space, with a corresponding but less emphatic time coverage (day and night, line 4; forever, line 9). The comprehensive spatial coverage is further brought out in the numerical phrases seven paths, nine Eight Marshes, and Five Mountains. We may recall the Four Seas (Poem 8, line 3), the Nine Provinces and Eight Confinements (Poem 10, lines 1 and 3), and the eight directions (Poem 11, line 1). The abrupt alternations of upward and downward movement are similar to those of Poems 2 and 4, and may suggest again psychological states of elation and depression. The much shorter Poem 14 ends with a cuttingoff device that we have already encountered twice (Poem 8, line 2, and Poem 12, line 16). The device is reinforced here by a change of rhyme. I am tempted to construe the following line of associations: change of rhyme-change of subject-say no more. This is a good point at which to cut off my essay. I do not claim that the approach attempted in these pages is the only possible approach to the work of a great poet such as Ts'ao Chih. Nor is my approach really new. It has been successfully applied for some time, by the New Critics and others, to Western poetry, and indeed, in isolated cases, to Chinese and Japanese poetry. I merely hope that what I have done here has brought out some aspects of Ts'ao Chih's poetry that had been obscured by previous interpretations. We have found Ts'ao Chih the poet to be quite distinct from the real or fancied historical Ts'ao Chih. This poet does not wallow in continuous self-pity. He is a highly imaginative artist. The world of his poetry is imbued with dynamic restlessness, without any trace of the placid tranquillity that we often associate with classic Chinese poetry. He does not speak of the Golden Mean but deals in extremes: extreme distances, extreme locations, extreme situations. Among his favorite images are tall objects, lofty places, soaring birds, aerial rides, wanderers, roads, rivers, boats, roaming animals, drifting plants. If most of his poems are melancholy, this does not mean that he was a sad sack in real life. In our own society, professional joke writers for television shows are apt to be gloomy in their private lives. In Ts'ao Chih's time-and long thereafter-melancholy was the noblest mode of Chinese lyric poetry, and a poet was expected to display himself and his creatures in melancholy roles, regardless of his natural disposition or his emotional state at the time of writing.
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