Unit 2

English 203:  Literature of the NonWestern World

Explication: 
Reading: Book of Songs, 527-45.

#17:  Some students become exasperated when literary images remain ambiguous & resist the attempt to replace them with exact, objective equivalences.  Our first poem #17 offers an illustration.  The theme is obvious.  The narrative voice is that of a young woman hoping to get married.  But what does the repeated word "plop" mean?  It connotes ripeness.  She suggests that she is a ripe fruit ready to be picked (married) & she invites some eligible male to pluck her before it is too late; before, like some of the plums, she falls to the ground & is not picked up.  All this is obvious.  Still, the associations suggested by the word "plop" resist our efforts to find fully explicit equivalents.  There is something sensual & mildly sexual that is best left alone & not forced into anything more explicit.

#18:  A quince is a tropical fruit sometimes called a "custard apple."  They are rather mealy & tasteless.  What is important to know, for the poem, is that they are the cheapest fruit in Asia.  So our first line twice implies that the girl's romantic interest is casual: "she threw a quince."   Throwing connotes aggression.  She offers a kind of mild challenge to notice her.  The male narrator is interested: "in requital I gave a bright girdle-gem."  If you have been a diligent student, reading the selections from Ruth Benedict's work, you should have quickly discerned how Confucian ethics is at work in this line.  Even if the girl was somewhat rude or provocative in throwing a quince to him, the man has to be polite.  The characters or voices in these poems are always upper class & consequently seek to achieve some degree of elegant behavior.  Prof. Benedict told you that:
It is as if they had set up their ethics [& manners] like a bridge game.  The good player is the one who accepts the rules & plays [well] within them (219).  This means keeping an account of little words & acts American throw lightly about with no thought of incurring obligations (141).
So our speaker must offer "requital," if for no other reason than his own self-respect.  However, offering a gem to balance accounts is all out of proportion to the negligible value of the quince, indicating that he is indeed romantically interested.  Obviously the girl is offering more than the fruit, just as the man is offering more than the gems.  Why are these apt symbols?  The man's gifts suggest that he considers the girl to be a gem.  Like the first poem, the girl's gifts of fruit suggest ripeness, sweetness & perhaps domesticity.  We can imagine the girl casually (or feigning casualness) plucking a quince or a peach from her family's orchard to toss to the man she is interested in.  It is much less plausible to think of her buying the fruit from a vendor.  So her gesture suggests that the man can have such fruits (including the girl), if he tends the orchard (marries her).

Can you imagine a situation where young people are mildly flirting.  Perhaps the girl offers a peach or a plum & the young man quotes a line from this poem, perhaps asking if this gift meant "I would lover her for ever"?  You see how this kind of poetic banter could carry on a romance that is elegant because everything is implied & nothing is pressed to the point of making an explicit "deal."  What would have happened if the guy had simply caught the apple & started munching it?  Obviously he would failed the test of elegance & gone his peasant way oblivious to the "fruit" he might have had, if he had been more discriminating, better educated, & understood that social gestures are not the spontaneous acts of animals, but refined rituals or games.

#22:  The point of this point is why the girl doesn't show up for this rendezvous.  She sort of shows up: "she hides & will not show herself."  Why?  This is not contemporary America.  Proper young women do not arrange to meet boyfriends outside their houses "at the corner of the Wall."  Anyway the subject is dalliance & the girl is, perhaps, too young, shy, & timid to show herself at the rendezvous that she evidently agreed to.  How do I know her age?
She has been in the pastures & brought for me rush-wool.
Who is likely to be skipping about in a pasture, a girl or a debutante?  If she is old enough to be seriously looking for a husband, I doubt that she is playing about in the pasture.  & she is definitely not "doing the chores" by following cows around.  All the characters in the poems are refined & upper class types.  Our thinking is confirmed by the "rush-wool," a term you should have looked up since I am betting that no one knows what it means.  I didn't know either.  But I looked it up to find that the important connotation is that it is a "tender blade," just like the girl: tender, young; & like a blade of grass instead of an exotic flower, in other words, still an ingenuous girl instead of a designing minx.

