Spring and Stone and the Total Perspective Vortex

Nice flowers you’ve got there. Be a shame if they turned out to symbolize the ephemerality of all things.

I try not to deal in cliches, commonplaces, or moldy oldies, but here, have a Meng Haoran 孟浩然 (689-740) poem that some sizable percentage of the species has known by heart for the last thousand years:

春曉

春眠不覺曉，處處聞啼鳥。
夜來風雨聲，花落知多少？

Spring Dawning

Spring slumber: I didn't mark the dawn.
From all around, the sound of singing birds.
In the night there was a noise of wind and rain —
Flowers fell. I wonder how many?

I have a soft spot for this one — as opposed to, say, Li Bai’s “Thoughts on a Still Night” (靜夜思), which by the numbers has got to be the most overrated piece of literature in all of human history. Meng’s poem is hardly any less of a cliche (it was several centuries’ introduction to pentameter, thanks to the anthology 千家詩 Qian jia shi) and to this day, if people know two Tang poems, you can be pretty sure this will be one of them — but there's more going on in it than initially meets the eye.

I'm cheating a bit by rendering the 曉 in the title as "Dawning" rather than the more common "Dawn" or "Daybreak" or "Morning" — but as in English, the word refers to both the thing that happens in the sky every morning and the thing that happens in our heads when we're lucky. Each line of the poem finds Meng a little more awake and a little more reengaged with the world around him. Spring and dawn have renewed that world for the time being — but the last line knows as well as we do that it's only temporary.

I also have a soft spot for the characteristically boozy response to this poem by Meng's younger admirer Li Bai, an entirely minor work by a poet as major as they come:

自遣

對酒不覺瞑，落花盈我衣。
醉起步溪月，烏還人亦稀。

Diversion

Drinking, I didn't mark the gloaming —
Fallen flowers fill the folds of my gown.
Drunk I rise, and track the moon in the stream.
The birds are roosting; people, few and far between.

---

Ka-pow.

Say what you will about the humanities — everyone does anyway — but there's nothing better than poetry for getting an uncomfortably accurate sense of perspective, with the possible exception of geology. Here's the Yuan official and poet Zhang Yanghao 張養浩 (1270-1329) on the site of Tong Pass, control of which could (and did) change the fortunes of emperors:

山坡羊 · 潼关怀古

峯巒如聚，波濤如怒，
山河表裏潼關路。
望西都，意躊躇。
傷心秦漢經行處，
宮闕萬間都做了土。
興，百姓苦；
亡，百姓苦！

Reflections on the Past: At Tong Pass
(to 'Sheep on the Hillside')

The peaks of Mount Hua muster in, 
The waves of the Yellow River rage. 
Threading through mountain and river it runs: 
          The road up to Tong Pass.
I pause 
          and gaze west toward the capital that was: 
Where Qin and Han and Tang passed through, 
And every one of their palaces turned to dust. 
Dynasties
          rise: the little people suffer.
          fall: the little people suffer.

This is pretty good, but it's still only a human timescale. How about Hanshan 寒山, the dour Zen collective we met in passing a while back?

桃花欲經夏， 風月催不待。
訪覓漢時人， 能無一箇在。
朝朝花遷落， 歲歲人移改。
今日揚塵處， 昔時為大海。

Peach blossoms long to last the summer through,
But by wind and moon are driven ceaselessly.
Search as you may for the people of the Han,
There's nary a one alive today.
Dawn after dawn, the flowers aged and fell;
Year in, year out, the people moved and changed.
There, where your foot kicks up the dust —
That once was sea.

(HS 55)

Those last lines knocked me on my ass pretty good the first time I read them, sitting about fifteen minutes' bike ride from the edge of the Piedmont Plateau, where the Atlantic Coastal Plain meets with what's left of the Alleghanian orogen. But we can still do better, or at any rate Liu Yin 劉因 (1249-1293) can:

茫茫大塊洪爐裏，何物不寒灰？
古今多少 荒煙廢壘 老樹遺臺
太山如礪 黃河如帯 等是塵埃
不須更嘆 花開花落 春去春來

One day, through all the smithy of Creation,
Ashes will cool where now the fire rages.
And what then, after all the ages?
Fortresses fallen to desolation,
Old trees the graves of palaces,
Mighty Mount Tai, worn to a whetstone,
A narrow band that was the Yellow River —
And even these soon dust forever.
No sense in sighing
At flowers blooming and dying in the blast:
The spring is past. Next year will bring
Another and another spring.

Enjoy the weekend! It won't be long enough, but what ever is?