Poem No. 2—
Symbolism of the Human Figure
After this example of a poem describing a natural scene that at the same time carries a wealth of subtle nuance, I would like to consider one that presents a situation involving a human figure that also invites an interpretative reading.
To the tune "Butterfly Loves Flowers" ("Tieh lien hua")
Lovely, modest girl of Yen, fifteen years old,
trailing her usual long skirt—
no mincing gait for her.
When she casts a glance, smiling, in the crowd,
the sirens of the world are like dirt.
A single tree in early bloom—
no other term fits,
except the words "as Heaven made it."
The girl there from Wu who boasts of her dancing skill—
too bad the supple waist misleads.[61]
I long considered this song to be an example of a lyric constructed around an invented episode, since it has that nuanced quality with a flavor of symbolism that provokes rich associations, and especially be-
[60] Ibid., p. 170.
[61] Ibid., p. 168.
cause the symbolic figure is consonant with both Wang Kuo-wei's own character and also with the critical ideas he advocated for song writing. I therefore believed that in writing this song Wang Kuo-wei was probably symbolizing himself. In an annotated edition of his songs by Hsiao Ai, however, I recently came across mention of an episode that might underlie the making of this poem. Hsiao Ai writes that he learned from Professor Liu Hui-sun that Wang Kuo-wei composed this song about "a Manchu girl wine-seller";[62] further, that several of the lines were written by his father, Liu Chi-ying, who asked Wang to complete the poem. Liu Hui-sun learned this information from a conversation he overheard between his father and his uncle Lo Chün-mei. Since the sons of Liu Chi-ying and Wang Kuo-wei were married to daughters of Lo Chen-yü, it is quite possible that Liu could have asked Wang to finish a poem he had begun. So this song could also be considered as an example of one written around an actual experience. Wang Kuo-wei himself remarked on the difficulty of distinguishing between a real and an imagined scene: "There is the invented scene and the described scene; it is what distinguishes the idealist and realist schools. But the two are rather difficult to distinguish, for the scene imagined by a great poet is consistent with the natural, and the described scene with the ideal." The song to the tune "Sands of the Washing Stream" dealt with earlier illustrates Wang Kuo-wei's point: there the "perched crows," "pushing open a window," "leaning on the railing," and especially "trying for a line" and "closing the book," are all part of a scene or episode that is taking place and naturally describe something that happened. But when we consider the implications and the subtle suggestions generated, Wang's claim that the scenes described by a great poet also belong to the ideal is confirmed.
Another example, from a song to the same tune,
Striving to ascend the highest peak for a close look at the white moon,
I chanced to open a celestial eye and look down to the red dust:
my own self alas there among those I see,[63]
presents a scene unmistakably drawn from the imagination, but the opening lines of the song could easily belong to the world of experience:
[62] Hsiao Ai, Wang Kuo-wei shih-tz'u chien-chiao (Hunan: Jen-min ch'u-pan-she, 1984), pp. 123–24.
[63] WKWTC , p. 124.
The mountain temple indistinct in the setting sun,
before birds in flight arrive, half the mountain is dark.
These images lack only the immediacy of someone pushing open a window or leaning on a railing, and are worth citing as illustrations of Wang's claim that invented scenes accord with nature.[64]
The song we are presently concerned with can of course be classed with others that simply describe a scene or recount an episode, if we accept Hsiao Ai's account of its origin, but it carries a rich suggestiveness that raises it to the level of an idealized, imagined scene. This can be demonstrated by a line-by-line examination of its imagery and method of presentation. In the first line one can see the dual possibility of a real event or an idealized, imagined one: "Lovely, modest girl of Yen, fifteen years old." In light of Mr. Hsiao's story, this could easily be a Manchu girl wine-seller in Peking (Yen), lovely, modest, and just of that age. While each item lends itself to such a circumstantial reading, there remains oddly enough a flavor of something more, something not simply observed.
First, the narrative voice is impersonal, removing this lovely, modest girl of Yen from the everyday world of human relations and making her an independent aesthetic object. Next, the vocabulary of the song makes use of code words that call up associations with a rich cultural heritage. The expression yao-t'iao (here translated "lovely and modest"), for example, originally appeared in the first poem of the Book of Songs , from which it already carries an aura of antique elegance and the familiarity of long use. At the same time this term has acquired from its heritage several layers of meaning: "good," "lovely," "secluded"; it can apply to beauty of character or of face. The multiple meanings of this first word of Wang Kuo-wei's song incline one already to a symbolical reading of the whole poem. If one were to substitute the unambiguous word mei-li (beautiful), the immediate sense would be the same, the meter would be unchanged, but the effect would be so commonplace and obvious that all trace of symbolism would vanish. So it is clear that the word yao-t'iao was used to generate a symbolic character for this song.
