The Collected Poems of Li He

by Li He

  A lady-general leads our Chinese soldiers.

  A dainty kerchief tucked into her quiver.

  She’s not ashamed of her heavy, gold seal,

  Mincing along with bow-case at her waist.

  Simple old men, just honest villagers,

  Tested the teeth of arrow-barbs last night,

  But she sent her courier to cry victory—

  Must powder and mascara blind us all!

  Such satire must have caused a minor sensation in Chang-an and perhaps even played a part in finally forcing the emperor to dismiss Tu-tu Cheng-cui from his command of the Armies of the Divine Plan on charges of bribery.

  Xian-zong’s restoration of the empire was highly successful. By the end of his reign he had not only subdued the rebellious provinces of Huai-xi and Ping-lu but had firmly established the imperial power throughout China in a way that had not been seen since the dynasty was at its height. But such successes were accomplished at considerable cost. Not only was the country in turmoil, with prominent officials falling victim to hired assassins in the capital itself, but the extensive military campaigns necessary to restore order placed a heavy burden of taxation on the peasantry, while conscription into the army added to their hardships.

  Li He was deeply concerned at the abuses he saw around him and wrote a number of poems to record his indignation. It is difficult at this remove for us to estimate just how many of the poems are to be understood as satires. The commentator Yao Wen-xie ascribes satirical intent to almost every verse He wrote, but this, of course, is an exaggeration. However, it is fair to assume that a great many poems which appear innocuous enough now would have been read as satires by He’s contemporaries. Perhaps something like 20 percent of the verse, at a conservative estimate, can even now reasonably be labelled satirical, though half the time we can never be sure just what target he is aiming at. In any case, it is certain that his involvement with the New Ballad Movement must not be underestimated. Bo Ju-yi (772–846) and Yuan Zhen had both come to the conclusion that “the duty of literature is to be of service to the writer’s generation: that of poetry to influence public affairs.” This conviction was a revival of an ancient belief, dating back to The Classic of Poetry and the Songs of Chu, that the poet was the social conscience of his time. To ensure the widest possible circulation for their work, Bo and Yuan cast their criticisms of existing abuses into ballad form. These ballads, which enjoyed as much vogue as the popular songs of our own time, were songs with a message. As Bo puts it in the preface to his own collection of fifty ballads:

  [These songs] are concerned with ideas, not with fine phrases….This was the principle behind the three hundred poems [of The Classic of Poetry]….Their style is smooth and flowing, so they can easily be played and sung. In short, they have been written for the emperor, for his ministers, for the people….They have not been written simply for art’s sake.

  This manifesto of Bo’s may be considered as the inception of the New Ballad Movement. Bo and Yuan were soon joined by a number of other writers—Li Shen, Meng Jiao, Zhang Ji, and Han Yu among them—who were all concerned in some degree with the use of verse as a vehicle for social criticism. Strictly speaking, the New Ballad had to conform to the criteria Bo Ju-yi himself adopted. It had to be simple in expression—Bo is said to have tried out all his poems on an old maidservant, deleting anything she could not understand—and conform to the ballad form, while revealing sympathy for the plight of the common people. The poetry, in fact, was in the pity. He has comparatively few ballads which meet all these requirements, for he was influenced more by the Li Sao tradition (the greatest poem of the Songs of Chu) than by The Classic of Poetry, and the Li Sao, though critical of governmental abuses, was ornate and highly obscure. Nevertheless, he would certainly have subscribed to Empson’s dictum:

  Politics are what verse should

  Not fly from, or it goes all wrong.

  Furthermore, he did write a few ballads which fulfill all the criteria laid down by Bo Ju-yi and yet carry his own inimitable stamp, as in the following song describing the miseries of the jade-gatherers, who had taken to this dangerous work to save themselves and their families from starvation:

  On rainy nights, on the ridge of a hill,

  He sups on hazel-nuts,

  Like blood that wells from a cuckoo’s maw

  The old man’s tears.

  The waters of Indigo River are gorged

  With human lives;

  Men dead a thousand years

  Still loathe these torrents.

