A Comparative Study on the Man-Nature Relationship and Its P
Su Hui
School of Chinese Language and Literature, Central China Normal University
152 Luoyu Road, Wuhan 430079, China
Email: [email protected]
Li Yinbo
College of Arts & Law, Wuhan University of Technology
122 Luoshi Road, Wuhan 430070, China
Email: [email protected]
Abstract Poetry on nature has always been a sparkling star in Chinese literature
as well as in British literature. Chinese and British nature poetry share similar
characteristics such as the pursuit of freedom and the attachment of certain
emotions to natural sceneries. Meanwhile, they are also greatly different owing
to the differences in cultural background, national characters and psychologies,
philosophies and aesthetic traditions. This paper aims to explore the differences
between Chinese and British nature poetry in terms of their concern with the
relationship between man and nature and its presentation. Chinese and British
nature poets appeal to different things in terms of the relationship between man and
nature. In Chinese nature poems, the poet always pursues the harmony between
man and nature, the self being forgotten; while in British nature poems, the scenery
is regarded as a symbol of emotions, the self always being foregrounded. Chinese
and British nature poetry are also different in their composing principles and
methods. Generally speaking, analogy and narration are the main practice in ancient
Chinese natural poetry writing, whereas personification and dramatic narration in
English. In British poems, since the speaker is narrating, “the sceneries are losing
their concreteness and directness with the speaker’s constant intervention” and
they are presented in a single line. Chinese nature poems are the exemplification of
“dramatic narration.” The sceneries are presented directly to the readers, without
the interference of the poet, and with the feature of loose arrangements, multi
levels and changing perspectives.
Key words Chinese nature poetry; British nature poetry; Man-Nature Relationship
Author Su Hui teaches foreign literature at the School of Chinese Language and
Literature, Central China Normal University, Wuhan, P.R.China. Her interests in
scholarship include American literature, comparative literature, and aesthetics of
comedy. Dr. Li Yinbo is associate professor at the College of Arts & Law, Wuhan
University of Technology (Wuhan 430070, China), specializing in comparative
literature and intercultural communication.
Poetry on nature has always been a sparkling star in Chinese literature as well
as in British literature, but it has gone through different phases of developments.
Chinese nature poetry can be dated back to the period of Wei Jin Southern and
Northern Dynasties (4th-5th century), and prospered in Tang and Song Dynasties.
Representative Chinese nature poets, namely, Tao Yuanming, Xie Lingyun, Meng
Haoran, Wang Wei, Li Bai, Du Fu, Bai Juyi, Su Shi and Lu You had written a
substantial number of brilliant nature poems. British nature poetry appeared in the
Renaissance, and prospered in the Romantic Movement. The representative poets
were Spencer, Pope, Wordsworth, Coleridge , Shelley, Keats, Byron and so on.
Chinese and British nature poetry share similar characteristics such as the
pursuit of freedom and the attachment of certain emotions to natural sceneries.
Meanwhile, they are also greatly different owing to the differences in cultural
background, national characters and psychologies, philosophies and aesthetic
traditions. This paper aims to explore the differences between Chinese and British
nature poetry in terms of their concern with the relationship between man and
nature and its presentation.
I
Chinese and British nature poets appeal to different things in terms of the
relationship between man and nature. In Chinese nature poems, the poet always
pursues the harmony between man and nature, the self being forgotten; while in
British nature poems, the scenery is regarded as a symbol of emotions, the self
always being foregrounded. Such difference can be clearly seen if we compare
Wordsworth’s “Lines Written in Early Spring” with Wang Wei’s “The Deer
Enclosure” and “The Twitter-Valley.” In the first two stanzas in “Lines Written in
Early Spring”:
I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts,
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.
To her fair works did nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it griev’d my heart to think
What man has made of man.
Wordsworth contrasts nature’s kindness with man’s cruelty. The natural scenery is
subsidiary to the speaker’s thoughts and emotions. The speaker is not immersed in
the intimacy with the nature. Instead, by associating beautiful natural environment
with evil social environment, he ponders over the problem of “what man has
made of man.” For readers, their immediate aesthetic target is the emotion, not
the scenery. Similarly, though the west wind, the swift cloud, the wave and the
hail in Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” and the nightingale, the forest and the
night in Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” all appear as independent imageries, they
carry certain emotions of the speaker or certain symbolic significance. There is
apparently a gap between the speaker and nature, where the speaker is clearly
aware that man isn’t materialized and nature isn’t personified. After a temporary
communication, man and nature have returned to their respective different world.
What Keats felt after the nightingale left is a good example.
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now ‘tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music: — do I wake or sleep?
With several “adieu”s, the nightingale’s singing flows “past the near meadows,”
“over the stream,” “up the hill-side” until it is “buried deep in the next valleyglades.”
The speaker suddenly awakens to the reality though he still lingers over
the dreamlike scene. What predominates in him is reason, not fantasy.
In Wang Wei’s（王维） two poems, “The Deer Enclosure”（鹿柴） and “The
Twitter-Valley”（鸟鸣涧）:
The Deer Enclosure
The hills are empty and nobody is sight,
But the human voices can be heard.
