“When I shall never wake again, perhaps I will just then have entered the kingdom of poetry.” Poetry was my father's life, his ideal mode of existence. In my father's heart, life was inherently full of poetry; and to write poetry was to seek out love, to sow love broadcast, and through love to seek out the true, the good, and the beautiful.
After my father left us, in those moments of heavy grief and of a spiritual emptiness that nothing could fill, I gathered up and read his poems; and I seemed to step into a kingdom of poetry where my father had lived and pursued his aims—a kingdom interweaving the real and the imaginary, the past and the future—and there I was bathed once more in the warmth of his love.
My father lived through years of blood and storm. As a patriotic, hot-blooded young man, he bound his own fate tightly together with the fate of the nation and the people. He threw himself without hesitation into the resistance against Japan and the salvation of the country; he led the student movement, founded progressive periodicals, organized wartime youth service corps, and rushed to the front lines of the resistance in northern Jiangsu. Through all of this one can always see it: poetry's radiance illumined my father, poetry's ideal stirred him, and poetry became the truthful portrait of his life's course. My father lived at once in the two worlds of reality and of poetry: he took part, with his feet on the ground, in the real struggle, doing the work of national salvation steadily and solidly; and in the moments left over from that work—in the intervals of travel, in a brief breathing-space of rest—another world, the world of poetry, would unfold before his eyes. Throughout my father's life, the two worlds supported each other and shone upon each other. He held up the ideal and the horizon of poetry as a mirror by which to measure and to encourage his life, and he poured his concrete, lived experience into the world of poetry, thereby achieving a meaningful life-path and a distinctive body of poetry and prose poetry.
The journey through northern Jiangsu in the war of resistance left an indelible imprint on my father. This perilous passage, beset on all sides, this trek through every kind of hardship, was at the same time my father's spiritual journey, his journey of ideals; it set off in him a vigorous surge of creative passion. “Crossing the Clear River,” “The Gun and the Rose,” “The Wheat-Ripening Season,” “Dawn,” “Ode to Morning,” “Work,” “Comrade Chen Yi,” “The Cook,” “War Horse,” “Sunflowers on the Bank of the Sheyang River,” “Evening Song,” the long poem Crossing the Grand Canal, “Mountain Inn,” “Mother,” and the poem-cycles “The Moon Shines upon Jiangnan,” “We Cross the Yangtze,” and “Wind and Rain in the Third Month”—all of these drew their material from this single experience.
In the long poem Crossing the Grand Canal, the lyrical protagonist “I,” out of love and ardor, rushes with the blazing fire of youth toward the canal. This is not in order to inquire into the canal's ancient stories, nor to pour out grievance and indignation; the canal is the symbol of the motherland and the people, and its fate is bound up with the fate of “I.” “I” ought to wash away shame and humiliation and to fight in the canal's defense. With abundant feeling, and in turn, the poet unfolds the six movements—“Rushing toward the Canal,” “Good Morning, Canal,” “By the Canal,” “Crossing the Canal,” “On the Far Bank of the Canal,” and “Leaving the Canal”—interweaving them into a single heroic epic of magnificent momentum, throwing into relief the full-bodied images of the lyrical protagonist “I” and of the canal.
