VI. TU FU

T’ao Ch’ien—Po Chü-i—Poems for malaria—Tu Fu and Li Po—A vision of war—Prosperous days—Destitution—Death

Li Po is the Keats of China, but there are other singers almost as fondly cherished by his countrymen. There is the simple and stoic T’ao Ch’ien, who left a government position because, as he said, he was unable any longer to “crook the hinges of his back for five pecks of rice a day”—that is, kow-tow* for his salary. Like many another public man disgusted with the commercialism of official life, he went to live in the woods, seeking there “length of years and depth of wine,” and finding the same solace and delight in the streams and mountains of China that her painters would later express on silk.

I pluck chrysanthemums under the eastern hedge,

Then gaze long at the distant summer hills.

The mountain air is fresh at the dawn of day;

The flying birds two by two return.

In these things there lies a deep meaning;

Yet when we would express it, words suddenly fail us. . . .

What folly to spend one’s life like a dropped leaf

Snared under the dust of streets!

But for thirteen years it was so I lived. . . .

For a long time I have lived in a cage;

Now I have returned.

For one must return

To fulfil one’s nature.⁵⁷

Po Chü-i took the other road, choosing public office and life in the capital; he rose from place to place until he was governor of the great city of Hangchow, and President of the Board of War. Nevertheless he lived to the age of seventy-two, wrote four thousand poems, and tasted Nature to his heart’s content in interludes of exile.⁵⁸ He knew the secret of mingling solitude with crowds, and repose with an active life. He made not too many friends, being, as he said, of middling accomplishment in “calligraphy, painting, chess and gambling, which tend to bring men together in pleasurable intercourse.”⁵⁹ He liked to talk with simple people, and story has it that he would read his poems to an old peasant woman, and simplify anything that she could not understand. Hence he became the best-loved of the Chinese poets among the common people; his poetry was inscribed everywhere, on the walls of schools and temples, and the cabins of ships. “You must not think,” said a “sing-song” girl to a captain whom she was entertaining, “that I am an ordinary dancing girl; I can recite Master Po’s “Everlasting Wrong.”⁶⁰*

We have kept for the last the profound and lovable Tu Fu. “English writers on Chinese literature,” says Arthur Waley, “are fond of announcing that Li T’ai-po is China’s greatest poet; the Chinese themselves, however, award this place to Tu Fu.”⁶¹ We first hear of him at Chang-an; he had come up to take the examinations for office, and had failed. He was not dismayed, even though his failure had been specifically in the subject of poetry; he announced to the public that his poems were a good cure for malarial fever, and seems to have tried the cure himself.⁶² Ming Huang read some of his verses, gave him, personally, another examination, marked him successful, and appointed him secretary to General Tsoa. Emboldened, and forgetting for a moment his wife and children in their distant village, Tu Fu settled down in the capital, exchanged songs with Li Po, and studied the taverns, paying for his wine with poetry. He writes of Li:

I love my Lord as younger brother loves elder brother,

In autumn, exhilarated by wine, we sleep under a single quilt;

Hand in hand, we daily walk together.⁶³

Those were the days of the love of Ming for Yang Kwei-fei. Tu celebrated it like the other poets; but when revolution burst forth, and rival ambitions drenched China in blood, he turned his muse to sadder themes, and pictured the human side of war:

Last night a government order came

To enlist boys who had reached eighteen.

They must help defend the capital. . . .

O Mother! O Children, do not weep so!

Shedding such tears will injure you.

When tears stop flowing then bones come through,

Nor Heaven nor Earth has compassion then. . . .

Do you know that in Shantung there are two hundred counties turned to the desert forlorn,

Thousands of villages, farms, covered only with bushes, the thorn?

Men are slain like dogs, women driven like hens along. . . .

If I had only known how bad is the fate of boys

I would have had my children all girls. . . .

Boys are only born to be buried beneath tall grass.

Still the bones of the war-dead of long ago are beside the Blue Sea when you pass.

They are wildly white and they lie exposed on the sand,

Both the little young ghosts and the old ghosts gather here to cry in a band.

When the rains sweep down, and the autumn, and winds that chill,

Their voices are loud, so loud that I learn how grief can kill. . . .

Birds make love in their dreams while they drift on the tide,

For the dusk’s path the fireflies must make their own light.

Why should man kill man just in order to live?

In vain I sigh in the passing night.⁶⁴

For two years, during the revolutionary interlude, he wandered about China, sharing his destitution with his wife and children, so poor that he begged for bread, and so humbled that he knelt to pray for blessings upon the man who took his family in and fed them for a while.⁶⁵ He was saved by the kindly general Yen Wu, who made him his secretary, put up with his moods and pranks, established him in a cottage by Washing Flower Stream, and required nothing more of him than that he should write poetry.* He was happy now, and sang blissfully of rain and flowers, mountains and the moon.

Of what use is a phrase or a fine stanza?

Before me but mountains, deep forests, too black.

I think I shall sell my art objects, my books,

And drink just of nature when pure at the source. . . .

When a place is so lovely

I walk slow. I long to let loveliness drown in my soul.

I like to touch bird-feathers.

I blow deep into them to find the soft hairs beneath.

I like to count stamens, too,

And even weigh their pollen-gold.

The grass is a delight to sit on.

I do not need wine here because the flowers intoxicate me so. . . .

To the deep of my bones I love old trees, and the jade-blue waves of the sea.⁶⁶

The good general liked him so that he disturbed his peace, raising him to high office as a Censor in Ch’ang-an. Then suddenly the general died, war raged around the poet, and, left only with his genius, he soon found himself penniless again. His children, savage with hunger, sneered at him for his helplessness. He passed into a bitter and lonely old age, “an ugly thing now to the eye”; the roof of his cabin was torn away by the wind, and urchins robbed him of the straw of his bed while he looked on, too physically weak to resist.⁶⁷ Worst of all, he lost his taste for wine, and could no longer solve the problems of life in the fashion of Li Po. At last he turned to religion, and sought solace in Buddhism. Prematurely senile at fifty-nine, he made a pilgrimage to the Holy Huen Mountain to visit a famous temple. There he was discovered by a magistrate who had read his poetry. The official took the poet home, and ordered a banquet to be served in his honor; hot beef smoked, and sweet wine abounded; Tu Fu had not for many years seen such a feast. He ate hungrily. Then at his host’s request, he tried to compose and sing; but he fell down exhausted. The next day he died.⁶⁸