The dark woods can’t hide the late sunset,
Which shines onto the green mosses on the ground.
The Twitter-Valley
Idle man can hear the fall of laurel flowers,
Quiet night can make spring hills empty.
When moon comes out it startles the hill-birds,
Which twitter and twitter in the vernal valley.
the poet creates a serene atmosphere where only the nature is seen. By now, the
poet has rid himself of the burdens of all sorts of thoughts. He seems to have
forgotten about himself, only contemplating the current scene, without any
intellectual interference. It is under such circumstance that he acquires special
hearing and eyesight, and is able to hear the unheard and see the unseen. With the
sensitiveness, he obtains the breath of the universe and feels the rhythm of the
nature, thus combining the subjective with objective. At the moment, the “self”
doesn’t go into the nature, while the nature doesn’t enter the “self.” The nature and
“I” are intermingled. The self is negated(no self), meanwhile it is acknowledged,
because the individual is immersed into the universe, the self is made immortal.
Lines like this in Chinese nature poetry are numerous. For example, “The
sparse shadows of its branches are slant across the clear shallow water, / A
slight fragrance of its flowers floats with wind under moon in twilight”, from
Lin Hejing’s（ 林和靖）“To the Plum Blossoms in a Garden”（ 山园早梅),
is an image of the plum in early spring. Seeing its lonely shadow in the water,
the fragrant plum feels sad, yet admires itself. Vague and sparse, it is ignored by
people, but wins the heartfelt appreciation of the poet. It is a plum, but it is more
like a human being, a noble person isolated from the world and enjoying spiritual
satisfaction. This is exactly the image of the poet himself who has been secluding
himself in Gushan Mountain of Westlake. The imagery produced from the unity
of the self, and the nature is neither a metaphor nor a symbol, but describes a state
when the heart seems to have ceased beating and the self is released from the
body to blend with the myriad of things in the universe. The poet has transcended
the reality by obtaining great freedom in spirit and coming to the highest stage in
aesthetics.
The different relationship between the self and the nature reflected in Chinese
and British nature poetry is closely related to the different natural views.
In China, the prevailing idea is the harmony between man and nature. The
formation of this idea is associated with the Chinese way of living and their living
environment. As early as the New Stone Age, the farming economy had been
established and for several thousand years, the self-sufficing economy was stable
and prosperous. Therefore, people greatly relied on natural environment, and were
sensitive to any delicate changes in the natural world, as they were desiring for
the intimacy with the nature. In Chinese philosophy, although there was preaching
of “the division of man and nature” and “man’s conquering of nature”, what
dominates the mentality of common Chinese people is still the idea of harmony
between man and nature, the communication between man and nature. This idea
is embedded in Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. Therefore, it becomes an
integral part of Chinese natural view and promotes the formation and development
of their aesthetic awareness of nature.
The flourishing of Chinese nature poems and the formation of leading ideas
are closely related to Taoism. The core of Laozi and Zhuangzi’s philosophy is
“Tao”（ 道）, which is the law of the universe and the cause of all changes in
the universe. The highest spiritual state is the unity with “Tao”, that is, through
cultivating the vacancy and stillness of the mind, the subject obtains a mind free
from affectation and all world value judgments. To observe everything in the
universe with this natural mind, “I” coexist with the universe and everything and “I”
are a unity, the object mingling with the subject’s mind.
There are similar ideas in Confucianism. The Confucianists argue that the
essence of the nature exists in human mind. Man in the ethical sense echoes the
nature, the source of ethics. They advocate “Troubled, improve yourself; valued,
improve the world”, that is, one should live in poverty and seek comfort in poverty,
which also implies the idea of “obeying nature.”
The Buddhists advocate refraining from the earthly world. They hold the view
that the sublime state of life is the emptiness and purity of the mind, which is a
returning to the nature through practice of meditation. According to Zen Buddhism,
experiencing a moment of awakening in this life is of central importance. It is
at this moment that one gets his eternity. Therefore, freeing themselves from the
captivity of language, words, concepts and thoughts, Zen Buddhists express those
that are supposed to be unspeakable in an intuitive way.
From different perspectives, Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism all expound
on the idea of the harmony between man and nature. This idea is deeply rooted
in the mind of ancient Chinese intellectuals, particularly exerting great influence
on nature poets’ aesthetic and artistic views. When the poets try to express their
affection towards the nature, the self and the nature are harmoniously mingled with
each other.
In western philosophy, because of the influence of scientific rationality and
humanistic ideas, the relationship between man and nature is relatively estranged.
Ancient Greeks were used to posing natural beauty as something opposite
to themselves, and attempted to analyze it in an objective way. The Melisian
School broke the shackles of mythology and tried to explain the formation and
development of everything in the natural world in terms of matter and rationality,
but they seldom touched upon the relationship between man and nature. Later on,
Protagoras put forward the proposition that “man is the measure of all things”,
placing man as the core of the universe, thus started the tradition of humanism.
Idealists such as Socrates and Plato regarded nature as the embodiment of God
or concepts. They argued that man can only know the surface of the nature while
its inherent laws belong to the other world. Aristotle saw nature in a mechanical
materialistic way. Nature to him is an intellectual world which can be understood,
but it’s hard to be experienced emotionally. In the Middle Ages, western culture
was dominated by Christianity. According to Christianity teachings, man should
believe in God, indulging in the nature would affect the perfection of the soul.
