Yeah, that's a difficult question. I'm not nearly enough of a historian to give you a proper answer. All I know is that all security is porous, and we know that when women became senior concubines, they had a lot more freedom.
But I think I can answer it with enough clarity for the purposes of our poem: this was definitely a literary device, not a real letter. The reason is simple: supposing that a poet in the city did manage to have some kind of contact with a palace dancer, he wouldn't publish a poem about it! That would be putting her in mortal danger.
The other thing to remember with these poems is just how young these women were. Many were selected for palace life at 13 or 14. He may well be describing a teenager looking out through her prison bars.
How sure are we that the sequestration was total in practice, as opposed to in theory?
Yeah, that's a difficult question. I'm not nearly enough of a historian to give you a proper answer. All I know is that all security is porous, and we know that when women became senior concubines, they had a lot more freedom.
But I think I can answer it with enough clarity for the purposes of our poem: this was definitely a literary device, not a real letter. The reason is simple: supposing that a poet in the city did manage to have some kind of contact with a palace dancer, he wouldn't publish a poem about it! That would be putting her in mortal danger.
The other thing to remember with these poems is just how young these women were. Many were selected for palace life at 13 or 14. He may well be describing a teenager looking out through her prison bars.
Thanks! Yes, that all makes sense.