“Waiting for the Unicorn” | Open Indiana

Wang Shih-chen (Yi-shang; JUAN-T’ING, YÜ-YANG SHAN-JEN), a native of Hsin-ch’eng, Shantung, was born before the collapse of the Ming dynasty. He was distinguished at an early age by his precocious literary talent and published his first collection of verse at the age of fourteen. After passing the chin-shih examination in 1758, Wang entered on a long and generally successful official career, which culminated in his appointment as president of the censorate and subsequently of the Board of Punishments. In 1704, however, he was cashiered for a minor administrative error, and after this he chose to live in retirement.

Widely regarded as one of the greatest of all Ch’ing poets, Wang first achieved celebrity with his set of four poems, “Autumn Willows,” written shortly before he passed the chin-shih examination. During his official posting, in the city of Yangchow, he traveled to Nanking, where he associated with Ch’ien Ch’ien-yi (q.v.), a senior poet and scholar who had survived the Ming collapse. Ch’ien was so impressed with Wang’s poetry and personality that he wrote a laudatory preface to a collection of his verse, in spite of the difference in their critical outlooks. While Ch’ien was an outspoken opponent of the “archaist” (fu-ku) movement that had dominated the poetic world for much of the Ming dynasty, it was this movement’s ideals that had most significantly influenced Wang Shih-chen’s approach to poetry, especially in his earlier years.

Although he wrote many poems in a relatively straightforward manner—favored in our selection here—Wang is best known for his densely allusive style of poetry, in which a single verse may involve references that require several paragraphs of annotation to explain. Unlike certain other poets of the Ch’ing, however, Wang does not parade his prodigious erudition for its own sake. Instead, his intellectual command of poetic technique and his sensitive emotional awareness succeed in bringing his learning fully into the service of his poetic intent, with the result that the reader capable of recognizing the allusions discovers in his poetry a richness of meaning attained by few poets. Many of Wang’s poems were inspired by historic sites. In these works, he combines a sure grasp of the written (and sometimes legendary) historical sources about the place with a subtle and complex awareness of the interplay between history and individual human experience. In other poems his inspiration is highly visual. In a style reminiscent of Wang Wei (701–761), he succeeds in making a very characteristic statement or suggestion without his personality being explicitly evident.

In addition to being a prolific poet, Wang was also one of the Ch’ing dynasty’s most influential literary critics. His earliest training had been in the archaist tradition, as we have seen, a tradition that stressed formal excellence and attention to certain model styles of the past, especially from the most flourishing period of the T’ang. Although these principles tended to degenerate into a dry and imitative formalism in the hands of the lesser archaists, the essential goal of the movement was the cultivation of the highest degree of perception and expression. In the course of his long career as a man of letters, Wang Shih-chen evolved his own distinctive poetics within this tradition, a poetics generally associated with the term shen-yün, which he used to suggest the combination of intuitive perception and evocation with personal tone that he found characteristic of great poetry. A striking feature of his criticism is his relatively tolerant attitude toward other critical ideals—unusual in the Ch’ing period, which saw a good deal of friction between competing literary schools. While he continued to favor T’ang poets over those of Sung, and self-cultivation through formal excellence over mere self-expression, Wang did significantly develop the archaist tradition by his stress on the dual nature of poetry as knowledge and expression.

Want wrote widely and extensively in many fields, and his purely belletristic writings alone are voluminous. Both because of the size of his oeuvre and the difficulty of his style, the usually encountered collection of his poetry is not his complete works, but rather his ten-chüanselection of the best of his poems, the Ching-hua lu, which has been supplied with several commentaries. The generally chronological arrangement of this collection makes it relatively convenient to follow Wang’s development as a poet. There is a similarly convenient and accessible selection of some of his critical comments on poetry, the Yüyang shih-hua.

(Daniel Bryant)

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1.Chao-ying Fang, ECCP, 2:831–833.