Ever since Renaissance, the beauty of nature has been receiving more and more
attention. The waves of “the discovery of man” had washed away the mythological
remains covering the nature. The brilliant beauty of nature was a shock to people
in the modern west. The practice of praising the nature was temporarily replaced
by Neoclassical rationality in the 17th century, but the enlighteners in the 18th
century declared that “we should return to the nature”. With the advent of the
Romantic Movement in the 19th century, nature became an independent target of
aesthetics and had an important position in literary works. However, nature poets
often appreciate natural beauty from the relationship between thinking and being,
focusing on exploring the nature of everything in the universe. They tend to explain
the diverse and mysterious natural phenomenon with monism, as a result of which
for them, the subject is relatively independent from the object. This explains
why the mind resonates with the nature and the self and the nature intermingled
harmoniously in Wang Wei’s poems on nature, while there’s much reasoning and
thinking in Wordsworth’s poems.
II
Chinese and British nature poetry are also different in their composing principles
and methods. Generally speaking, analogy( 拟物主义) is the main practice in
ancient Chinese natural poetry writing, whereas personification （ 拟人主义）in
English. Chinese nature poets tend to be impersonal. Things exist not because of
“the self”, but the inherent laws. Therefore, the truth and beauty lie in the existence.
Both the things and “the self” can be either subjective or objective. British nature
poets tend to be more personal or subjective, explaining the world with “the self”
and abstract concepts. The value of their poetry lies in the ontological level, as a
consequence of which there is always the color, the emotions and values of “the
self” involved and there is a clear-cut division between the subjective and objective.
For instance, Shelley’s “Ode to a Skylark” and Du Fu’s “A Quatrain” both
present the image of birds. In “Ode to a Skylark”, the speaker addresses the skylark
in apostrophe: “Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! / Bird thou never wert, / That from
Heaven, or near it, / Pourest thy full heart / In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.
”Here, the skylark is imagined as a creature that understands man and stands right
in front of the speaker, listening to him. It is the embodiment of pure happiness and
can sing heavenly hymns which remind the speaker of the past old times where
there was no pain, no sentiment and full of laughter. The skylark is personified.
In Du Fu’s（ 杜甫）“A Quatrain”（ 绝句）, analogy is used: “Two golden
orioles sing amid the willows green; A flock of white egrets flies into the sky. My
window frames the snow-crowned western mountain scene; My door says often
to east-going ship goodbye.” A beautiful picture is painted in the first couplet: the
thatched cottage is surrounded by willows, on the branches of which a couple of
orioles were singing and a flock of white egrets is flying in the sky. Both singing
orioles and flying white egrets bring energy and happiness. This quatrain was
written by Du Fu when he returned to his thatched cottage in Chengdu after the
An Lushan-Shi Siming Rebellion and caught sight of such vibrant views in front
of him. In this poem, the poet is just like a painter, without interfering with the
picture and the sceneries are not personified. But reading the lines, readers may feel
the poet has become a singing oriole or a flying white egret. This is the analogy is
Chinese poetics. The scenery serves as a mirror to the mind.
T. S. Eliot once made a distinction between “narration” and “dramatic
narration” in poetry. “Narration” is a top-down metaphor of the material, is
a subjective projection of the material; “Dramatic narration” is an objective
projection of feelings. Such a distinction is proper to be applied to tell the
differences between Chinese and British poems on nature. In British poems, since
the speaker is narrating, “the sceneries are losing their concreteness and directness
with the speaker’s constant intervention” (Ye Weilian 89) and they are presented
in a single line. To explain this, Mr. Ye Weilian gave an example of Wordsworth’s
“Tintern Abbey.” He pointed out that three quarters of this poem is the explanation
of how the outside world affects the mind, or the explanation of how the mind
and the nature feel and supplement each other. Nature is the “babysitter, mentor
and parent” of his moral being (Ye Weilian 88). Meanwhile, the way the speaker
presents the sceneries shows that he is directing the readers to get in touch with
the sceneries following his eyes, not interweaving time and space, which is quite
similar to the one-way transparency in western painting. Either the readers or the
poet is separated from the nature and is not able to merge into the nature.
Chinese nature poems are the exemplification of “dramatic narration”.
The sceneries are presented directly to the readers, without the interference of
the poet, and with the feature of loose arrangements, multi-levels and changing
perspectives. For example, in “On the West Stream of Chuzhou” （ 滁州西涧）
from Wei Yingwu（韦应物） in Tang Dynasty: “Alone I like the riverside where
green grass grows / And golden orioles sing amid leafy trees. / When showers fall
at dusk, the river overflows; / A lonely boat athwart the ferry floats at ease”, all
the images are independent of each other. There isn’t a sure logic relationship or
a fixed order among the “green grass”, “riverside”, “orioles”, “showers”, “ferry”
and “boat”. They come into readers’ view alternatively, free from the interference
of the speaker’s feelings. Meanwhile, these seemingly irrelevant images form a
complete picture in readers’ mind and evoke their aesthetic pleasure. The readers’
interpretation can be accomplished from every possible perspective and without the
limitation of time and space.
