Guan ju (: "Guan guan cry the ospreys", often mistakenly written with the unrelated but similar-looking character 睢, suī) is the first poem from the ancient anthology Shi Jing (Classic of Poetry), and is one of the best known poems in Chinese literature. It has been dated to the seventh century BC,W. A. C. H. Dobson, The Language of the Book of Songs (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968) p. 21. making it also one of China's oldest poems, though not the oldest in the Shi Jing. The title of the poem comes from its first line (Guan guan ju jiu), which evokes a scene of ospreys calling on a river islet. Fundamentally the poem is about finding a good and fair maiden as a match for a young noble.
Guan ju boasts a long tradition of commentaries. Traditional Chinese commentators, represented by the "Three Schools" and the Mao School, hold that the poem contains a moral pertinent to the relationship between genders. However, modern commentators, and some Western sinologists, offer different interpretations.
The poem has been culturally important since antiquity. According to the Analects, Confucius remarked that it displayed both joy and sorrow but neither to an excessive degree. The poem has subsequently been alluded to repeatedly in Chinese literature and continues to be quoted on occasion in the modern written language and in speech. In particular, the lines "fair and good lady", "seeking and not getting", and "to toss and turn in bed" have become well-known four-character classical idioms or set phrases (chengyu).
Synopsis and structure
"Guan ju" is part of the first section of the Shi Jing entitled "Zhou nan" (周南), itself a part of "Airs of the States" (國風), which make up 160 out of the 305 poems of the anthology. It is fairly typical of the other poems of the Airs of the States, being made up of three tetrasyllabic stanzas of four to eight lines each.
Poem
A translation of the Guan ju poem to English by Chinese master translator Xu Yuanchong is below:
Cooing And Wooing By riverside are cooing A pair of turtledoves; A good young man is wooing A fair maiden he loves. Water flows left and right Of cress long here, short there; The youth yearns day and night For the good maiden fair. His yearning grows so strong, He can not fall asleep, But tosses all night long, So deep in love, so deep! Now gather left and right Cress long or short and tender! O lute, play music bright For the bride sweet and slender! Feast friends at left and right On cress cooked till tender! O bells and drums, delight The bride so sweet and slender!
Interpretation
An interpretation of another translation of the poem is as follows. Each stanza begins with a natural image, which is juxtaposed without comment to the human situation around which the poem centres. The first stanza begins with the onomatopoeic cry of ospreys: "Guan guan" cry the ospreys On the islet in the river. The stanza then rehearses formulaic lines, drawn from the human context: The beautiful and good young lady Is a fine mate for the noble.
The entire poem consists of a series of isolated episodes which can be linked into a continuous narrative. It alternates between natural images and human situations, two literally unrelated frames of reference. One set of formulaic lines refers to a male-female relationship: The beautiful and good young lady Is a fine mate for the lord. (3-4) ... The beautiful and good young lady Waking and sleeping he wished for her. (7-8) ... The beautiful and good young lady Zithers and lutes greet her as friend. (15-16) ... The beautiful and good young lady Bells and drums delight her. (19-20)
Lines 9-12 intrude upon the formulaic scheme, making the poem asymmetrical: He wished for her without getting her. Waking and sleeping he thought of her: Longingly, longlingly, He tossed and turned from side to side.
The human elements of the poem (lines 3-4, 7-12, 15-16, 19-20) can read as either a first or third person narrative. If such a reading is taken, the poem begins with a statement of the male persona's longing for an ideal beloved in the first stanza, depicts the withholding of fulfillment in the second, and concludes with an eventual realisation of these desires in the third stanza.
The other set of formulaic lines describe, in vividly physical and tangible action, the rustic world of harvesting plants, incrementally varying the key verb of physical activity: Varied in length are the water plants; Left and right we catch them. (5-6) ... Varied in length are the water plants; Left and right we gather them. (13-14) ... Varied in length are the water plants; Left and right we cull them as vegetable. (17-18)
This usage of natural images in juxtaposition to human situations was given the term xing (興) by early commentators, and was regarded as one of the three rhetorical devices of the Shi Jing. It is not easy to find an equivalent in Western literature, but xing can be explained as a method of creating the mood, atmosphere or context within which the remainder of the poem takes place, and which exerts influence over the possible meanings of the rest of the poem’s action. It has variously been translated as "stimulus", "stimulates", and "motif".See for example Pauline Yu, The Reading of Imagery in the Chinese Poetic Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 49-50, 56-67, 74. Although there is no historical evidence to prove that the composer of "Guan ju" were intentionally employing such a rhetorical device, there have been a myriad of interpretations as to the purpose of the xing.
