Nostalgic and melancholic, the poetry of Yan Jidao in “XiaoshanCi” is characterized by its meticulous observation of the natural world – of rivers, mists, and flowers that embody human love and loss. Often, the narrator is a girl wandering alone in an empty, ancient domestic setting, staring at passing geese and waiting in vain for her departed loved one. Lotus flowers blossom like her beautiful but fleeting youth, candles melt like her tears, and ripples quiver like her unsettling heart. These exquisite images come not from a female writer but from a man, devoting his entire life to crafting delicate poetry focused on young women’s woe. This is the boudoir poetry tradition in classical China.
Popular during the Tang Dynasty, boudoir poetry portrays women in their daily contexts residing in misery. Here, we see leftover maids – deprived of their emperor’s love – watching the night place its shadow onto the castle. As the darkness gradually consumes the scenery, her life slowly falls into hopelessness. We see merchant wives sitting in the tall pavilion all day, looking at the approaching boats in glistening water, hoping one of them returns her husband … Extremely delicate in its imagery and symbolism, femininity defines boudoir poetry’s form and content. While some works in the genre are an authentic autobiography of female poets’ lives within a patriarchal, classical Chinese society, most boudoir poetry describes femininity from the male perspective. Why would men write about miserable women? What does a feminine perspective reveal that a male poet’s cannot? Is the male poet’s writing an effort to empower women by empathizing with their oppression, or does it further oppress the already underdeveloped feminine public discourse?
These answers lie in the connection between the male poet’s life experience and the poetry’s subject matter itself. Using imperial examinations of literature and composition to select bureaucrats, the Keju system in the Tang Dynasty contributed to the dual identity of literati as bureaucrats. Therefore, the boudoir poet is typically a middle-aged Chinese bureaucrat politically irritating the emperor, leading to his exile. Their loss of the emperor’s trust and attention, as well as their physical distance from the political center, are not dissimilar to the aging maid abandoned by the fickle emperor, residing in isolation in an entrapping castle. Moreover, given the classical Chinese Confucian tradition that emphasizes honor and respect toward the ruling class, direct, harsh criticism of the emperor’s acts was forbidden on any occasion. Consequently, bureaucrats used meandering and subtle boudoir metaphors as a vessel to convey their despondency. In this sense, women left over by their husbands and trapped in the boudoir are a metaphor for the men left over by the emperor and deprived of power, trapped in an embarrassing position that negates their political aspiration and personal agency.
But Yan Jidao is different. Out of the countless middle-aged men treating women as metaphors and symbols, he views them as friends, as sisters, as lovers deserving of authentic compassion and care, using his calligraphy brush to craft hundreds of heartfelt poems for them. The youngest son of Prime Minister Yan Shu, Yan was born into an affluent family with access to explore his talent for prose and poetry. He immersed himself in the world of literature, wine, and music, accompanied by family-owned maid girls who entertained him with their innocence and joy. This period, which I translated into “the halcyon days,” is the repetitive subject of reminiscence in his boudoir poetry.
After his father passed away, Yan was attacked by his father’s political opponents. Ultimately, he became a destitute aristocrat suffering from imprisonment and political turmoil. Yan’s desolate reality starkly contrasts with his peaceful past, driving him into a life-long state of woe and longing. Yet, his pain does not corrupt him into cursing and criticising his political opponents. Rather, it condenses into the most delicate poems of love and loss, of happy cuckoos and orioles singing tunes of the past, of soft wind kissing the pond to arouse wavelets, of a young girl with cheeks like jade who smiles beneath a plum blossom. All of these old artifacts and people revive themselves under his brush; he does not write to metaphorize but memorize, not to politicize but perpetuate. His writing is no doubt personal, though critics often criticize his poetry as an attachment to his particular self and suffering across Chinese literary history, making him not a poet of grand fame. Yet, his authentic reminiscence, his portrait of femininity, his love, and his loss are still touching across a millennium. This renders him one of the most captivating classical Chinese poets, in my humble opinion.
