The Collected Poems of Li He

by Li He

  In 814 he gave up his post—whether voluntarily or not we do not know—and returned to his estate in Chang-gu (modern Yi-yang), a place to which he was deeply attached. Chang-gu has never found its way into the gazetteers; but all commentators agree that it was located in Fu-chang county, some fifty miles west of Luo-yang. Its proximity to the Eastern capital, still a major centre of intellectual life, explains how he managed to acquire his early education. The district was mountainous, thickly wooded, and fertile. He’s family estate, though run-down and dilapidated, could not have been quite as poor as his sense of literary convention would have us believe, nor limited to “a weed-grown patch of stony ground.” In his long poem, Chang-gu, he celebrates the tranquil beauty of the countryside and the honest simplicity of its people in some of his most delicately-wrought verse:

  Paddy fields at Chang-gu, in the fifth month,

  A shimmer of green covers the level water.

  Distant hills rise towering, crag on crag.

  Precarious greenery, fearful of falling.

  Dazzling and pure, no thoughts of autumn yet,

  A cool wind from afar ruffles this beauty.

  The bamboos’ fragrance fills this lonely place,

  Each powdered node is streaked with emerald.

  The long-haired grass lets fall its mournful tresses,

  A bright dew weeps, shedding its secret tears.

  Tall trees from a bright and winding tunnel,

  A scented track where fading reds sway drunkenly.

  Swarms of insects etch the ancient willows,

  Cicadas cry from high sequestered spots.

  Long sashes of yellow arrowroot trail the ground,

  Purple rushes criss-cross narrow shores.

  Stones coined with moss lie strewn about in heaps,

  Plump leaves are growing in glossy clusters.

  Level and white are the wave-washed sands,

  Where horses stand, printing dark characters.

  At evening, fishes dart around joyfully,

  Alone, lean crane stands stock-still in the dusk.

  Down in their damp, mole-crickets chirp away.

  A muted spring wells up with startled splash…

  Reed-shoots are peering from the cinnabar pond.

  Ripples and eddies sport with sky’s reflection,

  The hands of ancient junipers grasp the clouds.

  The mournful moon is curtained with red roses,

  Thorns of fragrant creeper catch the clouds.

  The bearded wheat lies level for hundreds of leagues,

  On the untilled acres stand a thousand shops.

  This man from Cheng-ji, restless and fretful,

  Would like to emulate Master Wine-sack’s ways.

  The last couplet in this long nostalgic poem, which he wrote while in Chang-an, means simply that he would like nothing better than to emulate Fan Li, the great statesman who retired into obscurity after saving the state of Yueh from its enemies. He, however, had no hope of ever rising to any office even remotely approaching Fan Li’s. Furthermore, however alluring the idea of a life in the country may have seemed from the capital, he soon found that the prospect of retirement for life as an invalid at the age of twenty-three was not to be seriously contemplated, in spite of the idyllic days he would seem to have spent in his rural retreat:

  Lying on river sand softly sleeping

  Two ducks in the sun.

  l punt my little skiff slowly past

  The winding shores.

  Magnolias steeped in wine

  Covered with pepper-leaves.

  Friends help the sick man to his feet

  To plant water-chestnut.

  Living among the crumbling splendours of this ruined, noble estate must have been unbearable for him, as was the knowledge that the household depended largely on his efforts to maintain them. So after some months of sickness and enforced idleness in Chang-gu, he was once again in search of an official post. For some time past he had been seriously contemplating abandoning a civil career for a military one, as is apparent from several of the verses in his Thirteen Poems from My Southern Garden:

  Better to go and buy a sword

  From Ruo-ye river,

  Come back at dawn next day to serve

  The Monkey Duke.

  Why shouldn’t a young man wear a Wu sword?

  He could win back fifty provinces in pass and mountain.

  Over twenty years of incessant study had brought him nothing except hardship and disappointment. What use was a poet in such a war-torn age?

  Seeking a style, culling my phrases,

  Grown old carving grubs!

  At dawn the moon hangs in my blinds,

  A bow of jade.

  Can’t you see what is going on, year after year,

  By the sea of Liao-dong?

  Whatever can a writer do

  But weep in the autumn wind?

  These lines reveal his dilemma only too clearly. As a disciple of Han Yu’s he shared his master’s firm conviction that literature ought to play an important social role, that the poet was the guardian of the conscience of society. Yet all his endeavours to aid his country with his poetic talents had come to nothing. In fact, his outspoken, satirical poems attacking the abuses of the time had almost certainly blocked his chances of promotion if not actually removed him from office. What then was left to him except to seek service with some military governor or other in an outlying province? He could then both serve his country and at the same time further his own ambitions. Once he had established his reputation in such a post, he could return to work for the central government again, just as Han Yu himself had done in his youth. Far better to take office under the roughest of military commands in some distant border region than to starve in aristocratic poverty and idleness in Chang-gu:

  Not yet thirty but still turned twenty,

  Hungry in bright sunshine, living on leaves.

  Old man on the bridge! Feel sorry for me

  And give me a book on the art of war!