On a winter night, “I” comes to the canal's edge and, like “a sick and emaciated old cat,” crouches alone in a thatched hut on the embankment, where “a kerosene lamp coils with black smoke / mixed with the rank smell of sheep”; a startled woman, awakened, holds her child and presses in among the men, “with timid, shrinking eyes / staring at me, this unfamiliar far-traveling stranger”; and warm laughter at once dissolves the estrangement—“in the lively talk / they have already drawn close to me / tenderly calling me ‘comrade’…”
At dawn, “I” steps onto the canal's embankment: “I stretch my hand into the river / to test the river-water's warmth and cool / as if stroking a young girl's cheek / the river-water spreads its ripples / opening her lovely, moved eyes / she kisses me tenderly / and laughs…” The poet is deeply rooted in reality; he condenses a heart full of ardent love into delicate sensation, fuses surging passion into vivid images of reality and romantic imagination, and sublimates it all into the crystallized realm of poetry. The recording of long-enduring history, and the bearing of the canal's heavy disasters, lend the poem the weighty depth of history and a broad, generous symbolic import, forming an exchange between reality and history, between realistic depiction and symbol, between the finite and the infinite. Crossing the Grand Canal is a piece of pure-hearted lyricism. Although it runs to more than six hundred lines, it is wholly natural and unforced, deep and simple, and ought to hold a place not to be overlooked—a unique value—in the history of modern Chinese literature. The long poem was completed by the Yuancheng River in Yancheng, northern Jiangsu, on 8 April 1941; according to my father's recollection, it was written in one breath at the time, and after it was finished he made almost no revisions. It was first published in installments in a local newspaper in Tiantai, and was not properly issued to the world until May 1948, when it was collected in the “Forest Poetry Series” brought out by the Xingqun Press. In that age of the changing of old and new, of social upheaval, the issuing of the collection and its social influence were both circumscribed.
The idealism, the burning passion, and the spirit of self-sacrifice that this poetry reveals in the fathers of that generation seem, today, to have become quite unfamiliar; and yet they cannot but move me and command my admiration.
For my father, even when his person had fallen into the cage, even when he suffered imprisonment, his fighting will remained undimmed. In his eyes, prison was only “the birthing-room of a new century,” “a transfer station of history.” In the poem-cycle “The Black House,” that dark cell where freedom is forbidden “nucleates and sows seeds, / opens black-colored flowers”: cruelty may throttle a single life's cry; the iron gate greedily swallows him, sucks his blood, eats his flesh entire—“having chewed me dull, it lazily spat me out”; yet the high wall cannot cut off the familiar songs, cannot imprison the splendid dream, and conviction settles like a grain of grit grown into the pearl of a mussel-shell, becoming, through time and the grinding of pain, a brilliant gleaming gem. In “The Black House” the poet's feeling shows itself deeper and richer still; its concise lyricism is just like a black-and-white woodcut—forceful and strong.
My father began writing poetry and prose poetry at almost the same time. Looking across his whole creative life, the earlier period was clearly dominated by lyric poetry, and afterward he gradually turned toward the writing of prose poetry. The surging and battering of the tides of the age, the strong pull of legendary lives, and the intimate personal experience of throwing himself into the surge of struggle—all of these drove my father to pour himself into poetry, and one can always see that poetry kept him company from beginning to end. But after 1942, cut off by his fall into the occupied zone from direct participation in the war, his lonely and solitary life gave him more ample time, and a more urgent desire, to conduct inner self-examination and self-questioning; and so the writing of prose poetry became more and more a thing that came readily to his hand. The years 1942 to 1945 were still a rich period of my father's poetry-writing; the passion of that creation had its source in his earlier intimate experiences—it was the lingering continuation of the abundant feeling of those earlier years, but, deposited and filtered through time, it grew ever more crystalline and translucent. If poetry excels at lyric utterance, and prose poetry is good at catching the subtle stirrings of the heart and turning them into wise contemplation, then prose poetry accorded more closely with my father's nature. It was precisely in this period that prose poetry began to become my father's principal mode of lyric expression.
In my father's prose poetry there is the “sower” with bare feet and a ragged coat, who buries his own blood-red heart in the earthen hole, sowing the seeds of love; there is the “lodger” who, with the burden of “responsibility” on his back, walks unceasingly through wind, frost, rain, and snow toward an unknowable far country; there is the “questioner” who stands at humanity's mysterious gate and stubbornly interrogates the soul; there is the “magician” who holds a magic key, opens the door of fantasy, yet is powerless to change a painful world; there is the “fire-stealer” who walks through the desolate night seeking to kindle the fire of thought's light…—one living image after another, gathering up my father's reflections on the value of the human being and the meaning of life.