Traditional interpretations
The earliest known commentary on "Guan ju" is contained in the Analects, and is attributed to Confucius. Confucius praises "Guan ju" for its moderated emotions: "The Master said, "In the "Guan ju" there is joy without wantonness and sorrow without self-injury."In Chinese: 子曰 關雎 樂而不淫 哀而不傷. See Confucius, The Analects, translated by D. C. Lau (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), III.20, p. 70. Brooks and Brooks date this portion of the Analects to 342 BCE,E. Bruce Brooks and A. Taeko Brooks, The Original Analects: Sayings of Confucius and His Successors (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) p. 79. and this may have been when "Guan ju" first came to prominence. The Confucians were responsible for the tendency of much orthodox criticism to regard not only the Shi Jing but all literature in general as morally edifying or didactic in some way.See for example Donald Holzman, "Confucius and Ancient Chinese Literary Criticism" in Adele Rickett, ed., Chinese Approaches to Literature from Confucius to Liang Ch'i-ch'ao (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 29-38. One legend held that Confucius himself had selected the songs in the Shi Jing from an original pool of three thousand based on their moral import.
From early on the poems of the Shi Jing were used for their moral communicative value. There were, however, striking disagreements among early scholars as to how to interpret "Guan ju". In pre-Qin times, at three textual traditions - the "Three Schools of the Poems" (詩三家) of Lu, Qi, and Han - existed. These interpretations of "Guan ju" were eventually superseded by the Han dynasty Mao commentarial tradition, which is the only tradition that has survived into the modern era in its entirety.Jeffrey Riegel, "Shih-ching Poetry and Didacticism in Ancient Chinese Literature" in The Columbia History of Chinese Literature, Victor H Mair ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001) p. 100.
The Lu school reading
The first exegetical tradition saw "Guan ju" as a poem of political criticism. Although the Guan ju itself offers no hint of a satirical intent, commentators from the Lu school explain that the poem criticises the improper behaviour of King Kang of Zhou and his wife (eleventh century BCE) by presenting contrasting, positive images of male-female decorum. The Lu school held that King Kang had committed an egregious violation of ritual by being late for court one morning. The earliest references to it are in Liu Xiang's Lienü zhuan (16 BCE) and Wang Chong's Lun heng. However, the nature of Kang's offence is best preserved in a memorial by Yang Ci in Yuan Hong's Hou Han ji:
The Lu school reading evolved further towards the end of the Han dynasty. Zhang Chao, in his "Qiao 'Qingyi fu'" names the minister alluded to in Lun heng, as the Duke of Bi (畢公). According to Zhang Chao's version of the Lu tradition, the Duke of Bi's purpose was "to prevent degeneracy and reproach its progress, / Tactfully criticised and admonished the lord, his father." In other words, "Guan ju" could be read as both a poem of praise, extolling the excellent match of the beautiful and good young lady and the lord, and as a poem of criticism, intended to cause the listener, King Kang, to reflect on his and his consort's shortcomings.
Brief references to the dating of the poem to King Kang's reign appear in Shi Ji China's first universal history. The historian Sima Qian wrote, "Alas! When the house of Zhou was in decline, the "Guan ju" was composed."In Chinese: 周道缺 詩人本之衽席 關雎作. Sima Qian, Shi ji (Zhonghua shuju: Beijing, 1972) pp. 509. A similar comment appears at p. 3115. However, as Wang Chong and modern scholars have pointed out, this appears to conflict with Sima's own account of King Kang's reign, which records no deficiencies or evidence of decline.Wang Chong, "Xie duan pian", Lun Heng (論衡), 12.14b. See Sima Qian, "Annals of the House of Zhou", Shi ji.
The Lu school interpretation was probably the dominant one during the Han dynasty.Mark Laurent Asselin, "The Lu-school reading of "Guanju" as preserved in an Eastern Han Fu" Journal of the American Oriental Society 117.3 (1997): 427. It persisted well into the fifth century, even appearing in Fan Ye's Hou Han Shu (completed before CE 445), but was eventually eclipsed by the Mao school.
The Mao school reading
The second interpretive tradition, and the one which became dominant, chose to read "Guan ju" as a poem of praise, and specifically of the queen of the founder of the Zhou dynasty, King Wen. This reading is called the Mao school, after Mao Heng and Mao Chang, early annotators to the Shi Jing. Their notes to the Shi Jing, along with those of later scholars who agreed with them, were edited by Kong Yingda and published in the seventh century as Mao shi zheng yi (毛詩正義). The Mao School explains the poem as a purposeful analogy, and identifies the young lady as King Wen's queen Tai Si. It reads the images of picking water grasses as literal descriptions of the queen's activities in preparation for ritual sacrifices. The preface to the poem, attributed to Wei Hong and generally including along with the Mao text, explains the meaning of "Guan ju":
The prefaces to the remaining ten poems in the "Zhou nan", the first section of the Shi Jing, all describe the songs as referring to one or another aspect of the queen's virtuous influence.
One century after the Maos, Zheng Xuan introduced an interesting twist to the Mao interpretation. In his eyes the "pure young lady" refers not to the queen herself, but rather to palace ladies whom their mistress, in her virtuous and jealousy-free seclusion, is seeking as additional mates for the king. Thus it is she who tosses and turns until finding them.Mao shi zheng yi, p. 55-57.
The influential Song dynasty Neo-Confucian Zhu Xi largely agreed with the Mao school, but added a remark that the poem was composed not by some unknown poet but by the ladies of the royal palace. He also differs with the Mao school by reading the scenes depicting the picking of water grasses not as literal, but as juxtaposed, analogical images like the opening couplet.
Other readings