From emotion to argument

Our heroine ratchets up the pressure

Jade Pavilion Songs (9)
Quan Deyu

The autumn wind
    Blew all night long,
        Your pretty flowers
            Blew away.
Oh, neighbour girls
    Made eyes at Song—
        Come home, my love,
            And don’t delay.

权德舆  玉台体十二首·其九
秋风一夜至，吹尽后庭花。
莫作经时别，西邻是宋家。

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After several poems wallowing directly in emotion, the lonely-wife-voice-of-the-poet turns to argument. The errant husband should come home soon not just because the wife feels bad, but because there could be serious consequences if he stays away too long. Song Yu was a man of excessive physical beauty back in the Warring States era. The neighbour girl used to climb onto the garden wall to gaze at him.

(Song Yu told this tale himself to illustrate how clean-living he was: despite the neighbour girl being a great beauty herself, he never reciprocated her shameless advances. But the point in this poem is that with the husband away, anything might happen.)

This poem offers a nice example of how Tang poets liked to work their metaphors. The flowers in the first half are clearly a metaphor for the wife in the second half. But Tang poets didn’t like to just create a metaphor out of thin air and tack it emptily onto something real. They wanted their metaphors to be the consonance of real things. So the poet waits until the autumn winds provide the metaphor in concrete form, and then writes this poem to capture the moment.