(Po Chü-i)
(772–846)
One of the best-known poets of the Middle TANG DYNASTY, Bo Juyi was a successful government official who believed that poetry should be accessible to all, and that it should be used for the betterment of society. He was the most prolific of all Tang poets, leaving a legacy of more than 2,800 poems. Bo was born in China’s Shaanxi (Shensi) province. His father was a scholar, and at 29, Bo passed the JINSHI—the national civil service examination— and entered a life of public service. He had a successful political career, being appointed to a succession of positions in various parts of the Tang empire. Perhaps it was this broad experience that made him more keenly aware of the plight of the common people in the empire. In any case he became an advocate for the poor and the disenfranchised. With his friend YUAN ZHEN, Bo developed a theory of literature that called for a poetry that was both straightforward and socially conscious. The ideal Confucian poet, in his view, was one that used his literary talent to persuade those in power to cure social ills. In his xin yuefu, or “new yuefu,” Bo used a traditional form, not unlike a BALLAD or folk song in Western tradition, to dramatize the abuses suffered by the common people. In his poem “Watching the Reapers,” for example, he expresses his feeling of shame at how well he is paid as a government bureaucrat at the same time that government policies are causing others to starve:
They lost in grain-tax the whole of their crop;
What they glean here is all they will have to eat. . . .
At the year’s end I have still grain in hand.
Thinking of this, secretly I grew ashamed
And all day the thought lingered in my head.
(Waley 1941, “Watching the Reapers,” ll.19–26)
In this poem and others like it, Bo deliberately aimed for a style of verbal simplicity. According to one old legend, he read all of his poems to an old peasant woman before publishing them, and he reworked any parts of the poem that she did not understand. Such a story is probably apocryphal, but it does indicate how important Bo thought it was to make his poems accessible to all.
While Bo thought his poems of social commentary were his most important, the majority of his readers over the centuries have preferred some of his other productions.His most popular poem has probably been “A Song of Unending Sorrow,” which tells the story of a tragic love affair, based on the historical liaison between the Emperor Xuanzong (Hsuan-tsung) and a young concubine named Yang Guifei (Yang Kuei-fei). But critical appreciation has been most kind to his personal poems. Like his great predecessor Du Fu, Bo used small incidents in his own life to reflect in poetic form on his inner responses. He writes of little things—gardening, eating, family concerns—often with humor, but sometimes with great poignancy, as in the following poem where he remembers the death of his three-year-old daughter, jarred into remembering her when by chance he runs into her nurse on the street:
There came a day—they suddenly took her from me;
Her soul’s shadow wandered I know not where.
And when I remember how just at the time she died
She lisped strange sounds, beginning to learn to talk,
Then I know that the ties of flesh and blood
Only bind us to a load of grief and sorrow.
(Waley 1941, “Remembering Golden Bells,” ll. 7–10)
With his colloquial diction, his outspoken social criticism, and his autobiographical poems that provided a model for a number of later poets in the genre, Bo Juyi, is a unique figure among the Tang poets. Though not of the stature of Du Fu or Li BAI, he is one of the more important voices of the era.
Bibliography
■ Waley, Arthur. The Life and Times of Po-Chü-i, 772–846 A.D. London: Allen and Unwin, 1940.
■ ———, trans. Translations from the Chinese. New York: Knopf, 1941.
■ Watson, Burton, trans. Po Chü-i: Selected Poems. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.