There are various factors leading to such differences between Chinese and
English nature poems. This paper will focus on the following two factors. First,
in terms of aesthetics, the principle of “vitality infusion” is always followed in
appreciating and composing a piece of artistic work in the west, that is, the subject
has to infuse vitality into the aesthetic object. Kant maintains that we should
“transfer our reverence for the object to the nature” (Qtd. Wu Lifu 563) in his
Critique of Judgement. Hegel holds a similar view that “natural beauty is merely
a reflection of the beauty in mind, an incomplete and imperfect state”(Hegel 3),
its perfection could be reached when infused vitality by human mind. That’s why
Hegel maintains that “artistic beauty is above natural beauty”. Influenced by Kant
and Hegel’s ideas, German aesthetician the Vischers and Lipps put forward the
notion of “empathy.” Empathy is the projection of emotions on the outside world.
Aesthetic empathy, in Lipps’ words, is “infusing vitality into reality” (qtd. Zhu
Guangqian 624). As we can see, either in Kant and Hegel’s aesthetics, or in Lipps’
notion of empathy, the focus is always the subject, while the object is completely
passive. With such aesthetic view, personification is generally employed by British
nature poetry writing. The nature is personified and what is foregrounded is the
image of “I,” who directs readers to observing nature.
It is a different picture in Chinese nature poetry writing. In Chinese aesthetics
and philosophies, life of everything is always thought to originate from nature;
everything in nature resonates with human breathing. The aesthetic practice is
not only on the projection of their emotions, but also the bilateral communication
between nature and themselves. This can be achieved by a technique in the ancient
Chinese poetry writing — Bi Xing （比兴）. “Bi” is to attach certain emotions
to things; “Xing” is to trigger certain feelings when seeing things. “BiXing” lays
emphasis on the bilateral communication between the subject and the object, never
separating the person from the thing he attaches emotions to. By employing this
technique in poetry writing, it is possible to connect several imageries, which
share similarities to a certain extent. For example, in Ying Yang’s “On Departure”:
“Clouds float above the ocean at sunrise, / over the mountain at sunset. / Soldiers
at war miss their hometown, / but words of sorrow can’t be said.” “soldiers at
war” are compared to “floating clouds”, their homesickness being foregrounded.
Imageries connected by “Xing” are not necessarily connected with each other,
as “By riverside are cooing / A pair of turtledoves” and “ A good young man is
wooing / A fair maiden he loves”. It is the technique “BiXing” that has made the
juxtaposition of imageries possible in ancient Chinese poetry.
Second, in terms of the features of the language and characters, ancient
Chinese language is loosely structured in grammar, with a flexible part of speech;
while there are strict syntactic rules in English language, with changes of part of
speech, number, person and tense. This is one of the important reasons leading to
the different ways of presenting imageries in different structures in Chinese and
British nature poems.
As in Meng Haoran’s （孟浩然）“Passing the Night on a River in Jiande”
（ 宿建德江）: “I guide my boat to mooring by a misty islet, / With the setting
sun, a traveler’s sorrows revive. / Wilds so vast, the sky stoops to the trees; / The
river so clear, moon close to man.” The original Chinese word “xin,” “di” and “jin”
can be used as adjectives as well as verbs. When “xin” is an adjective, “ke chou
xin” means the traveler feels some new sorrows; when “xin” is a verb, it means
“his sorrows revive”. When “di” is an adjective, “tian di shu” means the sky is
lower than the trees; when “di” is a verb, it means “the sky stoops to the trees”.
When “jin” is an adjective, “yue jin ren” means the moon is “close to” man; when
“jin” is a verb, it means the moon approach man. When used as adjectives, these
words show a static beauty; when verbs, dynamic. Meanwhile, some prepositions
and conjunctions are omitted to vague the connection between imageries, leaving
great space for readers to imagine. In the original Chinese version, there is no “by”
between “moor” and “a misty islet,” and no conjunctions between “ye kuang” and
“tian di shu,” “jiang qing” and “yue jin ren.”
There are quite different features in English language. The strict syntactic
rules and the use of various modifiers set boundaries among imageries, as a
result of which they are developed and presented in a linear way from a certain
perspective. For example, in the first two lines of Wordsworth’s “My Heart Leaps
up,” “My heart leaps up when I behold / A rainbow in the sky,” “in” connects “a
rainbow” and “the sky,” indicating the constraint. “When” connects “my heart leaps
up” and “I behold a rainbow,” indicating the reasons of hearting leaping up. When
there is such a clear and strict boundary between imageries, the independence and
objectivity of the sceneries is invaded, which is helpful to produce ambiguity and
visual effects.
In the early 20th century, English poets started to learn from ancient Chinese
poetry, and have developed some similar techniques. The typical example is
Imagism. However, even in Pound, who very consciously imitates Chinese poems,
we find concerns and perspectives quite different from his Chinese counterpart.
This question will be further discussed in other papers.
Works Cited
Hegel. Esthetics. Vol.I. Beijing: The Commercial Press, 1979.
