Innovative Treatments of the 'Ganyu'-Poem Subgenre in the Late Eleventh Century: He Zhu and Chao Buzhi

One of the many things that make the poetry of He Zhu 賀鑄 (1052–1125) interesting and worthy of study is his success in giving new life to the poetic forms that were bequeathed to Northern Song writers by their Tang predecessors. Whether he was taking the language of a heptametric Ancient Verse (gushi 古詩) from popular performance literature rather than the canonical histories, experimenting with arranging poems on the topic of southern birds into a structured suite, or using metrical violations in Regulated Verse (lüshi 律 詩) to give emotive overtones to his poetry, He Zhu was an experimenter. His lyrics (ci 詞) are much better known, but the same musical or aural sensitivity that made them so appealing often energizes his shi 詩 poetry, as well.¹

One singular example of He Zhu's drive to break new ground is a poem he wrote (or revised, if we are to believe his headnote) in 1096 under the title "Bu ganyu shi" 補感寓詩 ("Restored Poem of Being Moved and Lodging the Feelings in Words"). This is a difficult poem rich in violent imagery; it might have been intended as an allegory, an allegory whose urgent topical meaning is unrecoverable today and surely would have been intelligible even then only to those who were let in on the secret by the poet himself. In any case, it is unique among poems in the Tang and Song that come to us under the title of "Ganyu shi" (on which, see below).

Measured on a scale of obscurity, He Zhu's poem is similar to a series of ten poems by his contemporary Chao Buzhi 晁補之 (1053–1110), also under the title "Ganyu shi" 感寓詩. Unlike other poems with the same title by Tang and Song poets, and unlike poems with the similar title "Ganyu shi" 感遇 詩 ("poems on things encountered"), Chao and He's works are not relatively transparent, generalized allegories. They are so different from predecessor poems with these titles that one might suppose that these two poets were refashioning the subgenre to use it for expressing outrage at specific people, perhaps those who were attempting to censor history in the post-Yuanyou eras. If so, use of the old title "Ganyu," "being moved and lodging the feelings," might have been intended as a coded signal to the reader to expect a targeted topical allegory. This was my hypothesis when I wrote about He Zhu's poem in 2007 (see note 1).

I now know that Chao's set of poems was written in 1090 (see note 47), the fifth year of the Yuanyou 元祐 reign era (1086–1093), so its historical context is not the same as He Zhu's, and post-Yuanyou politics are not relevant. Chao Buzhi's difficult allusive mode can also be best explained by the influence of Huang Tingjian 黃庭堅 (1045–1105). It is true that Chao's decision to call his ten poems "Ganyu shi" owes nothing to Huang, who did not write any poems extant today that he called "Ganyu shi." Perhaps Chao had the germ of a new idea, one that He Zhu took up six years later. But if He Zhu and Chao Buzhi really did have a shared understanding of a new kind of topical ganyu poem, they did not manage to come up with a single model that other poets could follow, at least on the evidence of surviving Song poetry. The allusive Huang/Chao style was followed, but not under the banner of a new ganyu shi; and if there are any poems inspired by He Zhu's "Ganyu shi," their titles do not identify them as such.

Rather than simply retracting my hypothesis about the ganyu poems by He Zhu and Chao Buzhi, I would like to take the opportunity to put more evidence into the record. I shall begin with a revised outline of the ganyu subgenre as it was practiced by other poets. Then, in order to clarify the similarities and differences among He Zhu, Chao, and Huang, I shall translate the full set of Chao's poems with comments on their structures...