Viewing the Sea from the Li-shuo Pavilion¹

“I climb a lofty hill and gaze toward the distant sea,”²

And thus behold ten thousand leagues of waves and surf.

The breadth of the heavens is vast and boundless, its cloudy forms are strange;

The shade of spring is lofty and bold, the fish and dragons exalted.

An angry tide is driven by the wind to rise a thousand yards high;

Tiger kraken and water oxen flee in tumbling confusion.

A horde of spirits form in secret a million misty mirages;

A single trace, still unsubmerged, of the Three Mountains’ crest³

And then in a moment their force is spent and the tide too comes to rest;

The waves are calm, the heavens clear, as still as a length of brocade.

Caltrops and moss, an emerald green, grow lush in hollows by the shore;

Snails and clams in a shimmering glow are scattered on sandy banks.

Isles and islets rough and broken, a realm of open gossamer;

As thick and tangled as starry hosts above in an autumn sky.

I drum on a sword, I listen to your song,

If we have wine and do not drink, then what are we to do?

The river in front of the Sun God’s shrine is chill and forlorn;

The clouds above the Transcendent’s Terrace jagged and lofty.

Hsien-men and Kao-shih are nowhere to be seen;

The First Emperor and Han Wu-ti visited here for nothing!⁴

Even now as I follow my gaze I feel a pang in my breast;

The regions of Huang, Ch’ui, Chien, and P’ing are all overgrown with weeds⁵

The happy moments in human life amount to so few hours;

Ruddy cheeks in a bright mirror can hardly retain their beauty.

I am going to escape from the world on Cricket Hill;

Or else drop in my hook from the Ephemera Isles.⁶

(YYSJCHL, 1A:11a)

(Tr. Daniel Bryant)

Mooring in the Rain at Kao-yu⁷

Wintry rain at Ch’in-yu brings my boat to an evening mooring;

The lake to the south is swollen; the river reaches the sky.

The romantic elegance of Ch’in Huai-hai⁸ is nowhere to be found;

Forlorn and lonely, the world of men, these five hundred years past.

(YYSJCHL, 5A:15a)

(Tr. Daniel Bryant)

On the River

And what of the journey where the head of Wu meets the tail of Ch’u?

Misty rain, as autumn deepens, dims the white-flecked waves.

In evening, I sail the winter tide, on across the river;

Filling the groves are yellow leaves and ever more calls of geese.

(No. 2 from a series of 2; YYSJCHL, 5A:18a)

(Tr. Daniel Bryant)

Crossing the River at Kuan-yin Gate⁹ after Rain

Light sails set and swelling breach the clearing evening sky;

The cold river is dim and still; the ebbing tide is calm.

Shrouded in rain, the hills of Wu vanish here and there;

Along the stream, the fires of Ch’u are lit up one by one.

Famous men are still remembered by Feather Fan Crossing;¹⁰

In stepping songs is ever lamented the fall of Stone Wall Fort.¹¹

Of Southern courts there are heartbreaking histories beyond all count;

Sad and mournful, the sound of jade flutes over the Ch’in-huai.¹²

(YYSJCHL, 5A:18a)

(Tr. Daniel Bryant)

Climbing to the Very Top of Swallow Rock¹³ Once Again,
in an Early Morning Rain

For ten thousand leagues the waves of the Min¹⁴ are encompassed in this view;

I brandish my staff on the highest peak of this precipitous rock.

In the hoary green of Wu and Ch’u, I distinguish the farthest coves;

River and hills in the level distance come into the first of autumn.

Those who crossed to the south in Yung-chia¹⁵ times have vanished to a man;

In a westerly wind beside Chien-yeh¹⁶ the river goes flowing on.

Sprinkling wine I lament once more the hazards of Heaven’s Moat;

Dabbling ducks and flying swallows cover the banks and islets.

