Bai Juyi

Buying Flowers

Spring’s dusk comes to the imperial city.
Rattle, clatter, carriages and horses pass.
Everyone is saying, “It’s peony season,”
and I follow them to buy flowers.
Expensive or cheap, there is no fixed cost,
prices shift with the number of blossoms.
Though a hundred red ones are like flames, flames,
even a small bouquet is worth five rolls of silk.
Canopies are used to cover the flowers
and bamboo frames to protect them.
They are sprinkled and sealed with mud
so that, transplanted, their color doesn’t change.
Every household follows this craze,
and no one wakes up from the addiction.
Now an old farmer
chances by the flower market,
lowers his head and sighs alone.
No one understands his sigh.
One cluster of deep-colored flowers
would pay the taxes of ten households.

Bai Juyi (772-846)

Bai Juyi was born in Henan to a poor family of scholars. He took the Imperial Exam at age twenty-seven and dreamed, with his friends Yuan Zhen, of being a reformer. However, his career as an official was less than illustrious, and his attempts to criticize incidents of injustice only caused him to be banished from the capital (Changan) in 815. He was the Prefect of Hangzhou (822-25) and then of Suzhou (825-27), but finally retired from the political life, which he found ultimately to be a disappointment. He turned to Buddhism. He fared somewhat better as a writer than as a politician. He was popular in his lifetime, and his poems were known by peasants and court ladies alike. He was very popular in Japan, and a number of his poems find their way into The Tale of Genji. He is the subject of a noh play and has even become a sort of Shinto deity. More than 2800 of his poems survive, as he was careful to preserve his work; in 815 he sent his writings to Yuan Zhen, who edited and compiled them into an edition of his collected work in 824-25. His poems show an interest in recording his times and his private life alike and often reveal an empathy with the poor that belies the heights of his own career. They are often written in a deliberately plain style, and some of his poetry is written in imitation of the folk songs collected by the Music Bureau (Yuefu poems) in the second century BCE. According to a popular account, Bai Juyi used to read his poems to an old peasant woman and change any lines that she couldn't understand. There is a benevolent directed intelligence in his poems that comes through the refractions of culture and translation and makes us feel the powerful presence of this poet who died more than a thousand years ago.

Tony Barnstone is Associate Professor of creative writing at Whittier College. His first book of poetry, Impure, a finalist for the Walt Whitman Prize, the National Poetry Series Prize, and the White Pine Prize, appeared with the UP of Florida in June 1999. His chapbook of poems, Naked Magic, appeared in 2002 with Main Street Rag Press. Other books include Out of the Howling Storm: The New Chinese Poetry (Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1993), Laughing Lost in the Mountains: Selected Poems of Wang Wei (Hanover: UP of New England, 1991), The Art of Writing: Teachings of Chinese Masters (Boston: Shambhala, 1996), and a number of textbooks, most recently The Literatures of Asia and The Literatures of the Middle East (Prentice Hall). His poetry, translations, essays on poetics, and fiction have appeared in dozens of American literary journals, from APR to Agni. He has won an Artists Fellowship from the California Arts Council, as well as many national poetry awards. His forthcoming books are The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry (Anchor, 2003) and a number of textbooks for Prentice Hall, including The Pleasures of Poetry: An Introduction (2005), World Literature (two volumes, 2003), and Modern Poetry: An Anthology with Contexts (2004).