  Fortunately for He, his friend Zhang Che, pupil and relative of Han Yu, was at that time in the service of Xi Shi-mei, a general still loyal to the emperor and commanding an army in Lu-zhou (Shanxi). Since the rebellion of An Lu-shan (A.D. 755) the central government had been gradually losing power to the provincial military governors. The Emperor Xian-zong (regnet 805–20) had attempted to arrest the decline of the dynasty by bringing these military satraps under the rule of the Chang-an regime. This involved the launching of a number of costly punitive expeditions against those governors who flatly refused to come to heel when called. The most notable of these was Wang Cheng-zong, who could not be compelled to return to allegiance until 818, in spite of the numerous campaigns directed against him. Xi Shi-mei’s army, along with those of five other commanders, was at that time (814) all set to wage a protracted struggle against Wang’s forces in Hebei. Hence He must have felt that by putting himself at the service of this general he was directly contributing to the restoration of dynastic greatness. In the autumn of 814 He set out from Chang-gu, heading northeast as he made for Lu-zhou. Several of the poems he wrote while on this journey have been preserved, among them the magnificent Song of an Arrowhead from Chang-ping, a poem which proves that poverty, sickness, and misfortune had, if anything, enhanced his poetic powers:

  Flakes of lacquer, dust of bones,

  Red cinnabar,

  The ancient blood once spurted forth

  And bore bronze flowers.

  White feathers and its metal stems

  Have rotted in the rain,

  Only the three spines still remain,

  Broken teeth of a wolf.

  I searched this plain of battle

  With a pair of nags,

  In stony fields east of the post-station,

  On a weed-grown hill.

  An endless wind, the day short,

  Desolate stars,

  Black banners of damp clouds,

  Hung in void night.


  Souls to the left, spirits to the right,

  Gaunt with hunger, wailing,

  I poured curds from my tilted flask,

  Offered roast mutton.

  Insects silent, the wild geese sick,

  Reed shoots reddening.

  A whirlwind came to see me off,

  Blowing the ghost fires…

  This poem with its insistent images of death and war, ghosts and sickness, gives us a disquieting glimpse of He’s state of mind as he pushed north through that bitter autumn towards the garrison town that was to be his home for the next three years.

  We know nothing of his life in Lu-zhou, but can only guess at what it must have been like from the few poems written during this period that have come down to us. From the length of time he was there, it is clear that he must have found a post on Xi Shi-mei’s staff. Xi’s forces were very active in the campaign against Wang Cheng-zong, so it seems likely that He saw something of the actual fighting. Life in a military border-town, in the thick of a campaign, must have made both the hectic pleasures of Chang-an and the quiet happiness of Chang-gu seem as remote as a fading dream. Two of his poems written at this time draw a vivid picture of life in a northern frontier post:

  Barbarian horns have summoned the north wind,

  Thistle Gate is whiter than a stream!

  The road to Green Sea vanishes into the sky,

  Along the Wall, a thousand moonlit miles.

  While dew falls drizzling on our flags,

  Cold metal clangs the watches of the night,

  Barbarian armour meshes serpent scales,

  Horses whinny where Green Grave gleams white…

  Even more powerful than these evocative verses is the poem Under the Walls of Ping City:

  Hungry and cold, under Ping City’s walls,

  Night after night we guard the shining moon.

  Our farewell swords have lost their sheen,

  The Gobi wind cuts through our temple-hair.

  Endless desert merges with white void,

  But see—far off—the red of Chinese banners,

  In their black tents they’re blowing short flutes,

  Mist and haze soaking their painted dragons.

  At twilight, up there on the city walls,

  We stare into the shadows of those walls,

  The wind is blowing, stirring dead tumbleweed,

  Our starving horses whinny within the walls.

  “Just ask the builders of these walls

  How many thousand leagues from the Pass we are?

  Rather than go home as bundled corpses

  We’ll turn our lances on ourselves and die.”

  Verse like this, sober, taut and bare, harking back to the ballad tradition and the concept of poetry as a vehicle for social criticism, is a long way removed from the ornate verse He had composed in Chang-an. Yet in what may well be his last poem, written as he lay sick in Chang Che’s house in Lu-zhou, he evokes once again the strangeness which so distinguished his earlier verse, marries it to the simplicity of his Lu-zhou poems, and achieves a deeply moving masterpiece which must rank among his finest creations.

  Only when autumn comes to Zhao-guan,

  Will you know how cold it is up here in Zhao.

  I tied this letter to a short-feathered summons,

  Cut out a long screed for a recital of woes.

  Through the clear dawn I slumbered in my sickness,

  While the sparse plane-trees cast fresh emeralds down.

  The city crows cried from white battlements,

  Military bugles saddened the mist in the reeds.

  With turban askew, I lifted the silken curtains,

  In dried-up pools the broken lotus lay.

  On the wooden window, traces of silver pictures,

  On the stone steps, water had left its coins.

  The traveller’s wine caught at my ailing lungs,

  While songs of parting rose from languid strings.

  I sealed this poem with a double string of tears,

  And culled a single orchid wet with dew.