#24:  The topic of this poem is hsaio (filial piety) vs. romance.  Recall that the first human relationship that you learn, which distinguishes you from a monkey & invests you with some measure of dignity, is the child/parent relationship.  Asians are typically reminded that they bear an unrepayable obligation to their parents for giving you life & nurturing you as a helpless infant & young child.  The least you can do, if you are not a monkey, is to honor & obey your parents.  This is the thinking behind line 5.  The narrator does not fear violence from disobeying her parents.  She is afraid of letting them down & being embarrassed:  "of what my father & mother say" (7).  So she says "no," which is really a kind of enticement.  She tells her boyfriend not to sneak into her house to visit her, explaining that she is not concerned about any physical damage he may do ("not that I mind about [breaking] the willows").  She is concerned about the damage to her reputation in the family, with her parents.  The repetition about "Indeed I am afraid" is probably not indicative of poetic inflation or the anxiety of a callow girl.  Consider her plight, if her father disowned her & threw her out of the house, because of her behavior.  What could she do?  There were no cash paying jobs.  Women had few life options: daughter, wife, mother, prostitute, servant/slave.

#25:  What is this poem about?  It's not so obvious.  The lady tells the man to get up & go to work: "The cock has crowed."  The wife bickering at a lazy husband  is not the right tone.  She is loving, solicitous, & concerned about his status & duty.  The knight  is reluctant to leave her, or to leave sleep, or a warm comfortable bed: "Day has not dawned."  Does this turn into a fight?  "Get up; go to work."  "Leave me alone.  I'm still sleepy."  No.  Instead of confronting him, the lady entices him with beauty: "Rise, then, & look at the night;/ the morning star is shining."  She also suggests that he is not so much getting up in order to go to face the drudgery of routine work; rather, she invites him to get up in order to have fun: "shoot the wild-duck & wild-geese."
     What's going on in the 2nd stanza?  She suggests that they will be together for life.  Bring home the fowl; I'll cook you dinner; "& I will be yours till we are old."  What is the point of all this?  It implies that to some degree, the man is reluctant to get up & leave his love, fearing that he doesn't know when he might return.  What does this imply about their relationship?  It seems doubtful that she is his wife.  If she were, wouldn't it be much more likely that she would, in fact, say, "get up & go to work & bring home the bacon (or duck)"?  It is your girl friend who promises to cook you a fancy romantic duck dinner & who promises you that "All shall be peaceful & good."
     Our suspicions along these lines seem strengthened by the last stanza.  Why wouldn't the woman know "those who come to to you"?  She repeats her wish or offer 3 times, referring first to those who are dependent on this mandarin; those who seek favor from him.  The suggestion is that she could solve their problems so that they don't have to bother him: "I have girdle-stones of many sorts as presents for them."  In the second instance, she wishes that she could buy off those who work under her knight, so that they wouldn't bother him & he would then be eager to get up out of bed.  In the third instance, she wants to intercede with "those that love you."  Initially this may sound strange, but think a bit.  Whoever the people are in the 3 cases (petitioners, co-workers, comrades, friends, or family), the point is that she doesn't know them.   What does that imply?  Obviously she is not the wife.  When the knight visits the lady (notice that the poem uses these titles rather than husband, wife), what does he likely complain about?  About his troubles, of course; about all the people who bother him, including, no doubt, members of his family.

#28:  The theme of this poem is obvious: lovers parting because of duty.  The voice or point of view together with the unstated reason or motive for indecision is more challenging.  It is a tough world: "Cold blows the northern wind,/ Thick falls the snow."  The speaker then invites the woman, "Take my hand & go with me."  She is reluctant: "Yet she lingers."   Why?
We cannot know the exact cause of her reluctance.  Of course we know that she is female.  So we can speculate.  Is she a new bride reluctant to leave her parents & siblings?  Perhaps, but how likely is it that she would get married in the middle of a blizzard?  Leaving home when "The north wind whistles" & the falling snow whirls, suggests something rather desperate, doesn't it?  The man repeats, "There is no time to lose" 3 times.  Why?  What is so pressing?  Our best guess is that she is running away with her lover, abandoning her husband, children, & home.
     What do the colors contribute?  "Nothing is redder than the fox,/ Nothing blacker than the crow" & these are set against the white snowy background.  We do not need or even wish to push these towards some exact equivalence.  It is enough to note that these are "pure" colors.  The snow does not water down the red fox to become pink, nor the black crow to become gray.  The suggestion is that she should be decisive.  She has no doubt agreed to run away with the man, "yet she lingers" just when she should be decisive & swift.  Thus he repeats 3 times, "Be kind to me, love me"; changing the last part: "go with me," "go home with me," "ride with me."

