No More Learning

Probably about half the poems contain some reference to the fact that
rivers do not return to their sources, while man changes hour by hour.

The obsession of impermanence has often been sublimated into great
mystic poetry. In Li Po it results only in endless restatement of
obvious facts.

It has, I think, been generally realized that his strength lies not
in the content, but in the form of his poetry. Above all, he was a
song-writer. Most of the pieces translated previously and most of those
I am going to read to-day are songs, not poems. It is noteworthy that
his tombstone bore the inscription, "His skill lay in the writing of
archaic songs. " His immediate predecessors had carried to the highest
refinement the art of writing in elaborate patterns of tone. In
Li's whole works there are said to be only nine poems in the strict
seven-character metre. Most of his familiar short poems are in the old
style, which neglects the formal arrangement of tones. The value of his
poetry lay in beauty of words, not in beauty of thought. Unfortunately
no one either here or in China can appreciate the music of his verse,
for we do not know how Chinese was pronounced in the eighth century.
Even to the modern Chinese, his poetry exists more for the eye than for
the ear.

The last point to which I shall refer is the extreme allusiveness of
his poems. This characteristic, common to most Chinese poetry, is
carried to an extreme point in the fifty-nine Old Style poems with
which the works begin.
Not only do they bristle with the names of
historical personages, but almost every phrase is borrowed from some
classic. One is tempted to quarrel with Wang An-shih's statement that
people liked the poems because they were easy to enjoy. No modern could
understand them without pages of commentary to each poem. But Chinese
poetry, with a few exceptions, has been written on this principle
since the Han dynasty; one poet alone, Po Chu-i, broke through the
restraints of pedantry, erasing every expression that his charwoman
could not understand.

Translators have naturally avoided the most allusive poems and have
omitted or generalized such allusions as occurred. They have frequently
failed to recognize allusions as such, and have mistranslated them
accordingly, often turning proper names into romantic sentiments.

Li's reputation, like all success, is due partly to accident. After
suffering a temporary eclipse during the Sung dynasty, he came back
into favour in the sixteenth century, when most of the popular
anthologies were made. These compilations devote an inordinate space
to his works, and he has been held in corresponding esteem by a public
whose knowledge of poetry is chiefly confined to anthologies.

Serious literary criticism has been dead in China since that time, and
the valuations then made are still accepted.

Like Miss Havisham's clock, which stopped at twenty to nine on her
wedding-day, the clock of Chinese esteem stopped at Li Po centuries
ago, and has stuck there ever since.

But I venture to surmise that if a dozen representative English poets
could read Chinese poetry in the original, they would none of them give
either the first or second place to Li Po.


XXXI. 25.

LIFE OF LI PO, FROM THE "NEW HISTORY OF THE T'ANG DYNASTY," COMPOSED IN
THE ELEVENTH CENTURY.

Li Po, styled T'ai-po, was descended in the ninth generation from
the Emperor Hsing-sh?