No More Learning

It would not be an exaggeration to
say that half the poems in the Chinese language are poems of parting or
separation.

Readers of these translations may imagine that the culture represented
by Po Chu-i extended over the whole vast confines of China. This would,
I think, be an error. Culture is essentially a metropolitan product.
Chu-i was as much _depayse_ at a provincial town as Charles Lamb would
have been at Botany Bay. But the system of Chinese bureaucracy tended
constantly to break up the literary coteries which formed at the
capitals, and to drive the members out of the little corner of Shensi
and Honan which to them was "home. "

It was chiefly economic necessity which forced the poets of China into
the meshes of bureaucracy--backed by the Confucian insistence on public
service. To such as were landowners there remained the alternative of
agricultural life, arduous and isolated.

The poet, then, usually passed through three stages of existence. In the
first we find him with his friends at the capital, drinking, writing,
and discussing: burdened by his office probably about as much as Pepys
was burdened by his duties at the Admiralty. Next, having failed to
curry favour with the Court, he is exiled to some provincial post,
perhaps a thousand miles from anyone he cares to talk to. Finally,
having scraped together enough money to buy husbands for his daughters,
he retires to a small estate, collecting round him the remnants of those
with whom he had shared the "feasts and frolics of old days. "

I have spoken hitherto only of poets. But the poetess occupies a place
of considerable importance in the first four centuries of our era,
though the classical period (T'ang and Sung) produced no great woman
writer. Her theme varies little; she is almost always a "rejected wife,"
cast adrift by her lord or sent back to her home.
Probably her father
would be unable to buy her another husband and there was no place for
unmarried women in the Chinese social system. The moment, then, which
produced such poems was one of supreme tragedy in a woman's life.

Love-poetry addressed by a man to a woman ceases after the Han dynasty;
but a conventional type of love-poem, in which the poet (of either sex)
speaks in the person of a deserted wife or concubine, continues to be
popular. The theme appears to be almost an obsession with the T'ang and
Sung poets. In a vague way, such poems were felt to be allegorical. Just
as in the Confucian interpretation of the love-poems in the Odes (see
below) the woman typifies the Minister, and the lover the Prince, so in
those classical poems the poet in a veiled way laments the thwarting of
his own public ambitions. Such tortuous expression of emotion did not
lead to good poetry.

The "figures of speech," devices such as metaphor, simile, and play on
words, are used by the Chinese with much more restraint than by us.
"Metaphorical epithets" are occasionally to be met with; waves, for
example, might perhaps be called "angry. " But in general the adjective
does not bear the heavy burden which our poets have laid upon it. The
Chinese would call the sky "blue," "gray," or "cloudy," according to
circumstances; but never "triumphant" or "terror-scourged. "

The long Homeric simile, introduced for its own sake or to vary the
monotony of narrative, is unknown to Chinese poetry. Shorter similes are
sometimes found, as when the half-Chinese poet Altun compares the sky
over the Mongolian steppe with the "walls of a tent"; but nothing could
be found analogous to Mr. T. S. Eliot's comparison of the sky to a
"patient etherized on a table.