#54:  Yet another poem that illustrates the problems caused by love.  The first line almost says it all: "The gourd has bitter leaves."  Of course there is no running water & modern plumbing.  We can imagine a gourd dipper left in a bucket outside, perhaps near a well.  Leaves fall & make a kind of bitter tasting tea.  Water is life.  Since we are human beings & not monkeys, we drink tea.  If water is necessary for life, tea suggests the cultural additive to bare existence.  Anyway, we must drink to live, even if our tea (social situation) is bitter.  The man complains that he cannot ford the river of life.  The female voice is probably his lover & not his mother.  In Asia, wives open doors for their husbands, rather than the other way around.  In a very cynical outlook, the husband works for a lord, the woman works for her husband.  Her job is to keep him happy, healthy, & ready to go back to work, because he is her sole source of support.  Our female character does not sound so cynical, but she does encourage the man to try again, to find stepping-stones to cross the river.  He responds saying that things have reached a crisis, the river is at flood stage.
     Her response is fairly long.  First she suggests that he is exaggerating & things are probably not as bad as he thinks: "The ford is not deep enough to wet your axles."  Next she suggests that he cannot afford to wait until things get better: "A knight that brings home his bride/ Must do so before the ice melts."  Perhaps there is a gentle admonition in this.  If he been more diligent earlier, in the dead of winter when the ice was hard & he could have easily walked across the river, he wouldn't now be stuck on one side in the spring after the ice has melted & caused the river to flood.  The last stanza is equally indirect, suggestive, & mildly critical.  Especially in Buddhist culture, fording a river is a stock image for getting through life.  Reaching the other side may symbolize enlightenment, but more often suggests the end of this life (which is also, in a figurative sense, what happens in Buddhist enlightenment).  In any case, she admonishes the man, suggesting that he shouldn't be so eager to get to the other side of river, or escape all his problems -- including his relationship with her!  He should be more romantic, even to the point of declining the offer of an easy boat ride across the river (of life or trouble), saying that he is content to remain in this life or troubles with his lover.  He should say to the ferry-man, "no thanks, I don't need a ride, because 'I am waiting for my friend.'"  This brings us back to the beginning of the poem with the woman consoling and encouraging the man.  She is willing to share his troubles.  Why isn't he more grateful or appreciative of her devotion?  He should be grateful to have a friend who is willing to remain a friend when he is in trouble.  Do you see the subtlest point here?  She is telling him to shut up & quit complaining.  He is exaggerating his problems.  Things would not have gotten this bad, if he had worked harder or paid more attention earlier & not let things reach this level (bring home the bride over the ice).  Thirdly, he has an ally & friend to help him through his troubles.

#56:  A very short but interesting poem that probably makes little sense to American readers who don't give much thought to eating something while they wander down the sidewalk with their friends, four abreast, causing others to step down the curb & into the street to let them pass in their cut-off jeans, flip-flops, & skateboards.  No one acts this way on the streets of Tokyo, Tai-Pei, Bejing, or Seoul.  One's appearance in public is important.  In the case of the poem, one's demeanor & behavior in public is must be considered first, or is more important than, one's relationship as spouses!  The woman asks to be forgiven, if she forgets herself & expresses some slight affection for her husband in public!  I have gotten you thinking about lovers & extra-marital affairs in other poems, so if you insist that there is a similar situation here . . . okay.  I would argue that the charming innocence of the narrative voice suggests newlyweds.  We are probably shocked enough to find that even mild displays of affection in public were considered serious breeches of etiquette; & shocked at the strange line: "Friendship takes time to overcome"!  As Ruth Benedict told us, in Confucian ethics what you feel is irrelevant, how you act is all important.  It doesn't matter whether you love or hate your spouse.  What matters is that you comport yourself as spouses in public.  Life is not about your feelings.  It is about doing your duty, living up to expectations & standards.

#57: Lost love.  What more needs to be said?  Even the leaves of the weeping willows have mates or seem to huddle together: "Whose leaves are so close."  Out speaker is alone as the morning star.

