p. 162, SORROW OF DEPARTURE: Earlier version by KR in 100: “To the Tune, ‘Plum Blossoms Fall and Scatter.’” p. 163, FADING PLUM BLOSSOMS: Referring to another poem of hers, Li Ch’ing-chao wrote: “Poets in the past always complained that to write about plum blossoms was very difficult, for you can hardly avoid vulgarism. Now that I have tried it, I totally agree with them.” p. 164, AUTUMN LOVE: Earlier version by KR in Love: “A Weary Song to a Slow Sad Tune.” p. 167, ON SPRING: Earlier version by KR in 100: “Mist.” p. 168, A SONG OF DEPARTURE: Earlier versions by KR in 100 (“Alone in the Night”) and Orchid (“The Sorrow of Departure”). p. 169, SPRING ENDS: Earlier versions by KR in Love (“To the Tune ‘Spring at Wu Ling’”) and Orchid (“Spring Ends”).
LU YU (1125–1210) KR (Love): “Lu Yu is the least classical of the major Sung poets. Although a member of the scholar gentry, he never attained, or desired, high office, and seems to have been genuinely far from rich, especially toward the end of his life. (Understand that throughout China’s history a really ‘poor farmer’ never got a chance to read or write anything.) His poetry is loose, casual. It had to be–he wrote about eleven thousand poems. His poems have that easy directness that is supposed to come only with rare, concentrated effort. By his day Sung China had retreated to the South and the Golden Tatars in the North were already being threatened by the Mongols who were soon to overwhelm all. Lu Yu’s patriotism was not prepared to accept the modus vivendi less doctrinaire minds had worked out, and his stirring agitational poems against the invader have been very popular in twentieth-century China where everybody has been an invader to everybody else.”
Lu Yu: “We make our poems out of pure sadness, for without sadness how would we have any poems?”
Tai Fu-ku (1167–?) on Lu Yu: “Using what is plain and simple he fashioned subtle lines; / Taking the most ordinary words, he changed them into wonders.” (trans. Burton Watson)
p. 176, THE WILD FLOWER MAN: “There is a veiled ironic reference to a Sung Buddhist saint who was reputed to live only on honey.” (KR, 100)
YANG WAN-LI (1127–1206) An important official who fell in and out of favor; a devout Buddhist who developed a Ch’an theory of poetic careers: in the disciple stage, one imitates the masters; then one achieves a poetic “enlightenment” and effortlessly writes one’s own poetry. His poem on a fly is thought to be the first in Chinese.
DH (Mountain): “Yang Wan-li was the last of the great Sung poets, and with him China’s rivers-and-mountains poetry had opened up virtually all of its possibilities. China’s poets would continue to actively cultivate this rich terrain up to the present, but there would be few really fundamental innovations.”
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