  The sedge is growing old, the cricket weeping.

  While broken gargoyles peer from withered pines.

  Waking, I sit astride a horse from Yan,

  Dreaming, I voyage on a boat through Chu.

  Pepper and cinnamon poured above long mats!

  Perch and bream sliced up on tortoise-shell!

  Surely you can’t forget the homeward road,

  To spend your youth on river-girdled isles?

  Verse of this quality, written when he was only twenty-five or so, makes one realize just how great a loss literature sustained by his untimely death. For at this juncture he was very near the end. We do not know precisely from what disease he was suffering, though repeated references to his emaciated condition in his verse, combined with other symptoms—his prematurely white hair, his fever, and his weakness—would seem to indicate pulmonary tuberculosis. An ancient source (Yun xian za ji) carries the story of a visitor who saw our poet “spit on the floor three times” while composing three poems, which is perhaps another indication that he was suffering from consumption. In any case, the disease that had haunted him for years was now pressing the attack home for the last time. He gave up his post in Lu-zhou and returned to Chang-gu, where he died sometime during the year 816, at the age of 26 or so. He left behind him a corpus of verse which, strangely enough, has not enjoyed widespread popularity in China since the Song dynasty. The standard anthology of Tang verse, Tang shi san-bai shou (Three Hundred Tang Poems), which was compiled in Qing times and is familiar to every Chinese schoolboy, does not include a single poem of his. Until quite recently he was comparatively little read, though modern critics, Chinese, Japanese, and European, are paying him increasing attention. So the last twenty years or so have witnessed the appearance of several important new editions of his poems in Chinese, as well as three Japanese translations. In addition, there have been numerous Japanese studies of He’s life and poetry as well as no less than five doctoral theses on him submitted to American or Australian universities.

  The reason for the comparative neglect of He evinced by traditional Chinese scholarship—a couple of dozen studies in twelve hundred years—is not difficult to ascertain. If Chinese culture—to borrow Nietzsche’s terminology—is essentially Apollonian, He’s verse is essentially Dionysian. The only other poet writing in Chinese whose verse seems at all akin to He’s is, significantly enough, the Manchu poet Singde (1655–1685), who had been shaped by a shamanistic culture. There is a wild, exotic air about He’s poetry which the Chinese mind finds distasteful, an air which has only sporadically made its appearance in Chinese literature since the Chu Ci, those Songs of the South from which He so clearly drew his inspiration. There is an air of romantic extravagance about his lines which is quite unmistakable.

  Straddling a tiger, the Prince of Qin

  Roams the Eight Poles.

  His glittering sword lights up the sky,

  Heaven turns sapphire.

  Ix and He whip up the sun

  With the sound of glass….

  Jade from Mount Kun is shattered,

  Phoenixes shriek.

  Lotuses are weeping dew,

  Fragrant orchids smile….

  The West’s White King was struck with fear

  When it was drawn,

  His demon Mother wailing loudly

  In the autumn wilds.

  Lines like these carry the imprint of He’s unique style, bearing a strangeness of tone which led an eleventh-century critic to dub him “the demon-poet.” “Weird,” “astonishing,” and “demonic” are all adjectives frequently applied to his verse. Zhou Chi-zhi remarked: “Li Chang-ji’s language is astonishing, verging on the weird,” while Yen Yu, a Song dynasty critic, asserted that He “used the language of a demonic immortal.” One does not have to search very far before coming across scores of lines which bear out this remark.

  The Blue Lion kowtows and c
alls

  To the Palace Spirits.

  With a fearful howl the Dog of Jade

  Opens Heaven’s gates….

  On an autumn grave a ghost sits chanting

  That poem of Bao’s.

  A thousand years in earth makes emerald jade

  That rancorous blood.

  Blue racoons are weeping blood

  As shivering foxes die….

  Owls that have lived a hundred years,

  Turned forest demons,

  Laugh wildly as an emerald fire

  Leaps from their nests.

  A white fox barking at the moon,

  The mountain wind….

  No wonder that one ancient critic remarked that “His ideas are original and his language extravagantly beautiful.”

  The quality of imagination displayed in the stanzas just quoted is rare in any poetic tradition, let alone in Chinese verse where what one might call the “shamanistic style” has only sporadically appeared.

  …In the west are the Moving Sands stretching

  endlessly on and on,

  And beasts with heads like swine, slanting

  eyes and shaggy hair,

  Long claws and serrated teeth and

  wild, mad laughter….

  …I lashed the Wind God and made him

  ride before me

  Imprisoned the Dark Spirit in the Pit of Night

  Verses like these last—selected almost at random from David Hawkes’s fine translation of the Chu Ci—had their origin in a culture where shamans were employed to call down spirits by means of music, dancing, and incantations.

  Female shamans—or “witches,” as we might call them today—were widely employed during Tang, not only by the gentry but by the royal house. Exorcism was generally carried out by shamans, who were considered to have greater powers in these rites than Taoist priests, who for their part often assumed the role of shamans. He has several poems describing shamanistic ceremonies, written with an immediacy which indicates his personal experience with such ritual.