Wu Lifu. Selected Works of Western Literary Theory. Shanghai Translation publishing house,
1979.
Ye Weilian. Chinese Poetics. SDX joint publishing company, 1992.
Zhu Guangqian. History of Western Esthetics.Vol. II. Beijing: people’s Literature Publishing
House, 1979.
School of Chinese Language and Literature, Central China Normal University
152 Luoyu Road, Wuhan 430079, China
Email: [email protected]
Li Yinbo
College of Arts & Law, Wuhan University of Technology
122 Luoshi Road, Wuhan 430070, China
Email: [email protected]
Abstract Poetry on nature has always been a sparkling star in Chinese literature
as well as in British literature. Chinese and British nature poetry share similar
characteristics such as the pursuit of freedom and the attachment of certain
emotions to natural sceneries. Meanwhile, they are also greatly different owing
to the differences in cultural background, national characters and psychologies,
philosophies and aesthetic traditions. This paper aims to explore the differences
between Chinese and British nature poetry in terms of their concern with the
relationship between man and nature and its presentation. Chinese and British
nature poets appeal to different things in terms of the relationship between man and
nature. In Chinese nature poems, the poet always pursues the harmony between
man and nature, the self being forgotten; while in British nature poems, the scenery
is regarded as a symbol of emotions, the self always being foregrounded. Chinese
and British nature poetry are also different in their composing principles and
methods. Generally speaking, analogy and narration are the main practice in ancient
Chinese natural poetry writing, whereas personification and dramatic narration in
English. In British poems, since the speaker is narrating, “the sceneries are losing
their concreteness and directness with the speaker’s constant intervention” and
they are presented in a single line. Chinese nature poems are the exemplification of
“dramatic narration.” The sceneries are presented directly to the readers, without
the interference of the poet, and with the feature of loose arrangements, multi
levels and changing perspectives.
Key words Chinese nature poetry; British nature poetry; Man-Nature Relationship
Author Su Hui teaches foreign literature at the School of Chinese Language and
Literature, Central China Normal University, Wuhan, P.R.China. Her interests in
scholarship include American literature, comparative literature, and aesthetics of
comedy. Dr. Li Yinbo is associate professor at the College of Arts & Law, Wuhan
University of Technology (Wuhan 430070, China), specializing in comparative
literature and intercultural communication.
Poetry on nature has always been a sparkling star in Chinese literature as well
as in British literature, but it has gone through different phases of developments.
Chinese nature poetry can be dated back to the period of Wei Jin Southern and
Northern Dynasties (4th-5th century), and prospered in Tang and Song Dynasties.
Representative Chinese nature poets, namely, Tao Yuanming, Xie Lingyun, Meng
Haoran, Wang Wei, Li Bai, Du Fu, Bai Juyi, Su Shi and Lu You had written a
substantial number of brilliant nature poems. British nature poetry appeared in the
Renaissance, and prospered in the Romantic Movement. The representative poets
were Spencer, Pope, Wordsworth, Coleridge , Shelley, Keats, Byron and so on.
Chinese and British nature poetry share similar characteristics such as the
pursuit of freedom and the attachment of certain emotions to natural sceneries.
Meanwhile, they are also greatly different owing to the differences in cultural
background, national characters and psychologies, philosophies and aesthetic
traditions. This paper aims to explore the differences between Chinese and British
nature poetry in terms of their concern with the relationship between man and
nature and its presentation.
I
Chinese and British nature poets appeal to different things in terms of the
relationship between man and nature. In Chinese nature poems, the poet always
pursues the harmony between man and nature, the self being forgotten; while in
British nature poems, the scenery is regarded as a symbol of emotions, the self
always being foregrounded. Such difference can be clearly seen if we compare
Wordsworth’s “Lines Written in Early Spring” with Wang Wei’s “The Deer
Enclosure” and “The Twitter-Valley.” In the first two stanzas in “Lines Written in
Early Spring”:
I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts,
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.
To her fair works did nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it griev’d my heart to think
What man has made of man.
Wordsworth contrasts nature’s kindness with man’s cruelty. The natural scenery is
subsidiary to the speaker’s thoughts and emotions. The speaker is not immersed in
the intimacy with the nature. Instead, by associating beautiful natural environment
with evil social environment, he ponders over the problem of “what man has
made of man.” For readers, their immediate aesthetic target is the emotion, not
the scenery. Similarly, though the west wind, the swift cloud, the wave and the
hail in Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” and the nightingale, the forest and the
night in Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” all appear as independent imageries, they
carry certain emotions of the speaker or certain symbolic significance. There is
apparently a gap between the speaker and nature, where the speaker is clearly
aware that man isn’t materialized and nature isn’t personified. After a temporary
communication, man and nature have returned to their respective different world.
What Keats felt after the nightingale left is a good example.
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now ‘tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music: — do I wake or sleep?
With several “adieu”s, the nightingale’s singing flows “past the near meadows,”
“over the stream,” “up the hill-side” until it is “buried deep in the next valleyglades.”
The speaker suddenly awakens to the reality though he still lingers over
the dreamlike scene. What predominates in him is reason, not fantasy.