(YYSJCHL, 5A:18b)

(Tr. Daniel Bryant)

Two Poems on the Ch’in-huai

Over the years hearts have been broken on Mo-ling¹⁷ boats,

Dreams entwine the houses beside the Ch’in-huai stream.

For ten days now, in strands of rain and sheets of wind,

This misty scene at the height of spring has seemed like the end of autumn.

(No. 1 from a series of 14; YYSJCHL, 5A:29a)

(Tr. Daniel Bryant)

When the tide ebbed in the Ch’in-huai, autumn after spring;

“Never Sorrow” was fond of outings for pleasure in Stone Wall Town.

For all the years that sorrow has filled it along with the tides of spring,

You wouldn’t think the name of the lake would still be “Never Sorrow.”¹⁸

(No. 5 from a series of 14; YYSJCHL, 5A:29b)

(Tr. Daniel Bryant)

Crossing the River in Heavy Wind

Amidst chiseled jasper and drifting cinnabar, all in a haze,

Surf of silver, billows of snow, and thundering torrents.

A ten-foot sail of cloth is like a bird on its wing,

As I lie watching the hills of Chin-ling on both banks of the river.

A pair of red-collared swallows gently brush the waves:

From both banks, flowing foam and tiny ripples are born.

Heading south or north, two boats pass each other without a word,

As a sail in the wind cuts a swath on the river just for one instant.

(YYSJCHL, 5A:32b-33a)

(Tr. Irving Lo)

Chen-chou Quatrains

At dawn I climb a river tower to its very highest storey,

The gentle and delicate look of departing sail is hard to bear.

The tide stretches a thousand yards below White Sands Pavilion;

Sending a homesick heart all the way back to Mo-ling.

Most of the houses along the river are those of fisherfolk;

Spaced well apart in a band of willow paths and caltrop ponds.

Perfect now that the sun is low and the wind has died away,

And they sell their perch beneath the scarlet trees along the river.

(Nos. 3 and 4 from a series of 5; YYSJCHL, 5B:11a-b)

(Tr. Daniel Bryant)

NOTES

1. Located in Lai-chou, on the coast of Shantung.

2. An ancient yüeh-fu tune title, and also the first line of a ballad by Li Po.

3. A mountain fifty li north of Lai-chen, Shantung province, where numerous shrines were built by visiting emperors of ancient times.

4. The First Emperor of Ch’in and Emperor Wu-ti of the Han both made progresses to Shantung, where they carried out sacrifices to various spirits, including the “Sun God,” and sought the arts of immortality of such legendary transcendents as Hsien-men and Kao-shih.

5. Huang, Ch’ui, Chien, and P’ing are all districts in which sacrifices were carried out.

6. Cricket Hill and the Ephemera Isles were likewise places associated with spiritual escape from the world.

7. Kao-yu, also called Ch’in-yu, is located north of Yangchow, Kiangsu province.

8. Kao-yu is the birthplace of the Sung lyric poet Ch’in Kuan, whose style-name was Huai-hai.

9. North of Chiang-ning, Kiangsu province, an important garrison town.

10. Referring to the victory of the Tsin dynasty general Ku Jung who used a fan made of feathers to direct his troops.

11. I.e., Nanking.

12. See Ch’ien Ch’ien-yi, note 3.

13. A promontory that juts into the Yangtze at Nanking, a city known as “Heavenly Moat” since the Yung-chia period (307–313).

14. The Yangtze is sometimes called the Min, since its headwaters are located in the Min Mountains of Szechwan province.

15. See note 13 above. This was a time of foreign invasion and political turmoil.

16. I.e., Nanking, a city sometimes said to be protected by Heaven’s Moat because of its location on the south shore of the Yangtze.

17. Ancient name for Nanking.

18. A famous lake in Nanking named after Mo-ch’ou (Never Worry), a beautiful girl from an ancient ballad said to have been married into a rich family and later expressing regret or worry for not marrying a young man next door.

Waiting for the Unicorn