The "girl of Yen" also has long been used in Chinese poetry to stand for a pretty girl, and so is an indefinite term, not applying to a girl from a specific place. The twelfth of the "Nineteen Old Poems" includes the
[64] See my Chia-ling lun tz'u ts'ung-kao , pp. 251–57.
line "In Yen and Chao are many lovely ladies";[65] a poem by Fu Hsüan (217–78) notes that "The women of Yen are lovely, / the girls of Chao are pretty";[66] and in a poem by Liu Hsiao-ch'o (481–539), "In Yen and Chao are many beauties."[67] Obviously "girls from Yen" and "women from Chao" are only general designations that can be applied to beautiful women anywhere. Such expressions go beyond pointing to a specific referent and take on the possibility of a symbolic use.
"Fifteen years old" sounds definite enough to be the factually reported age of the "girl of Yen." But this too is a code word with a long history in Chinese culture. Fifteen is the age at which a girl reaches maturity and can be given in marriage—the time her hair is symbolically pinned up (chi fan ), corresponding to the boy's capping ceremony (chia kuan ).[68] Poets have traditionally used the age fifteen for girls as a symbolical counterpart to the capping age, when a boy becomes a man old enough to take office; thus, Li Shang-yin's "Untitled Poem" begins, "At eight years she stole a look in the mirror,"[69] and follows her preparation for her expected role in life from that moment, when she starts to paint her eyebrows, through learning to dress attractively, until at fourteen she is kept out of sight at home, waiting for a proposal, and then, still not engaged at fifteen, she stands by the garden swing, weeping in the spring wind. Here the disappointed girl is a symbol for the young man who, conscious of his endowments, finds himself unappreciated and passed over among the candidates for public office. So "age fifteen" is a code word with a weight of historical background that lends it symbolical value.
The next couplet also has a dual reading and the potential for multiple meanings:
Trailing her usual long skirt—
no mincing gait for her.
Hsiao Ai explains this as an objective description: these lines tell us that she was wearing a Manchu dress and that she walked naturally, something that could be said of Manchu girls, for they did not have bound feet. This of course fits the reported origin of the poem. But the value of this song lies not in the veracity of the episode it uses but in how effectively it makes use of it, and here again the excellence of these two lines
[65] Wen hsüan (Taipei: Wen-hua t'u-shu kung-ssu, 1975), 29.403.
[66] Fu Hsüan, "Wu Ch'u ko," in Ting Fu-pao, Ch'üan Chin shih , 2.12b.
[67] Liu Hsiao-ch'o, "Ku i," in Ting Fu-pao, Ch'üan Liang shih , 10.20a.
[68] See the "Nei tse" chapter of Li chi , in Shih-san-ching chu-shu , 5:538–39.
[69] "Wu t'i," in Li I-shan shih chi (SPTK ), 1.5.
comes from associations in the mind of the reader. This is achieved, I think, through the obvious contrast between the dissimilar attitudes conveyed by the two phrases "trailing a long skirt" and "a mincing gait." One associates with the former an aristocrat moving easily and with dignity in a long gown, while the latter suggests a delicate, pretty figure. The former belongs to a dignified, self-confident person, the latter to someone anxious to please. This contrast provides the possibility of symbolism, particularly when the first phrase is qualified with the word "usual" or "customary" and the second is negated, "not for her," implying "not like those others," so that in addition to the contrast in attitudes there is also the contrast between what one does and what one does not do, bringing with it an implication of moral character and steadfastness.
In the following lines, "When she casts a glance, smiling, in the crowd, / the sirens of the world are like dirt," the word "smiling" (yen-jan ) occurs in the Sung Yü rhapsody "Lechery of Master Teng-t'u," where it is applied to the charms of the neighbor girl whose single smile was enough to bewilder the whole city.[70] The phrase yen-se ju ch'en-t'u recalls Po Chü-i's (772–846) "Song of Everlasting Sorrow" ("Ch'ang hen ko"), where the palace ladies lose their looks (wu yen-se ) when Yang Kuei-fei turns her head and with a single smile reveals her manifold charms,[71] and Ch'en Hung's "Story of the Song of Everlasting Sorrow" ("Ch'ang-hen chuan"), which adds that "their beauty was like dirt" ( fen-se ju t'u ).[72] Such associations take us beyond the simple description of the beauty of the Manchu wine-seller of the anecdote.