The prose-poem cycles “Yeliya” and “Linamon” were written in early 1947. At that time the Zhejiang Daily had moved from Lishui to Hangzhou and was then taken over by the authorities, and my father lost his post; luckily he was able to help his mother edit Women's Weekly. A family of eight squeezed into a snail's shell of barely six square meters, and every night, after the family next door had fallen fast asleep, my father could only begin to write under the dim lamplight. But a hard-pressed life could not bind down the wings of poetic thought; on the contrary, it gave birth to that radiant girl-image, Yeliya. “The snow has already melted, the sun has already come out, the sky will be dark and lightless no more. Come out and walk, Yeliya; turn your face toward the sun, turn your heart toward the sun, and, like those early-spring flowering trees, scatter your joy toward the sun.” The poet ardently summons the sunlight-pure girl, leading her into the bright open country spread with spring sun, to awaken in her the revelation of life that nature brings. Under the poet's pen, Yeliya is “I,” is the great nature of early spring, is life, is love, is the human ideal.
This is the pure outflow of nature, the artless artistry; it does not labor at carving and chiseling, yet it melts life into a single integral symbol. It is hard to imagine that the impoverished, hard-pressed straits of porridge-thin days could nurture poems so bright and so easeful. After writing several pieces in the cycle “Yeliya,” my father began to conceive another set of prose poems, “Linamon.” If Yeliya is too pure, too innocent—so that the poet cannot bear to let her disperse the gloom of his life and the heavy weight of his thought, which press upon her shoulders—then Linamon is deep and melancholy; mercilessly it lays bare the profound inner contradictions of a generation of intellectuals.
“The Final Curtain” is an ingeniously conceived prose poem. On the stage, the heavy curtain slowly falls, cutting off the single thread of connection between the people in the play and the audience. People leave their seats—some leading a lover, some carrying a child—and come out from the dispersing theater. The theater is empty and hollow, like an ancient tomb, and left behind in it are an old man and a youth. The old man is mute; this is the last winter day of his life, the last time he will watch a play. Just then, in comes an old woman; she holds a candle and bends over to search for something between the long benches…
“Life is a theater of plays.” Just as a young person sees from the stage all manner of human life-stories, the old man has personally lived through all manner of human life-stories; the performance is over, the curtain about to fall—and so he comes to pick up again whatever has been left behind: “In this courtyard of the night's spent play, may I, by this little candlelight, search out something of what has been lost?” Too many trials and ordeals made my father, all too truly, bid farewell to his youth; and so his prose poetry shows itself the more deep and rich, the more broad and weighty.
Liberation came. My father, full of hope, welcomed the first light of dawn. This was just his vigorous creative period; he ought to have sung aloud and let his feeling pour out—and yet, like the great majority of older writers, he fell mute. Prison and poverty had not been able to smother my father's poetic feeling, but now he set down the pen he had wielded so long, and admonished his sons and daughters not to study literature. My father secretly taught himself, and poured all his learning, all his ardor, all his heart's blood into his students.
In my childhood memory, I would now and then catch sight of my father writing poetry. Every winter and summer vacation, my father would come down from Hangzhou with a travel bag on his shoulder and a string-bag in his hand, hurrying in through the door, and we children would rush up and embrace him, looking forward to his producing presents as if by a conjuring trick. Only my second younger sister would hide at the head of the stairs and peep timidly; my father had only to beckon to her, and at once she would dash back upstairs.
Although there were many children in the house, so that it was never lonely, my father's arrival still added, all at once, sunshine and joy. Every year my father would take the children to “Lutian” or “Nanyang” to have a “family photograph” taken, and mother would devise every means to dress each child in new clothes. Every evening, as the night came down, song would rise from the house. First my father and mother would sing together, then eldest brother and eldest sister would join in, and then the whole family would sing in chorus—duets, songs by Schubert, “The Mountain Hawthorn Tree,” “The Red Plum Blossoms,” Russian folk-songs… a single branch of a family standing in for a whole orchestra. This was the time when everyone was most intoxicated, most happy. At night, the children would vie to crowd onto father's and mother's bed to sleep; little sister enjoyed the privilege of sleeping in the middle, between them, while the few of us who were a little older could only squeeze in at the foot of the bed. But as soon as morning came, we would again, like a band of burrowing creatures, slip in stealthily and crowd in at father's and mother's side, pestering father to tell us stories.