  Though apparently simple, analysis reveals this to be a far more complex and intricately structured poem than anything Bo Ju-yi ever wrote. In modern terms, we can discern within this verse something of that peculiar tension between symbolism and naturalism manifest in the work of so many writers of our own century. But I shall come back to this point later. For the moment we shall simply note that the poem makes its point dramatically and effectively and must certainly be ranked as a ballad of social protest squarely in the tradition.

  In another poem he satirizes greedy officials whose depredations have stripped whole districts of their natural resources.

  He-pu has no more shining pearls,

  Lung-zhou has no more “wooden slaves.”

  Enough to show us that the powers of Nature

  Can never meet officialdom’s demands.

  The wives of Yue had not begun their weaving,

  Silkworms of Wu had just started wriggling about,

  When a district official came riding on his horse,

  He’d a wicked face, a curly purple beard.

  Now in his robe he carried a square tablet,

  And on this tablet several lines were written.

  “If it were not for the Magistrate’s anger,

  Would I have come in person to your house?”

  More dangerous than his attacks on governmental oppression were his scarcely veiled satires on Emperor Xian-zong’s quest for immortality through Taoist arts—a quest which was eventually to result in his death. Taoists believed that with the aid of the proper drugs, life could be lengthened almost indefinitely. Since most of these drugs were highly toxic preparations of gold, arsenic, lead, mercury, and like substances, it is hardly surprising to learn that those who sought immortality the most assiduously were frequently those who departed this life the most precipitately. As early as 810, the Emperor had evinced considerable interest in elixirs of immortality, much to the disapproval of his minister, Li Fan, who had given him a stern lecture on the folly of putting one’s faith in Taoist magicians. This seems to have had little effect on Xian-zong’s ardour, for by 819 we find him swallowing drugs daily and so becoming more and more bad-tempered and thirsty, as well as showing increasing signs of mental instability, a process which continued until his demise the following year. It is still unclear as to whether he died of an overdose of elixir or was poisoned by Chen Hong-zhi, one of the palace eunuchs, for reasons which still remain obscure.

  Several writers attempted to remonstrate with the emperor on this subject, though to do so was really “to run up against the dragon’s scales,” since this was a topic on which he was notoriously short-tempered. Han Yu himself, who had merely alluded indirectly to the subject in his well-known memorial on the Buddha’s bone, only narrowly escaped death for his indiscretion. Bo Ju-yi, Meng Jiao, and other poets preferred to couch their protests in the form of verse gibing at the vain quest for immortality undertaken by previous emperors such as Qin Shi Huang-di, Emperor Wu of Han, and Emperor Wen of Wei. He himself has a large number of poems on this subject, so many in fact that one wonders how he escaped punishment, for he was undoubtedly running a risk by circulating songs dealing with such a topic.

  Why should we swallow yellow gold,

  Or eat white jade?

  Who is Ren Gong-zi

  Riding a white donkey through the clouds?

  Liu Che lies in the Mao-ling tomb,

  Just a pile of bones.

&
nbsp; Ying Zheng lies in his catalpa coffin—

  What a waste of abalone!

  By eating cinnabar you may become

  A serpent riding a white mist,

  A thousand-year-old turtle in a well of jade.

  Can’t you see yourself transformed to snake or turtle

  For twenty centuries,

  Dragging your life out, year after year,

  On the grass-green dikes of Wu?

  Eight trigrams on your back,

  Blazoned “Immortal,”

  Your cunning scales,

  Your stubborn armour

  Slimed with a fishy spittle!

