“‘O son, man’s greatest earthly boon,
With thee I bury hopes and fears.’
He bowed his head in grief, and soon
His breast was wet with rolling tears.
“Life’s dread uncertainty he knows,
But oh for this untimely close!”
There was Wang Ts‘an (A.D. 177-217), a learned man who wrote an Ars Poetica, not, however, in verse. A youth of great promise, he excelled as a poet, although the times were most unfavourable to success. It has been alleged, with more or less truth, that all Chinese poetry is pitched in the key of melancholy; that the favourite themes of Chinese poets are the transitory character of life with its partings and other ills, and the inevitable approach of death, with substitution of the unknown for the known. Wang Ts‘an had good cause for his lamentations. He was forced by political disturbances to leave his home at the capital and seek safety in flight. There, as he tells us,
“Wolves and tigers work their own sweet will.”
On the way he finds
“Naught but bleached bones covering the plain ahead,”
and he comes across a famine-stricken woman who had thrown among the bushes a child she was unable to feed. Arriving at the Great River, the setting sun brings his feelings to a head:—
“Streaks of light still cling to the hill-tops,
While a deeper shade falls upon the steep slopes;
The fox makes his way to his burrow,
Birds fly back to their homes in the wood,
Clear sound the ripples of the rushing waves,
Along the banks the gibbons scream and cry,
My sleeves are fluttered by the whistling gale,
The lapels of my robe are drenched with dew.
The livelong night I cannot close my eyes.
I arise and seize my guitar,
Which, ever in sympathy with man’s changing moods,
Now sounds responsive to my grief.”
But music cannot make him forget his kith and kin—