c i P oe t ry : long s ong ly riC s on ob j eC t s 293bluebirds, the sense of solitude refers to the plum tree and to the lyric speaker,
who is away from home (ke li).
Another level of equation is found in the second strophe, which contains an
allusion to a couplet from the poem “Beautiful Lady” (Jiaren), by Du Fu (712–770):
“The day is cold, her green sleeves thin; / The sun sets as she leans on slender
bamboos.”11 Du Fu’s “Beautiful Lady” depicts a highbred woman who has become
a wanderer after having lost her brothers and been abandoned by her husband in a
time of chaos and disorder. To preserve her integrity and purity, she lives in seclu-
sion and solitude. This comparison of the blossoming plum and the beautiful lady
provides the background for the subsequent strophes.
The second half of the first stanza, consisting of the third and fourth strophes,
contains an allusion to Wang Zhaojun, a concubine of the emperor Han Yuandi
(r. 48–33 b .C.e.) who was married to a chieftain of the Xiongnu tribes on the north-
ern border of the Han territory in 33 b.C.e. A story about Wang Zhaojun in the
Xijing zaji (Miscellaneous Notes of the Western Capital) relates that Han Yuandi kept
so many concubines that, in order to select which ones he would favor, he ordered
court artisans to paint a portrait of each.12 Wishing to capture the emperor’s at-
tention, all the concubines but one bribed the artists. Wang Zhaojun, confident of
her own beauty, did not offer a bribe and in consequence was represented as the
ugliest. Later, when the Xiongnu chieftain demanded marriage to one of the Han
emperor’s concubines, Wang Zhaojun was chosen. When Han Yuandi summoned
her to an audience before her departure, he discovered that, to his regret, she was
in fact the most beautiful woman in his palace. Wang Zhaojun became a popular
subject in later Chinese poetry, which focuses not on her beauty but on her re-
sentment at having had to leave her homeland for the cold and desolate barbarian
territory, and on her homesickness. Du Fu’s regulated verse “Thoughts on Histori-
cal Sites, No. 3,” laments her grievance, solitude, and homesickness; it includes
the couplet from which Jiang Kui derived his fourth strophe: “Her spring-wind
face was judged from a painting; / Her spirit in vain returned with her jeweled
waistband on moonlit nights.”13 The second strophe of the first stanza in “Dappled
Shadows” makes explicit the equation between the blossoming plum and a beauty
by an allusion to the other Du Fu poem, “Beautiful Lady.” The third strophe shifts
to Wang Zhaojun’s homesickness while living in the barbarian desert. In the con-
cluding strophe, Jiang Kui imagines that it must be Wang Zhaojun’s spirit that has
come back to the south and transformed itself into the solitary plum blossom. This
equation greatly increases the feelings of solitude and homesickness that have al-
ready been set forth in the third strophe.
Taking the first stanza as a whole, we can say that, on one level, the allusions to
Wang Zhaojun and Du Fu’s “Beautiful Lady” may be metaphorical of Jiang Kui’s
sadness about his own life as a wandering scholar-artist and perhaps point to his
reminiscence about a woman he had been in love with. On another level, the image
of husha (barbarian sands) cannot adequately be interpreted as a mere metaphor
for the poet’s unhappiness. Husha is most often associated in Chinese literature
with the tribal people in the north, who had been a constant threat to the Chi-