  The bizarre imagery of the second poem which transforms an emperor into a stubborn and cunning reptile, “slimed with a fishy spittle,” reminds us that He was a disciple not just of Han Yu, whose style resembles that displayed in this poem, but of the great Du Fu, who once remarked: “Not even death would stop me from trying to startle my readers.” We should remember that the period in which He was writing was one of literary reform based on the principle of “return to antiquity” (fu gu). Han Yu, who was Li He’s patron, had already established a reputation for verse in the “antique” style, so it is hardly surprising to find that He avoids the Regulated Verse, with its fixed lengths and rigid tone-patterns, and writes most of his poems either in the freer Ancient Verse, in both its five-syllable and seven-syllable forms, or in Irregular Verse with lines of mixed length. He did this because of the greater freedom to express himself and “startle his readers” afforded by these verse forms. As Wang Shi-zhen (1526–90) observed: “Li Chang-ji follows the dictates of his heart so that his poems often sound strange, while he also has lines that surprise his readers.”

  Such poetic power springs from great artifice. As one Chinese critic remarked: “Li He’s poetry is like the art of jade-carving; not a single word but has been refined a hundred times. This is really the product of work that made him ‘vomit out his heart.’ ” His insistent craftsmanship is reminiscent of the French Parnassiens for whom:

  L’oeuvre sort plus belle

  D’une forme au travail rebelle,

  Vers, marbre, onyx, émail.

  His language often possesses a Keatsian sumptuousness, every rift loaded with ore, a Keatsian “devotion to the intensity imbedded within the concrete,” giving his lines “a heavy richness, a slow, clogged—almost drugged—movement, a choked-in fullness…which gives him strength with all his luxury and keeps his sensuousness firm and vital.” These lines, originally written of Keats, are applicable to a great deal of He’s concinnous verse.

  Comparatively few of He’s poems have the directness and simplicity of the poems quoted above. In fact, his verse on the whole is notoriously difficult and enigmatic. If, as Hugo Friedrich maintains, one of the chief characteristics of modern Western poetry is its obscurity, then Li He is in this respect a very modern poet. It has been alleged that Browning was the first poet to have been criticised for his obscurity, though surely Sordello is a much less recondite work than Shakespeare’s The Phoenix and the Turtle. But Li He was criticised for his wilful obscurity over a thousand years before Browning first set pen to paper. “Li He’s poems cannot be read without a commentary” is an old literary saw which may help to explain why, even in this translation, I have been compelled to include copious notes. His poems, like those of his younger contemporary, Li Shang-yin (813–858) present special difficulties, above those normally occurring in Tang verse, for a number of reasons. Firstly, his poems have an innate logic of their own which, to the unsuspecting reader, often appears lacking of logic. Take, for example, the song Gossamer:

  In the aging leaves of weeping-willows,

  Orioles feed their young,

  The gossamer is vanishing,

  Yellow bees go home.

  Black-haired young men, and girls

  With golden hairpins,

  From goblets, powder-blue, are quaffing

  A liquid amber.

  Twilight over flower-decked terraces,

  Spring says goodbye,

  Fallen blossoms rise and dance

  To eddying airs.

  Elm-tree seeds now lie so thick

  They can’t be counted,

  Young Shen’s green money strewn along

  Our city roads!

  This seems, at first glance, to be no more than a loosely-linked collection of images illustrating spring. However, as one critic, Lin Guo-yuan, has astutely pointed out, the poem actually renders the feelings of an aging courtesan for whom the spring is but a reminder of another passing year. The weeping-willow is an accepted symbol for a prostitute in Chinese verse. Its “aging leaves,” coupled with the images of an oriole feeding its young, suggest that she is lamenting that she has no child of her own although she is growing old. “Gossamer” again suggests her vanishing youth, here contrasted with the “black-haired young men” who have now found younger company. As spring fades, so does her youth. Try as she may to hold back the years, she is but a fallen blossom, now discarded, dancing vainly in the twilight. She has squandered her youth as recklessly as the elm-tree seeds which litter the ground, seeds which suggest the money she has earned and spent in her prodigal pursuit of pleasure. This is a delicately subtle poem which achieves its effects with economy. At one level it may be read simply as an impressionistic picture of a late spring day; its deeper meaning only emerges on careful examination. Hence its apparent lack of structure and logic is illusory, for the poem is tightly organised and structurally compact, to the point of density.

