April soft and cold: This eastern garden

Naturally, people writing poems about Spring generally focus on the freshness of the earth, of youth, of love—all those things betokened by the rebirth of the natural world around them.

Here’s one, though, that takes a different tack, one that recognizes that hidden in the sharp brilliance of Spring are the heat of Summer, the withering of Autumn and the death of Winter. And and that it goes on regardless of where we are in our individual cycle.

Su Ting was a courtier in service to both Tang and Zhou emperors in the 8^th Century. And he had a literary gift of great power. Look:

The year is ended, and it only adds to my age;

Spring has come, but I must take leave of my home.

Alas, that the trees in this eastern garden,

Without me, will still bear flowers.

The thing I’ve noticed about the East Asian poetic forms that I’ve come across—Korean, Chinese, Japanese—is that the poets can capture so much in so few words. Imagery, emotion, observation—it’s like they pare it all down to the bone and let a few strokes speak volumes. I don’t read their alphabets, but I wonder how much the visual form of the characters reinforces this spare presentation?

I’m trying to imagine how many stanzas it would take for Alexander Pope to say what Su does in four lines. Emily Dickinson might manage it in a few couplets, but she’d annoy the spit out of me while she was doing it. You can barely hear Su’s exhaled half-sigh as he acknowledges that—no matter how powerful he is in the human scheme of things—those trees will continue flowering long after he’s gone.

And that’s life, baby. I like it.