In Wang Wei’s（王维） two poems, “The Deer Enclosure”（鹿柴） and “The
Twitter-Valley”（鸟鸣涧）:
The Deer Enclosure
The hills are empty and nobody is sight,
But the human voices can be heard.
The dark woods can’t hide the late sunset,
Which shines onto the green mosses on the ground.
The Twitter-Valley
Idle man can hear the fall of laurel flowers,
Quiet night can make spring hills empty.
When moon comes out it startles the hill-birds,
Which twitter and twitter in the vernal valley.
the poet creates a serene atmosphere where only the nature is seen. By now, the
poet has rid himself of the burdens of all sorts of thoughts. He seems to have
forgotten about himself, only contemplating the current scene, without any
intellectual interference. It is under such circumstance that he acquires special
hearing and eyesight, and is able to hear the unheard and see the unseen. With the
sensitiveness, he obtains the breath of the universe and feels the rhythm of the
nature, thus combining the subjective with objective. At the moment, the “self”
doesn’t go into the nature, while the nature doesn’t enter the “self.” The nature and
“I” are intermingled. The self is negated(no self), meanwhile it is acknowledged,
because the individual is immersed into the universe, the self is made immortal.
Lines like this in Chinese nature poetry are numerous. For example, “The
sparse shadows of its branches are slant across the clear shallow water, / A
slight fragrance of its flowers floats with wind under moon in twilight”, from
Lin Hejing’s（ 林和靖）“To the Plum Blossoms in a Garden”（ 山园早梅),
is an image of the plum in early spring. Seeing its lonely shadow in the water,
the fragrant plum feels sad, yet admires itself. Vague and sparse, it is ignored by
people, but wins the heartfelt appreciation of the poet. It is a plum, but it is more
like a human being, a noble person isolated from the world and enjoying spiritual
satisfaction. This is exactly the image of the poet himself who has been secluding
himself in Gushan Mountain of Westlake. The imagery produced from the unity
of the self, and the nature is neither a metaphor nor a symbol, but describes a state
when the heart seems to have ceased beating and the self is released from the
body to blend with the myriad of things in the universe. The poet has transcended
the reality by obtaining great freedom in spirit and coming to the highest stage in
aesthetics.
The different relationship between the self and the nature reflected in Chinese
and British nature poetry is closely related to the different natural views.
In China, the prevailing idea is the harmony between man and nature. The
formation of this idea is associated with the Chinese way of living and their living
environment. As early as the New Stone Age, the farming economy had been
established and for several thousand years, the self-sufficing economy was stable
and prosperous. Therefore, people greatly relied on natural environment, and were
sensitive to any delicate changes in the natural world, as they were desiring for
the intimacy with the nature. In Chinese philosophy, although there was preaching
of “the division of man and nature” and “man’s conquering of nature”, what
dominates the mentality of common Chinese people is still the idea of harmony
between man and nature, the communication between man and nature. This idea
is embedded in Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. Therefore, it becomes an
integral part of Chinese natural view and promotes the formation and development
of their aesthetic awareness of nature.
The flourishing of Chinese nature poems and the formation of leading ideas
are closely related to Taoism. The core of Laozi and Zhuangzi’s philosophy is
“Tao”（ 道）, which is the law of the universe and the cause of all changes in
the universe. The highest spiritual state is the unity with “Tao”, that is, through
cultivating the vacancy and stillness of the mind, the subject obtains a mind free
from affectation and all world value judgments. To observe everything in the
universe with this natural mind, “I” coexist with the universe and everything and “I”
are a unity, the object mingling with the subject’s mind.
There are similar ideas in Confucianism. The Confucianists argue that the
essence of the nature exists in human mind. Man in the ethical sense echoes the
nature, the source of ethics. They advocate “Troubled, improve yourself; valued,
improve the world”, that is, one should live in poverty and seek comfort in poverty,
which also implies the idea of “obeying nature.”
The Buddhists advocate refraining from the earthly world. They hold the view
that the sublime state of life is the emptiness and purity of the mind, which is a
returning to the nature through practice of meditation. According to Zen Buddhism,
experiencing a moment of awakening in this life is of central importance. It is
at this moment that one gets his eternity. Therefore, freeing themselves from the
captivity of language, words, concepts and thoughts, Zen Buddhists express those
that are supposed to be unspeakable in an intuitive way.
From different perspectives, Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism all expound
on the idea of the harmony between man and nature. This idea is deeply rooted
in the mind of ancient Chinese intellectuals, particularly exerting great influence
on nature poets’ aesthetic and artistic views. When the poets try to express their
affection towards the nature, the self and the nature are harmoniously mingled with
each other.
In western philosophy, because of the influence of scientific rationality and
humanistic ideas, the relationship between man and nature is relatively estranged.
Ancient Greeks were used to posing natural beauty as something opposite
to themselves, and attempted to analyze it in an objective way. The Melisian
School broke the shackles of mythology and tried to explain the formation and
development of everything in the natural world in terms of matter and rationality,
but they seldom touched upon the relationship between man and nature. Later on,
Protagoras put forward the proposition that “man is the measure of all things”,
placing man as the core of the universe, thus started the tradition of humanism.