  He’s imagination is neither rhetorical nor yet dramatic; it is purely visual. He sees things in flashes, apparently disconnectedly, so that in this respect his work may be less puzzling to modern readers, whose eyes have been trained by years of television and cinema, than it was to his traditional audience. His technique is undoubtedly connected with the method of composition described in his biographies, in which he would jot down lines and phrases as they occurred to him and then piece them together like a mosaic on his return home. As a result of this, some of his long poems, like Chang-gu and She Steals My Heart tend to break down into disparate shots in which the inner unity that should bind them has been lost. In cinematic terms, He’s camera—work—whether black-and-white or colour—is always brilliant. It is his montages that sometimes fail him.

  It is this technique that has led some of his modern commentators like Arai Ken and Seto Yasuo to complain that He jumps about in time and space, keeps changing his subject, and in general lacks unity. Seto objects that the lines of some of the poems are disjointed and quite lacking in temporal, spatial, or logical connections. Quite often, as in the poem quoted above, He’s critics are wrong, for they have failed to descry the innate logic of his verse. Even when their criticisms are just, however, we should note that this disconnectedness, allied as it is to the crossfade technique of our cinematic arts, is yet another instance of He’s modernity, being characteristic of much modern verse, an anticipation of the Bergsonian flux of twentieth-century art. It is this disparateness which has led Qian Zhong-shu to remark that He’s poetry resembles the shifting sands of the desert—a desert which, I might add, has deterred many who might have wished to cross it.

  Other difficulties confront the reader, not least among them the density of the verse. He’s favourite measure is the seven-syllable line, which he packs with subjects and verbs, often in compound form, and crams with attributives. This syntactical density, taken in conjunction with a use of trope hitherto unparalleled in Chinese poetry—metonymy, synecdoche, hyperbole, periphrasis, personification, simile, metaphors, and conceit—at times renders his verse peculiarly recalcitrant to both the reader and the translator. Yet, paradoxically, in spite of its density, his verse gives an impression of swiftness and lightness, as Qian Zhong-shu has pointed out: “Though each individual element of his poetry is stagnant, weighty, hard and solid, the movement of the verse as a whole is swift, speedy and volatile. Individually, each word seems sta
gnant and heavy, while collectively they float airily….” Classical Chinese, whether poetry or prose, is characterised by parataxis, a figure of rhetoric which signifies the placing of two terms in juxtaposition without expressing a grammatical or logical connection between them. Like all Chinese poets Li He is fond of employing this device, generally in the form of metaphor. C. Day Lewis’s epigram: “We find poetic truth struck out by the collision rather than the collusion of images” (The Poetic Image, 1947) is certainly applicable to Li He, whose high poetic energy expresses itself characteristically through brilliant parataxis.

  “Leaves on the lotus pool, numberless green coins:

  The fragrant sweat that soaks them, jewels of grain.”

  “Windy tong trees, lutes in jasper cases,

  Fire-flies’ stars, envoys to Brocade City.”

  “Bamboo quiver, short flutes playing.”

  “Blood that wells from a cuckoo’s maw,

  The old man’s tears.”

  “Tamarisk faces half-asleep,

  The Premier’s trees.”

  When one half of the metaphor is suppressed, we are left with something close to a kenning. Thus autumn flowers are “cold reds”; wine is “liquid amber”; a sword is “jade dragon,” “a sash of white satin,” or simply “three feet of water”; jujubes are “hanging pearls,” or “hanging reds”; the moon is a “cold hare,” a “jade wheel,” an “emerald flower,” or a “cold toad”; moss is “purple coins,” or “emerald earth-flowers”; a river is a “dragon-bone,” or a “duck-head,” the latter because it is soft and green. He’s originality, his penchant for coining strange metaphors or reformulating tired metaphors in new ways, made him unpopular with orthodox Chinese critics who were repelled by his strangeness. As a modern critic, Ye Cong-qi, has pointed out, He “rigorously avoids clichés and is unwilling to follow ordinary conventions and practices…transforming clichés such as ‘the silver River’ and ‘the silver Han’ [terms for the Milky Way] into ‘the cloudy banks.’ ”