#63:  So far the poems in female voice have worried about being caught in affairs of the heart that are at odds with the affairs of decorum, etiquette, & duty.  This poem suggests the ultimate price for indulging one's desire & abandoning propriety: "In the wilds there is a dead doe."  The life/death image works in at least two ways.  Life is offered, if you follow the social rules.  If not, you are ostracized, left in the "wilds" & ultimately end up like the "dead doe."  A doe seems to connote innocence; at least it is inoffensive.  Nonetheless, it pays the ultimate price for not being cautious enough to evade the hunter or predator.  This leads to an opposite rendering of life/death in which the condition of conforming to propriety seems like death or like being frozen.  Thus "There was a lady longing for the spring," longing for the heat of genuine love to melt the ice of empty social gestures.  You see how this poem is something of the opposite of #56.  This lady has had enough of the kind of conventional life that is still a novelty to the new wife in #56.  The lady in #63 wants love, but knows that it is illicit & dangerous: "Take care, or the dog will bark."

#75: Our female speaker in this poem in similar to #63 in that she also feels chaffed & confined by li (tradition), ethics, & etiquette.  She is clearly in love with some man who is not on the family's short list of eligible bridegrooms.  She concedes that her family has given her almost everything she wants: "Wine I have, all things needful/ For play, for sport."  When she confides her love to her previously solicitous & compliant brothers, "I found that they were angry with me."  No help anywhere!  She continues to rebel in stanza 3, complaining that she has complied with etiquette & ethics long enough: "I have borne myself correctly/ In rites more than can be numbered."  She feels misunderstood as the only one with deep emotions, "harassed/ By a host of small men."  She means "small minded," that they are concerned with the tiny details of status & prestige while her heart is breaking.  Her family is not much swayed by her plight: "I have borne vexations very many,/ Received insults not few."  Who else could insult a high class young lady?  Only members of her family.  Don't you love the image in the last stanza?  "Sorrow clings to me/ Like an unwashed dress."  When the dress is newly laundered it does not cling, being freshly starched & ironed.  Southern China is about like Houston in August: unbearably humid & hot.  After hours of sweating in such a climate (like the "climate" of heated opposition in her family), her dress looses its crisp creases to limply cling to her sweaty body.  The metaphor has a further level.  If you are so hot & uncomfortable, why not remove the sweaty dress?  Ah, she dares not go that far.  She may "Long to take wing & fly away" but she knows that she cannot go naked, nor can she renounce her family to elope with her love.  She complains that "My heart is not a mirror,/ To reflect what others will."  That is okay, as long as her behavior is a mirror for what others (her mother, grandmother, aunts, father, brothers, etc.) will.  Again you see confirmation of Ruth Benedict's point, in Asia life is all about duty & obligation.

#131:  This is the first poem that is not about the problems of love.  The problem here is Mongol invasions, war, death & destruction: "We have no house, no home."  The speaker is a soldier tired of service: "We are hungry & thirsty,/ But our campaign is not over."  The military was underpaid & insufficiently appreciated even then: "Our hearts are stricken with sorrow,/  But no one listens to our plaint."  I suspect that this poem might be often quoted by Mandarins tired of their thankless duty in some distant, culturally barren province: "But the king's business never ends;/ We cannot rest or bide."