Idealists such as Socrates and Plato regarded nature as the embodiment of God
or concepts. They argued that man can only know the surface of the nature while
its inherent laws belong to the other world. Aristotle saw nature in a mechanical
materialistic way. Nature to him is an intellectual world which can be understood,
but it’s hard to be experienced emotionally. In the Middle Ages, western culture
was dominated by Christianity. According to Christianity teachings, man should
believe in God, indulging in the nature would affect the perfection of the soul.
Ever since Renaissance, the beauty of nature has been receiving more and more
attention. The waves of “the discovery of man” had washed away the mythological
remains covering the nature. The brilliant beauty of nature was a shock to people
in the modern west. The practice of praising the nature was temporarily replaced
by Neoclassical rationality in the 17th century, but the enlighteners in the 18th
century declared that “we should return to the nature”. With the advent of the
Romantic Movement in the 19th century, nature became an independent target of
aesthetics and had an important position in literary works. However, nature poets
often appreciate natural beauty from the relationship between thinking and being,
focusing on exploring the nature of everything in the universe. They tend to explain
the diverse and mysterious natural phenomenon with monism, as a result of which
for them, the subject is relatively independent from the object. This explains
why the mind resonates with the nature and the self and the nature intermingled
harmoniously in Wang Wei’s poems on nature, while there’s much reasoning and
thinking in Wordsworth’s poems.
II
Chinese and British nature poetry are also different in their composing principles
and methods. Generally speaking, analogy( 拟物主义) is the main practice in
ancient Chinese natural poetry writing, whereas personification （ 拟人主义）in
English. Chinese nature poets tend to be impersonal. Things exist not because of
“the self”, but the inherent laws. Therefore, the truth and beauty lie in the existence.
Both the things and “the self” can be either subjective or objective. British nature
poets tend to be more personal or subjective, explaining the world with “the self”
and abstract concepts. The value of their poetry lies in the ontological level, as a
consequence of which there is always the color, the emotions and values of “the
self” involved and there is a clear-cut division between the subjective and objective.
For instance, Shelley’s “Ode to a Skylark” and Du Fu’s “A Quatrain” both
present the image of birds. In “Ode to a Skylark”, the speaker addresses the skylark
in apostrophe: “Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! / Bird thou never wert, / That from
Heaven, or near it, / Pourest thy full heart / In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.
”Here, the skylark is imagined as a creature that understands man and stands right
in front of the speaker, listening to him. It is the embodiment of pure happiness and
can sing heavenly hymns which remind the speaker of the past old times where
there was no pain, no sentiment and full of laughter. The skylark is personified.
In Du Fu’s（ 杜甫）“A Quatrain”（ 绝句）, analogy is used: “Two golden
orioles sing amid the willows green; A flock of white egrets flies into the sky. My
window frames the snow-crowned western mountain scene; My door says often
to east-going ship goodbye.” A beautiful picture is painted in the first couplet: the
thatched cottage is surrounded by willows, on the branches of which a couple of
orioles were singing and a flock of white egrets is flying in the sky. Both singing
orioles and flying white egrets bring energy and happiness. This quatrain was
written by Du Fu when he returned to his thatched cottage in Chengdu after the
An Lushan-Shi Siming Rebellion and caught sight of such vibrant views in front
of him. In this poem, the poet is just like a painter, without interfering with the
picture and the sceneries are not personified. But reading the lines, readers may feel
the poet has become a singing oriole or a flying white egret. This is the analogy is
Chinese poetics. The scenery serves as a mirror to the mind.
T. S. Eliot once made a distinction between “narration” and “dramatic
narration” in poetry. “Narration” is a top-down metaphor of the material, is
a subjective projection of the material; “Dramatic narration” is an objective
projection of feelings. Such a distinction is proper to be applied to tell the
differences between Chinese and British poems on nature. In British poems, since
the speaker is narrating, “the sceneries are losing their concreteness and directness
with the speaker’s constant intervention” (Ye Weilian 89) and they are presented
in a single line. To explain this, Mr. Ye Weilian gave an example of Wordsworth’s
“Tintern Abbey.” He pointed out that three quarters of this poem is the explanation
of how the outside world affects the mind, or the explanation of how the mind
and the nature feel and supplement each other. Nature is the “babysitter, mentor
and parent” of his moral being (Ye Weilian 88). Meanwhile, the way the speaker
presents the sceneries shows that he is directing the readers to get in touch with
the sceneries following his eyes, not interweaving time and space, which is quite
similar to the one-way transparency in western painting. Either the readers or the
poet is separated from the nature and is not able to merge into the nature.
Chinese nature poems are the exemplification of “dramatic narration”.
The sceneries are presented directly to the readers, without the interference of
the poet, and with the feature of loose arrangements, multi-levels and changing
perspectives. For example, in “On the West Stream of Chuzhou” （ 滁州西涧）
from Wei Yingwu（韦应物） in Tang Dynasty: “Alone I like the riverside where
green grass grows / And golden orioles sing amid leafy trees. / When showers fall
at dusk, the river overflows; / A lonely boat athwart the ferry floats at ease”, all
the images are independent of each other. There isn’t a sure logic relationship or
a fixed order among the “green grass”, “riverside”, “orioles”, “showers”, “ferry”
and “boat”. They come into readers’ view alternatively, free from the interference
of the speaker’s feelings. Meanwhile, these seemingly irrelevant images form a
complete picture in readers’ mind and evoke their aesthetic pleasure. The readers’
interpretation can be accomplished from every possible perspective and without the
limitation of time and space.
