My Land: Passing the Night Alone at Boshan

COOL POEMS: Introduction > THE POEMS

Topic: My Land

Author: Xin Qiji (1140-1207)

Passing the Night Alone at Boshan

Hungry rats scamper ‘round my bed,
Bats do a dance about the lamp,
Above the roof, wind in the pines fans the rain’s fury
While tattered paper window panes chatter to themselves.

All my life I’ve travelled the country,
Returning now with frosty hair and pale mien.
My blanket thin, I woke from a dream this autumn eve,
But could see just as clearly the boundless hills and rivers of our land.

 
Comments: The first stanza of this poem exemplifies well the Song literary principle “Taking the ordinary/vulgar and making it beautiful.” Most people would be thoroughly disgusted staying in a cheap hotel infested with bats and rats, not to mention drafty windows, but Xin’s poetic eye discerns a curious performance in the bat’s dance as well as a whimsical poetry in the rhythm of wind-flapped paper. Such a sensibility sounds rather modern to European or American ears because Western poets take up such subjects late in historical time, but this should not blind us to the fact that Chinese poets explored such subjects early on. In the second stanza Xin reflects upon the vicissitudes of his life and the physical hardships he has endured in his service as an official. Passing the night in such a low-grade hostel he can hardly sleep, yet upon awakening he is compensated by a view of China’s boundless landscape. As a result this poem, like many others Xin wrote, is often classed among his “patriotic” poems because it takes pride in China as a culture and as a polity. Such sentiments were not uncommon in Song times, but differed from modern “patriotism” in that international cultural competition was not a consideration for Chinese intellectuals at that time as it would for post-Hegelian intellectuals in the 18th and 19th centuries.

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