The accompanying “stop-short” by the same writer is generally thought to contain an effective surprise in the last line:—
“Beneath the bamboo grove, alone,
I seize my lute and sit and croon;
No ear to hear me, save mine own:
No eye to see me—save the moon.”
Wang Wei has been accused of loose writing and incongruous pictures. A friendly critic defends him as follows:—“For instance, there is Wang Wei, who introduces bananas into a snow-storm. When, however, we come to examine such points by the light of scholarship, we see that his mind had merely passed into subjective relationship with the things described. Fools say he did not know heat from cold.”
TS’UI HAO
A skilled poet, and a wine-bibber and gambler to boot, was Ts‘ui Hao, who graduated about A.D. 730.
He wrote a poem on the Yellow-Crane pagoda which until quite recently stood on the bank of the Yang-tsze near Hankow, and was put up to mark the spot where Wang Tzŭ-ch‘iao, who had attained immortality, went up to heaven in broad daylight six centuries before the Christian era. The great Li Po once thought of writing on the theme, but he gave up the idea so soon as he had read these lines by Ts‘ui Hao:—
“Here a mortal once sailed
up to heaven on a crane,
And the Yellow-Crane Kiosque,
will for ever remain;
But the bird flew away
and will come back no more,
Though the white clouds are there
as the white clouds of yore.
Away to the east
lie fair forests of trees,
From the flowers on the west
comes a scent-laden breeze,
Yet my eyes daily turn
to their far-away home,
Beyond the broad River,
its waves, and its foam.”
LI PO