In Chinese literary history there has long been a tradition of using a beautiful woman as the symbol for a man of virtue or for oneself so considered, beginning with Ch'ü Yüan's "Li-sao." The words "cast a glance" (t'ung i ku ) in this song earlier appeared in a poem, "Fang-ko hsing," by the poet Ch'en Shih-tao (1052–1102):
The spring breeze on Everlasting Lane where the beauty, confined,
has long brought undeserved fame to the green houses.
She might raise the curtain to cast a glance outside
but fears that he would not get a good look.[73]
[70] "Teng-t'u-tzu hao se fu," in Wen hsüan , 25.253.
[71] Chou Shu-jen [Lu Hsün], ed., T'ang Sung ch'uan-ch'i chi (Peking: Wen-hsüeh ku-chi k'an-hsing-she, 1956), p. 115.
[72] Ibid., p. 111. Ch'en Hung was a contemporary of Po Chü-i; he served as a chu-k'o lang-chung (Director of the Bureau of Receptions) during the reign of Emperor Te-tsung (780–804).
[73] Hou-shan shih ch'ao , in Lü Liu-liang, Wu Chih-chen, and Wu Tzu-mu, eds., Sung shih ch'ao (Taipei: Shih-chieh shu-chü, 1962), 1.31a. "Everlasting Lane" was where palace ladies in disgrace were confined.
That Ch'en Shih-tao was using the neglected palace lady allegorically was noted by his contemporary and mentor Huang T'ing-chien (1045–1105), who is quoted as having remarked disparagingly of this poem, "Lingering over his own reflection, he is too much of a show-off."[74] If we are reminded of Ch'en Shih-tao's poem as we read Wang Kuo-wei's, the potential for an allegorical meaning naturally increases, particularly so when the phrase "casts a glance" comes after "in the crowd," first setting the lovely girl in contrast to all others, and then in the next line placing her far above all the other beauties in the world and translating her into the highest imaginable realm.
Given the strong possibility of such a reading, there remains the question of how the symbol of a beautiful woman is to be taken. She could stand for the poet himself. I have already suggested a reason for such an interpretation: the poem begins by taking the figure of the woman impersonally, as an aesthetic object, like the girl in the Li Shang-yin poem, and here too she could be a symbol for the poet himself. Likewise, in Ch'en Shih-tao's allegory, a palace lady failed to get the favor of her lord; now that she lives shut up in Everlasting Lane, her beauty hidden out of sight, ordinary women's looks gain an undeserved praise. And even though this beauty does not regret her loss of position and, rolling up the curtain, shows her face, it is to be feared that no one will recognize or appreciate her outstanding beauty. In this poem the beautiful woman certainly stands for the poet himself.
Finally, in some of Wang Kuo-wei's own songs lovely ladies do symbolize the poet,[75] so such a reading here is in line with his tastes and practice. Thus, there are many reasons for believing that Wang Kuo-wei was presenting his own situation through the figure of the woman.
Interestingly enough, however, the suggestion implicit in these lines could also apply to something other than the poet. In the first place, the lovely girl presented as an aesthetic object could easily stand for any ideal of beauty in the poet's mind. And if we take Wang Kuo-wei's phrase "casts a glance" without reference to Ch'en Shih-tao's poem, the phrase could just as well apply to an observer, one who was a part of the crowd but who perceives the extraordinary beauty of the girl: just
[74] Wang Chih-fang shih-hua , in Kuo Shao-yü, ed., Sung shih-hua chi-i, Yen-ching hsüeh-pao chuan-hao , 14 (Peiping: Harvard Yenching Institute, 1937), 1.57.
[75] "Yü mei-jen," in WKWTC , p. 30; and "Tieh lien hua," in WKWTC , p. 178.
when she looked, smiling, she caught his eye, and from this momentary exchange of glances, all other women of the world were as dust to him. Such an occurrence could symbolize some precious and exalted ideal in the mind.
Furthermore, Wang Kuo-wei often expressed such ideas in his other songs, where a sudden moment of philosophical insight comes unawares. For example, "the solitary chime from up above" and "climbing the high peak for a glimpse of the white moon"[76] and "the nearby fairy mountains with the towers and pavilions visible from afar"[77] —these all belong to a kind of exalted, imagined realm of which one catches only a glimpse. So it is clear that taking something other than the poet as the thing symbolized yields a reading compatible with the spiritual goal Wang Kuo-wei was preoccupied with.
