao Qian’s time and that of the Southern Song allows
the poet to hint that those seekers of fame on the southern bank of the river also
include his despicable contemporaries. What he really despises in them is not so
much their craving for fame as their being undeserving of what they crave. “How
could they know the magic of the turbid wine?” asks the vehement poet (line 16).
For him, they have no right to pretend that they know the special flavor of being
wild.
The irony is that while the poet jeers at those seekers of fame, he himself is one
who grudgingly guards against potential sharers of the honor and fame that he
gives himself. As if to manifest how different he is from the mediocre, he abruptly
makes a high-flown gesture that has nothing to do with being a hermit: he threat-
ens to “conjure a gust of wind and send clouds flying” (line 16), alluding to “Da-
feng ge” (Song of the Great Wind), by the first Han emperor, Han Gaozu (Liu
Bang, 256–195 b.C.e.), which is said to have been written during his ostentatious
homecoming after having donned the emperor’s dragon robe.
What follows then is the stunning outcry, “I regret not that I can’t meet the an-
cients, / But that the ancients had no chance to see my wildness” (lines 17–18). The
“ancients” become pitiable because they do not have the chance to see the poet’s
“wildness”—his aggressive egotism. It is they, not he, who suffer a loss. When he
ends the song with “The number of people who understand me / Is no more than