Songs of the Righteous Spirit: âMen of High Purposeâ and Their ...

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JAPANESE SONGS OF HIGH PURPOSE 141仰視浮雲白 Pure as the white floating clouds that I gaze atoverhead.55 悠悠我心悲 Vast is the sorrow in my heart;蒼天曷有極 Blue Heaven! When will it end?哲人日已遠 The great wise men grow more distant each day;典刑在夙昔 Yet their example lives on in the past.風簷展書讀 Under the breezy eaves, I open a book and read;古道照顏色 The ancient path illuminating my face.The original poem is not explicitly separated into stanzas, but it may bedivided into four sections based upon shifts in rhyme: indicated hereand in the Japanese versions that follow with the insertion of a blankline. Wen’s poem begins with a general statement about the “RighteousSpirit” (lines 1–10), continues with a parade of vignettes from Chinesehistory that demonstrate the Spirit in action (lines 11–26), proceedsto another meditation on this Spirit (lines 27–34), and ends with asequence on the poet’s own situation and his reliance on the RighteousSpirit for inspiration and transcendence (lines 35–60).64 The echoes ofWen Tianxiang’s “Song” in the above poems by Japanese shishi are clear.The final section of Wen’s “Song” in particular, with its grim descriptionof the humiliation of unjust imprisonment, had particular resonancefor the incarcerated Japanese shishi, and the equanimity toward life anddeath expressed by Wen in line 30 is specifically invoked in the poemsby Takasugi Shinsaku and Kojima Kyōsuke. The shorter Japanese shishipoems that reference Wen Tianxiang repeat a key structure fromthe original, but they also effect an important contraction and displacement.In the same way that Wen Tianxiang speaks of how reading historicalaccounts of his valorous predecessors gives him the spiritualsustenance necessary to endure his ordeal, so do these short Japanesepoems emphasize the encouragement readings and recollections ofthe past provide, yet they focus on a single historical exemplar: that ofWen Tianxiang himself. Similarly, line 9 of Wen Tianxiang’s “Song” celebratesthe “integrity” or “mettle” (Ch. jie; J. setsu 節 ) of a panoply ofheroic individuals in Chinese history, while in these Japanese poems64Yang Ye has suggested first a two-part division (lines 1–34 and lines 35–60), the firstpart of which can then be further subdivided into a “beginning, a middle, and an end initself ”; see his “The Culture of Canonization,” p. 10.
142 MATTHEW FRALEIGHinspired by Wen’s example, the term serves as the definitive term associatedwith Wen himself, appearing in line 6 of the first poem entitled“Composed in prison” by Takasugi, the comment from Yoshida Shōinthat Takasugi appended to his second poem of the same title, and thepoem by Hashimoto Sanai. These shorter poems by the Japanese shishithus recapitulate the frame in Wen Tianxiang’s “Song” that invokeshistorical analogues as sources of inspiration, but at the same time displacethe referential scope to Wen Tianxiang himself. The versions ofWen Tianxiang’s “Song” by Yoshida Shōin and others represent a differentform of displacement, one that relocated the frame to Japan.Yoshida Shōin’s “Song of the Righteous Spirit,” also a “pentasyl labicold-style poem” (Ch. wuyan gushi; J. gogon koshi 五言古詩 ), makes useof the rhyme characters in Wen Tianxiang’s original. Moreover, as inWen’s “Song,” the shifts in Shōin’s rhymes correspond to the contoursof his poem’s semantic content and rhetorical strategy, serving to distinguishone structural unit from another.和文天祥正氣歌韻Matching the rhymes of Wen Tianxiang’s“Song of the Righteous Spirit”正氣塞天地 The righteous spirit pervades Heaven and Earth;聖人唯踐形 Only a sage can completely fulfill it.65其次不朽者 And after the sages come the ever-enduring,亦爭光日星 Who rival the sun and stars in their light.5 嗟吾小丈夫 But, alas! I am a mere man,一粟點蒼溟 A grain of millet floating on the dark blue depths.才疎身側陋 My talents are meager, and my station low;雲路遙天廷 The cloud-path to Court stretches so far away.然當其送東 Yet when I was sent up to the East,10 眼與山水青 My eyes shone as pure blue as the mountains andrivers.周海泊舟處敬慕文臣筆When our ship anchored on the shores of Suō,I paid my respects to the literary vassal’s brush.6665The allusion is to Mencius VIIA.38: 孟子曰形色天性也 . 惟聖人然後可以踐形 .“Mencius said ‘Our body and complexion are given to us by heaven. Only a sage can givehis body complete fulfillment.’” See Mencius, trans. D. C. Lau (Harmondsworth: PenguinBooks, 1970), p. 191.66I believe that the “literary vassal” here refers to eminent poet and scholar Sugawara
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Page 51 and 52: 158 MATTHEW FRALEIGH崚嶒富嶽
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