#157:  Finally, life is good!  We have a celebrative poem depicting a kind of Thanksgiving celebration.  Lots of hard agrarian labor: "They clear away the grass, the trees;/ Their ploughs open up the ground./  In a thousand pairs they tug at weeds & roots."  Finally the crop is reaped, the grain bundled is stacks or "stooks."  So far the poem is indistinguishable from similar Western poems commemorating heroic agricultural labor.  What would you expect next, after the harvest?  Okay, Thanksgiving dinner.  However secular our "turkey day" (with the Cowboys on TV) may have become, every Westerner would understand that the holiday is somehow about thanking God for the good things in our lives.  Our poem does something like this, but in a distinctively Chinese way.  The grain makes wine that is offered to sustain deceased ancestors who exist in the next world but who remain connected to their relatives in this world.  There is a kind of mutual aid going on between members of the living family, who offer "spirit" goods (food, water, liquor, money) to deceased ancestors, not simply to keep them alive in their incarnation as spirits in the next world, but to make them happy so that they will return the favor & cause good things to happen for us.
     When you visit Taiwan or Malaysia, most of the so-called Chinese temples you will see & visit are not Buddhist temples, nor Taoist temples -- & they are almost never Confucian temples.  They are clan-name temples.  In John Calvin's Christian outlook, one hoped to earn a million dollars in order to prove to God that you were a diligent steward who deserved a reward in the next world.  The Chinese parallel might go something like this.  You lead a successful & distinguished life in order to win approval from your family, city, & even from the nation.  A very few people, like Confucius, win nearly eternal fame & respect.  It is nearly unthinkable for you & I to have such ambitions.  If we succeed (including making a lot of money), much of our monetary legacy will be left to endow a temple & employ priests to continue to literally "sing our praises" keeping our family name alive & memorable.
     The poem does not go into such detail, which was a historically later development.  But it does suggest that food/wealth is produced for dead ancestors as much as for the living; liquor offered "For fulfillment of all the rites" & that "Glory shall come to the fatherland" "when sweet the fragrance of offering" is made.  "When pungent the scent" of incense helps "the blessed elders" rest in peace.  Our narrator tells us that "Not only here is it like this,/ Not only now is it so.  From long ago it has been thus."  Do you see the difference between China & the Hebrew culture?  The poem does not end by suggesting that this ritual is God's will or celebrated in order to express our obedience to God's command.  The ritual is li.  It is what human beings do & monkeys don't.  It is what refined people do & peasants don't.  You cannot construe this to suggest: it is what God's people do & heathen don't.  Like it or not, the measuring stick here is not Truth (cf. God's will), but aesthetics.  Only a monkey disregards its family or is casual about it.  A human being's family should be traceable for a thousand years or more.  Ah, we have another Asian "game."  If I can trace my genealogy back a millennia & you don't know who your great-grandparents were (because your family was not affluent enough to be attentive to such measures of prestige) . . . well this is another yardstick to measure who marries whom, who gets invited to the country club, etc.
     So this poem is not, as you perhaps thought, a simple expression of Thanksgiving.

#238:  A creation poem.  I hope you will remember it when we read a somewhat similar creation poem from India.  You will find them entirely different.  Here we see how agri-culture was the first expression of culture.  Who gave birth to people, allowing them to live?  Millet.  We subsequently receive other divine gifts, including "hemp" (l. 35) & "lucky grains."  How do we thank the divine for these gifts, for life itself?  By being good farmers.  "Indeed, what are they, our sacrifices?/  We pound the grain, we bale it out,/  We sift, we tread,/  We wash it -- soak, soak;/  We boil it all steamy."  As in ancient Greece, the gods are apparently satisfied with the smells of the kitchen: "As soon as the smell rises/  God on high is very pleased."

#276: So the barbarians are defeated or kept at bay & we are dutiful & grateful farmers.  We only have to be concerned about affairs of the heart, as the first poems suggested.  Ah, but there are more prosaic problems: big rats eat our millet, our corn, our rice.  Who are the big rats?  Of course they are literally fat squeaky Mickey Mouse rats.  But there must be another kind of rat in order to make sense of lines 11-12: "3 years we have slaved for you,/  Yet you give us no credit."  Instead of killing rats, the farmers threaten "to leave you/ And go to that happy land; Happy land, happy land,/ Where we shall have our place."  Ah, "credit" & "our place."  You see the problem here?  Our happy farmers of #157 & #238 do not own their own land.  They are serfs or share-croppers.  The rats are the money-lenders & feudal aristocrats who own the land & nibble away at the harvest.

#278: Our previous poem may have implied that the happy kingdom "where no sad songs are sung" might be in the next world.  Certainly we do not know of any actual place in our world where sad songs are not sung.  This poem may not be entirely pessimistic about what lies in store for us after death, but it grieves over the loss of life in this world: "But as he drew near the tomb-hole/ His limbs shook with dread."  There is a suggestion that death offers a a rebirth into another world.  The "tomb-hole" is not just a hole in the ground.  Not a very elegant word, but "tomb-hole" seems to conjure up the associated "womb-hole" or birth canal.  Our poet is not consoled about the prospects for rebirth: "That blue one, Heaven,/ Takes all our good men" who cannot be ransomed back from death to continue to live in our world.

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