So much for the possibilities of interpretation offered by the first stanza. The second offers fewer ambiguities.
A single tree in early bloom—
no other term fits,
except the words "as Heaven made it."
These lines are a paean to natural beauty. Read in terms of the anecdote, they would apply to the unadorned beauty of the Manchu wineseller, but even such straightforward verses have in fact the potential for symbolism. One comes to this stanza with expectations developed in the first stanza with its aura of symbolism and finds in the burgeoning tree bursting with flowers an obvious symbol for beauty, one that need not be restricted to a woman's good looks, and indeed there is here no direct mention of a person. What is praised is natural, unadorned beauty, something Wang Kuo-wei repeatedly found occasion to commend as a characteristic of the songs he admired. Even Hsiao Ai, to whom we owe the anecdotal reference, remarks, "Through this song we can catch a glimpse of Ching-an's [Wang Kuo-wei's] aesthetic views. When he writes about song lyrics, he strongly praises the natural and genuine, and in discussing the good qualities of Yüan opera he also writes, 'To sum it up in a word, natural is all,' and, 'Lack of makeup and careless dress still cannot hide an outstanding beauty.' 'Heaven-given' says it all." And T'ien Chih-tou in his commentary on Wang Kuo-wei's songs also says of this song, "This healthy, beautiful girl of the north made a deep impression on the poet. 'Heaven-given' is the aesthetic standard for Wang. 'The lotus emerging from clear water, Heaven-given, dis-
[76] "Huan hsi sha," in WKWTC , p. 124.
[77] "Tieh lien hua," in WKWTC , p. 36.
penses with ornament'—this is the natural excellence given highest praise in his song lyric criticism. . . . This song could be read as a piece of tz'u criticism."[78]
While noticing the possibility of an allegorical reading of these lines, both Hsiao and T'ien believe that it is primarily the description of the girl of the anecdote, and that Wang Kuo-wei merely associated his concept of beauty in the song lyric with the girl's beauty. I think it is not only the quality of "Heaven-given" that is common to the beauty of the girl and what he advocated as an ideal for the lyric; rather, every line of the song is a part of the symbolism. These three lines praise Heaven-given beauty, but we must take them in the context of the following lines: "The girl there from Wu who boasts of her dancing skill—/ too bad the supple waist misleads," and notice the implied invidious contrast between the "girl from Wu" and the girl of Yen who embodies that beauty. Taken together, it becomes apparent that "Heaven-given" and "dancing skill" represent yet another contrast in character, besides the one already noticed in the first stanza, between "trailing a long skirt" and "mincing gait." There Wang Kuo-wei was already comparing two kinds of beauty, and using them symbolically. In this case the contrast becomes stronger when we recall the sort of associations one has with dancing skill as it comes up in traditional Chinese poetry, where it suggests obsequious behavior—as in Hsin Ch'i-chi's (1140–1207) song to the tune "The Boy Tickles the Fish" ("Mo yü erh"):
Don't dance—
don't you see,
Yü-huan and Fei-yen are both turned to dust?[79]
Wang Kuo-wei's "too bad the supple waist misleads" makes his negative view of dancing skill even more obvious.
The Heaven-given beauty that Wang praises is not only consonant with his ideal of beauty in song lyrics, it also symbolizes his ideal of human character and conduct. If we look back at the whole poem, we will see that the entire text of this song not only lends itself to a symbolical interpretation, the meaning and structure of the symbol, too, are completely consistent with this dual interpretation.
[78] WKWTC , p. 168.
[79] Hsin Ch'i-chi, Chia-hsüan tz'u pien-nien chien-chu (Shanghai: Ku-tien wen-hsüeh ch'u-pan-she, 1968), 1.52.
I am not of course denying the possibility of a straightforward reading of the text in terms of the reported anecdote, but it is worth emphasizing that even those song lyrics of Wang's that are presented as descriptive of real events frequently contain the suggestion of a deeper, subtler reading, resulting in what is essentially a created scene. As Wang Kuo-wei himself said in the statement cited earlier, "The scenes [a great poet] describes also approach the ideal," and "whether tz'u is refined or vulgar comes from the spirit, not what appears on the surface." This song can be taken as an illustration of these poetic principles.