Li Qingzhao and Graceful and Restrained Ci Poetry

Li Qingzhao (1084—1155), with the courtesy name of Yian Jushi, was a famous female ci poet living between the late Northern Song Dynasty and the early Southern Song Dynasty, and a very influential female writer in the history of Chinese literature. Li Qingzhao was born in a scholar-bureaucrat's family, well educated in literature in her childhood, and accomplished in literature and history with outstanding talent. She and her husband Zhao Mingcheng were both interested in collecting and studying epigraphic calligraphy and painting works, and wrote Epigraphic Collection.

Li Qingzhao's life includes two periods separated by the Jingkang Incident. In the 2nd year of the Jingkang Period (1127), Jin troops captured the capital of the Northern Song Dynasty Dongjing (today's Kaifeng, Henan), and the Song Dynasty moved the capital to Lin'an (today's Hangzhou, Zhejiang) in the south and was historically called the Southern Song Dynasty. Before the capital was moved to the south, Li Qingzhao lived happily as a girl and young married woman. She had her joy and happiness. Though her husband served as an official away from home, adding some loneliness and grief of parting, her life was quiet and comfortable. After the capital was moved to the south, the country was conquered and her family wrecked. She wandered from place to place among fires of war. Besides, her husband died of illness, and the epigraphic calligraphy and painting works collected in many years were lost. All miseries in life attacked at the same time, making Li Qingzhao sink into a sad and painful situation. The Jingkang Incident completely changed Li Qingzhao's life and changed her understanding of literature. Before the incident, she was a daughter of an eminent family, she and her husband loved each other, and her family life was the main part of her life; after the incident, the country was conquered and her family wrecked, she wandered from place to place, and the fate of the country became an issue she had to think about. This also added deep awareness of potential dangers and melancholy to her later literary creations.

In On Ci Poetry, Li Qingzhao systematically elaborated her views on creation of ci poetry and schools of ci poetry. Like Su Shi and others, she emphasized the difference between poetry and ci poetry and that ci poetry should "be a separate genre" different from poetry. However, Li Qingzhao more clearly pointed out ci poetry's fundamental characteristics should be elegance, simplicity, smoothness, flexibility, strict sound and rhyme patterns, solemnity and exquisiteness. Li Qingzhao not only separated ci poetry and poetry, but also pointed out the characteristics of the graceful and restrained style of ci poetry commended by her.

Li Qingzhao's ci poems reveal his stylistic characteristics of softness, mildness and exquisiteness. This is first of all related to her sharp perceptiveness particular to women. Li Qingzhao's ci poems have a very prominent image, i.e. the lyric protagonist's sentimental, emotional and sorrowful image. Through this image, the female ci poet repeatedly expressed her deep consciousness and feelings from the bottom of her heart tenderly and insightfully. Her famous ci poem Like A Dream is an example:

Last night the wind was strong and rain was fine,

Sound sleep did not dispel the taste of wine.

I ask the maid who's rolling up the screen.

"The same crab-apple tree, she says, "is seen. "

"Don't you know,

Don 't you know

The red should languish and the green must grow?

This ci poem has not only the artistic conceptions of "night rain" and "fragrant flowers" often described in previous ci poems, but also its own unique characteristics. This short ci poem features skillful and changeful methods such as word reduplication and Q&A. The length of one's life and "growing green and languish red" form a sharp contrast and make people feel boundless melancholy. A Twig of'Mume Blossoms is more delicate and grieved:

The jade-like mat feels autumn s cold, I change a coat

And 'mid the fading fragrance

Of lotus pink alone I boat.

Will wild returning geese bring letters through the cloud?

When they come, with moonbeams

My west chamber s overflowed.

As water flows and flowers jail without leaving traces,

One and the same longing

Overflows two lonely places.

I cannot get rid of this sorrow: kept apart

From my eyebrows,

It gnaws my heart.

This ci poem was written after the newly-married couple of Li Qingzhao and Zhao Mingcheng parted. Though expressing personal feelings, it is vivid and moving. The character's expressions and movements as well as the slightest emotional stirrings from the bottom of the heart are described in great detail. What should be commended is that Li Qingzhao used plain words to express such an exceedingly sentimental and complicated emotion without difficulty. "From my eyebrows, it gnaws my heart" perfectly manifests the lovesickness that could not be dispelled by the woman separated from her husband.

Her famous work Intoxicated Under the Shadow of Flowers is also a ci poem on her longing for her husband:

The Double Ninth Festival

Light .mists and heavy clouds,

melancholy the long dreary day.

In the golden censer

the burning incense is dying away.

It is again time

for the lovely Double-Ninth Festival;

The coolness of midnight

penetrates my screen of sheer silk

and chills my pillow of jade.

After drinking wine at twilight

under the chrysanthemum hedge,

My sleeves are perfumed

by the fragrance of the plants.

Oh, I cannot say it is not endearing,

Only, when the west wind stirs the curtain,

I see that I am more gracile

than the yellow flowers.

There is also a story about this ci poem. During the Double Ninth Festival, Li Qingzhao wrote this ci poem and mailed it to her husband. After Zhao Mingcheng read it, he appreciated it very much but wanted to surpass his wife, so he closed the door to visitors, cudgeled his brains for three days and three nights, wrote 50 ci poems, mixed the ci poem written by his wife with them, and showed them to a friend. After perusing them, the friend thought for a while and finally said that "Oh, I cannot say it is not endearing, only, when the west wind stirs the curtain, I see that I am more gracile than the yellow flowers" were the best lines!

Li Qingzhao was also very good at expressing complicated emotions with ci poems' rhymes and embodying those indescribable inner feelings in common actual scenes. Slow, Slow Tune is a representative ci poem among Li Qingzhao's later works:

I look for what I miss,

I know not what it is:

I feel so sad, so drear,

So lonely, without cheer

How hard is it

To keep me fit

In this lingering cold!

Hardly warmed up

By cup on cup

Of wine so dry.

Oh! how could I

Endure at dusk the drift

Of wind so swift?

It breaks my heart, alas!

To see the wild geese pass,

For they are my acquaintances of old.

The ground is covered with yellow flowers

Faded and fallen in showers.

Who will pick them up now?

Sitting alone at the window,

How could I but quicken

The pace of darkness which won't thicken?

On parasol-trees a fine rain drizzles

As twilight grizzles.

The cold and lifeless natural scene of late autumn is also a portrayal of sadness in life. Here Li Qingzhao spared no effort to describe the scene of late autumn, and the ci poet showed her inner emotions in writing at the same time. Her resentment about the conquered country and wrecked family, her misery of homelessness and the loneliness she felt after her husband's death were all released. However, the ci poem is common and clear without flowery language. "My acquaintances of old," "who will pick them up now" and "what can I do with a grief beyond belief are all very plain lines. Alliteration and assonance in the first few lines are also very common, but this is just where Li Qingzhao's skills lie. Profound meanings are embodied in common words, and plain expressions are filled with a sense of beauty. Those seemingly common words are easy-to-read and highly musical.

In both the early period and the late period, Li Qingzhao established her unique position in the history of literature with the graceful and restrained style. Her ci poems were reputed by later people as "Yi'an style" and "orthodox graceful and restrained style."