c i P oe t ry : long s ong ly riC s on ob j eC t s 291Xiaohong passed by the famous Drooping-Rainbow Bridge on West Lake, the poet
wrote a quatrain about his journey:
These songs I newly made, their resonance most lovely,
Xiaohong quietly sings, and I play the flute.
The tune ends, we’ve passed all the pine-covered hills,
Looking back: amid mists and waves, fourteen bridges.
[JBSCXZ, 280]This lovely quatrain appears in Jiang Kui’s collection of shi poetry. If the anecdote
is indeed factual, the “songs” in the first line must allude to “Secret Fragrance” and
“Dappled Shadows.”
“Secret Fragrance” and “Dappled Shadows” are among the most quoted and
admired works by Jiang Kui. The titles come from a regulated verse on the plum
blossom by the poet-recluse Lin Bu (967–1028) of the early Northern Song; they
are taken directly from the following couplet: “Dappled shadows hang aslant over
clear shallow water; / Secret fragrance wafts in the moonlit dusk.”6 “Dappled shad-
ows” and “secret fragrance” thus are two coordinate images for the plum blossom,
referring to its shape and smell, respectively.
These two song lyrics exhibit a difficult and obscure style. Through the ages,
scholars have offered diverse interpretations, ranging from taking them as a remi-
niscence about a woman whom Jiang Kui loved, to interpreting them as an ex-
pression of sorrow for his life as an unemployed scholar-artist far from home, to
reading them as a lament for the capture of the last two Northern Song emperors,
Huizong (r. 1100–1125) and Qinzong (r. 1125–1126), and their palace ladies by the
Jurchens in 1126.7 In fact, it is not feasible to focus on one interpretation to the
exclusion of the other possible readings.
Of the two poems, “Secret Fragrance” is written in a comparatively lucid style.
Its theme does seem to be the poet’s reminiscence about a woman with whom he
used to pick plum blossoms by West Lake. The blossom, mentioned explicitly in
line 5, is not used as a metaphor for the woman but as an object that arouses in
the poet memories of her. With the inclusion of wo (me) in line 2, Jiang Kui em-
phasizes the poem’s personal tone, but this indication is personal only in compari-
son with the other elements in the poem. The allusion in the third strophe to the
poet He Xun (d. 518), who loved plum blossoms and wrote poems about them, is
meant to be autobiographical.8 Jiang Kui sees himself as an aging He Xun, too old
to feel any real enthusiasm for flowers anymore. By this use of allusion, Jiang Kui
attributes a certain degree of universality to his personal experience. The reference
to He Xun also implies that his mind is really not so much on the blossom as on
his “jade [that is, beautiful] lady.” The blossom is merely a reminder of her absence.
This becomes clear in the beginning of the second stanza, when he says that the
distance between them has grown too far for him “to send [her] a blossom.”
Throughout the entire poem, the experiencing subject and the experienced
object (the blossoming plum) remain distinct, and the constitutive role of the