Li Shangyin the Poems on Occasion

fourteen Li Shangyin The Poems on Occasion Poetics 李商隱, 樂遊原 Li Shangyin, Yueyou Plain1 向晚意不適 I felt dissatisfied late in the day, 驅車登古原 I galloped my coach to the ancient plain. 夕陽無限好 The evening sun was limitlessly fine, 只是近黃昏 it was just that it was drawing toward dusk. Success in the short-line quatrain was difficult to achieve, and poets who attempted it often stood in the shadow of Wang Wei. Li Shangyin here created something distinctive. The rhythm of moods in the poem is perfect: a restless sense of unease, resolved in riding out of Chang’an to Yueyou Plain and discovering the beauty of the setting sunlight, a beauty immediately qualified by the poet’s awareness of the coming darkness. He does not say directly that the last sunlight is beautiful be- cause it will be so brief; “it’s just that,” zhishi 只是, suggests a sudden awareness of limits in what is literally supposed to be “limitless.” Li Shangyin did not, of course, know that he was a Late Tang poet. Like other poets of his age, he was fascinated with the last phases of historical periods, which may suggest a general sense of “lateness,” but he certainly did not anticipate the catastrophes that would befall his dynasty a few decades after his death. His last moment of glorious light ————— 1. 29116; Jijie 1942; Ye (1985) 31. 486 Li Shangyin before nightfall was unwittingly portentous; yet it is impossible for later readers not to hear such a resonance in the poem. In Li Shangyin’s moment, however, such a vision was yet another variation on his fasci- nation with speculative images of permanence and with the fragile and the transient. The poet of “Yueyou Plain” was the same poet who wrote the im- penetrable “Heyang,” discussed earlier (see pp. 364–79), and wrote in a variety of other styles as well. Such diversity represents one side of con- tested values in ninth-century poetry. Was the “true poet” distinguished by his range or by the intensity of his focus? The first clear articulation of poetic greatness achieved through diversity and range was in Yuan Zhen’s funeral inscription for Du Fu.2 We saw the echo of that Mid- Tang value in Liu Yuxi’s preface to the poetry of Lingche (see p. 91), where Lingche’s poetry is praised as superior to other poet-monks be- cause of his range and their limitation. In his “Epistle Presented to the Vice Minister of Rites, His Excel- lency of Julu” 獻侍郎鉅鹿公啟, written in 847, Li Shangyin does offer a broader judgment on Tang poetry, one favoring breadth:3 Since the founding of our dynasty, this Way [of poetry] has flourished greatly. Yet all have fallen into some one-sided artfulness [ pianqiao 偏巧], and few have talents that combine all things. Those who rest their heads on stones and rinse their mouths in the current tend to prefer dried-up and quiet lines; those who have clung to scales and wings [rising high in office] are foremost in pieces of excessive opulence. Among those who advocate Li Bai and Du Fu, resentment and satire occupy the greater part, while imitators of Shen Quanqi and Song Zhiwen go to extremes of frivolous delicacy. Although this passage is, in part, driven by rhetoric and established commonplaces, the general referents would be clear in a contemporary context. The “advocates of Li Bai and Du Fu” would certainly be Yuan Zhen and Bai Juyi, remembered for their “New Yuefu” in a mid-ninth- century context; Han Yu might also be included. The “imitators of Shen Quanqi and Song Zhiwen” would be the regulated-verse craftsmen. ————— 2. Yuan Zhen ji 元稹集 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1982), 600–601. 3. “Epistle Presented to the Vice Minister of Rites, His Excellency of Julu” 獻侍郎鉅鹿公啟, in Liu Xuekai 劉學鍇 and Yu Shucheng 余恕誠, Li Shangyin wen biannian jiaozhu 李商隱文編年校注 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2002), 1188–89. .

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