Songs of the Righteous Spirit: “Men of High Purpose” and Their ...

146 MATTHEW FRALEIGHcontrast, provided no prose preface to his poem; instead he used thefirst half of the poem to chart how his poetic persona had come intocontact with traces of historical events.74The five couplets of Shōin’s prologue steadily progress from thegrand scale of “Heaven and Earth” (line 1) to the minuteness of “a grainof millet” (line 6), and from the realm of “sages” and other luminaries(lines 2–4) to the humble domain of the poet’s own meager station(line 7). Wen Tianxiang’s poem also progressively narrows its focus inits first few lines. Both poets turn their attention from cosmic to humanaffairs in line 5; but whereas Wen Tianxiang speaks in general termsabout the world of men, Shōin speaks specifically about himself. In WenTianxiang’s “Song,” historical precedents are listed with detachment. InShōin’s poem, even the spectacular procession of illustrative historicalpersonages (lines 11–26) is filtered through the poet’s individual perceptions.In both poems, lines 9–10 serve as a transitional couplet thatoffsets the parade of famous figures to follow. Yet Shōin provides a personalcontext for this litany, describing the sequence in terms of thesites he remembered having visited during his cross- country travel in1859—when he was being remanded from domiciliary confinement inHagi to a shogunal prison in Edo. Shōin thus links the portraits in thegallery with a spatial vector that describes a more or less steady coursefrom east to west. Grounded in Japan, the vector coincides with Shōin’sown progression toward confrontation with the authorities and thenceto his own death.In Wen Tianxiang’s “Song,” twelve historical figures appear in sixteenlines (11–26), with only the first group of four following a strictchronological order. Scholar of Chinese literature Yang Ye has characterizedthe variety in both the syntactic structure of the lines and thetime periods from which the allusions are drawn as lending Wen Tianxiang’sgallery “color and musicality.”75 Shōin’s poem also uses structuraland syntactic variation, with the concentration of allusions percouplet varying considerably; the first four couplets (lines 11–18) eachidentify a single episode; the three couplets (lines 19–24) that followeach identify two episodes, and the concluding couplet offers a summaryjudgment about the whole group of ten figures (lines 25–26). Fur-74Perhaps the work that he was writing concurrently, Shōkonroku, can be read as a prosecounterpart.75Yang Ye, “The Culture of Canonization,” p. 11.