My father was kind and gentle, calm and serene. I never realized what giving up poetry meant for my father; never realized the bitterness hidden within “do not study literature.” And yet, even so, during the Cultural Revolution my father still could not escape calamity.
It was not until the early 1980s, after a full interval of thirty years, that my father, at sixty-five, returned at last to that world which belonged to him. “One day I was sitting alone in my room, brows knit, breathing low and level, and a floating thought slowly sank and settled; it was as if in a dream and not a dream—a sensation as of an illusion, as though the long-lost poetic spirit had suddenly come once more to call on me. I started in surprise: the lost illusion stood vivid before my eyes. And so I took this illusion and described it in words on paper.” The first prose poem of my father, returned to the world of letters, was “Illusion”:
“A spring rain had just passed, and in the dawn the poetic spirit, draped in mist-thin gauze, came soundlessly. She seemed to want to say something to me, and yet did not say it; she seemed to want to sing me some song, and yet sent forth no song.” And “I seemed to know her, and yet felt her a stranger; it was as though we met for the first time, and yet I dimly remembered we had once been well acquainted. I searched and could not find her in my memory, and yet I was lost and vague, as if I had lost all recollection…” Thirty drifting years are enough to wipe away a man's memory, enough to make the singing throat go dumb, enough to make the lamp of poetry gutter out—and yet my father took up once more the song that he had begun.
My father's heart was open and broad. He laid bare the true face of the “saint” with his blustering manner and his lofty, vaunting airs; he loved the “flute-playing old man,” at ease and untroubled, who cherished the weary laborers of the wheat fields; he praised the “mountain-village woman teacher” who kept time to the rhythm of the heart and taught the children to recite poetry; he grieved over the friends whose lives had been wrongfully taken in the prison of injustice as they rushed toward revolution; and at the same time he lashed those “masked actors” who play out every kind of role—emperor, general, scholar, philanthropist, swindler—and who, after the soul has left the body, no longer recognize their own “masked players”; even the grass, the trees, the insects, the birds could all pluck at my father's heartstrings and call forth gorgeous, far-reaching poetic thought. He pondered: what is wealth, what is satisfaction, what is truth, what is fortune and misfortune; he listened to the faint speech of life and to the voice of his own soul; he sang the love-songs of dusk while cherishing the memory of first love; he knocked at the window of those who slumber, striving hard to awaken the people lost in muddled dreams… Yes—“in the season of the changing of the seasons,” my father was a diligent sower, and my father's heart was a “fertile soil” nurturing poems.
Speaking of the writing of prose poetry, my father said: “I really do not know what I ought to call it—prose? It seems I am writing poetry. Poetry? It seems I am writing prose. Prose poetry? It seems I am again writing fables, writing fairy tales, writing stories, writing fiction, writing dramatic monologues, writing film shot-breakdowns, writing the reflections that come after reading, even writing argumentative essays…” In opening out the content and form of prose poetry, my father gave the heart's blood of his whole life, right up to his life's last breath.
My father was “the vagabond of the poetic realm.” He had no power, no position, no money. In his clothes-bag there was nothing at all; in his knapsack there were only a roll of poems, a sheaf of manuscripts, and one worn-out pen. And yet he was also the richest of men, possessing a boundless golden kingdom. In both ages, the old and the new, my father was once regarded as an “intruder”; yet he also possessed friends and students close to him in heart, and the dear ones whom he loved. And those poems he wrote “upon the green leaves” will still, from dawn to dusk, from spring to winter, endure the spring sun, the summer rain, the autumn wind, the winter snow…
(Author's affiliation: School of Humanities, Wenzhou University)