The mysterious case of the textureless poem

Meng Haoran just says it like it is

A mindless furball, according to science. Credit: Mathias Appel, Flickr.

Passing By the Farm of an Old Acquaintance
Meng Haoran

You laid on millet chicken, and a bed,
In your idyllic sanctuary.
The mountains slope away above the wood
That wraps us round in greenery.
Your windows overlook the fields; we drink
And speak of hemp and mulberry.
Chrysanthemums will bloom on Double Ninth,
I will return; look out for me.


孟浩然  过故人庄
故人具鸡黍，邀我至田家。
绿树村边合，青山郭外斜。
开轩面场圃，把酒话桑麻。
待到重阳日，还来就菊花。

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Double Ninth: This festival, held on the 9^th day of the 9^th lunar month (usually early October by the modern calendar) was associated with chrysanthemums and gathering with old friends.

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My son told me the other day that the complexity of our brains is connected physically to the amount of texture and folds on their surface; and koalas have almost perfectly smooth brains. (I couldn’t bear to put a picture of an actual koala brain on this post, so you just got a cute tree-hugger.)

This poem of Meng Haoran’s makes me think of those koala brains. This poem looks very much like many similar poems by similar poets. And yet, this one somehow seems flatter than all of them. It has some nice turns of phrase; it fits the meter; it rhymes. But it doesn’t have any of the smell or grit of poetry. There are no hidden meanings. Even the one symbol deployed in the last line seems somehow leached of symbolic meaning. It’s so flat that it started to feel rather splendid to me, and I wrestled mightily to find the rhymes to hold it together.