There are various factors leading to such differences between Chinese and
English nature poems. This paper will focus on the following two factors. First,
in terms of aesthetics, the principle of “vitality infusion” is always followed in
appreciating and composing a piece of artistic work in the west, that is, the subject
has to infuse vitality into the aesthetic object. Kant maintains that we should
“transfer our reverence for the object to the nature” (Qtd. Wu Lifu 563) in his
Critique of Judgement. Hegel holds a similar view that “natural beauty is merely
a reflection of the beauty in mind, an incomplete and imperfect state”(Hegel 3),
its perfection could be reached when infused vitality by human mind. That’s why
Hegel maintains that “artistic beauty is above natural beauty”. Influenced by Kant
and Hegel’s ideas, German aesthetician the Vischers and Lipps put forward the
notion of “empathy.” Empathy is the projection of emotions on the outside world.
Aesthetic empathy, in Lipps’ words, is “infusing vitality into reality” (qtd. Zhu
Guangqian 624). As we can see, either in Kant and Hegel’s aesthetics, or in Lipps’
notion of empathy, the focus is always the subject, while the object is completely
passive. With such aesthetic view, personification is generally employed by British
nature poetry writing. The nature is personified and what is foregrounded is the
image of “I,” who directs readers to observing nature.
It is a different picture in Chinese nature poetry writing. In Chinese aesthetics
and philosophies, life of everything is always thought to originate from nature;
everything in nature resonates with human breathing. The aesthetic practice is
not only on the projection of their emotions, but also the bilateral communication
between nature and themselves. This can be achieved by a technique in the ancient
Chinese poetry writing — Bi Xing （比兴）. “Bi” is to attach certain emotions
to things; “Xing” is to trigger certain feelings when seeing things. “BiXing” lays
emphasis on the bilateral communication between the subject and the object, never
separating the person from the thing he attaches emotions to. By employing this
technique in poetry writing, it is possible to connect several imageries, which
share similarities to a certain extent. For example, in Ying Yang’s “On Departure”:
“Clouds float above the ocean at sunrise, / over the mountain at sunset. / Soldiers
at war miss their hometown, / but words of sorrow can’t be said.” “soldiers at
war” are compared to “floating clouds”, their homesickness being foregrounded.
Imageries connected by “Xing” are not necessarily connected with each other,
as “By riverside are cooing / A pair of turtledoves” and “ A good young man is
wooing / A fair maiden he loves”. It is the technique “BiXing” that has made the
juxtaposition of imageries possible in ancient Chinese poetry.
Second, in terms of the features of the language and characters, ancient
Chinese language is loosely structured in grammar, with a flexible part of speech;
while there are strict syntactic rules in English language, with changes of part of
speech, number, person and tense. This is one of the important reasons leading to
the different ways of presenting imageries in different structures in Chinese and
British nature poems.
As in Meng Haoran’s （孟浩然）“Passing the Night on a River in Jiande”
（ 宿建德江）: “I guide my boat to mooring by a misty islet, / With the setting
sun, a traveler’s sorrows revive. / Wilds so vast, the sky stoops to the trees; / The
river so clear, moon close to man.” The original Chinese word “xin,” “di” and “jin”
can be used as adjectives as well as verbs. When “xin” is an adjective, “ke chou
xin” means the traveler feels some new sorrows; when “xin” is a verb, it means
“his sorrows revive”. When “di” is an adjective, “tian di shu” means the sky is
lower than the trees; when “di” is a verb, it means “the sky stoops to the trees”.
When “jin” is an adjective, “yue jin ren” means the moon is “close to” man; when
“jin” is a verb, it means the moon approach man. When used as adjectives, these
words show a static beauty; when verbs, dynamic. Meanwhile, some prepositions
and conjunctions are omitted to vague the connection between imageries, leaving
great space for readers to imagine. In the original Chinese version, there is no “by”
between “moor” and “a misty islet,” and no conjunctions between “ye kuang” and
“tian di shu,” “jiang qing” and “yue jin ren.”
There are quite different features in English language. The strict syntactic
rules and the use of various modifiers set boundaries among imageries, as a
result of which they are developed and presented in a linear way from a certain
perspective. For example, in the first two lines of Wordsworth’s “My Heart Leaps
up,” “My heart leaps up when I behold / A rainbow in the sky,” “in” connects “a
rainbow” and “the sky,” indicating the constraint. “When” connects “my heart leaps
up” and “I behold a rainbow,” indicating the reasons of hearting leaping up. When
there is such a clear and strict boundary between imageries, the independence and
objectivity of the sceneries is invaded, which is helpful to produce ambiguity and
visual effects.
In the early 20th century, English poets started to learn from ancient Chinese
poetry, and have developed some similar techniques. The typical example is
Imagism. However, even in Pound, who very consciously imitates Chinese poems,
we find concerns and perspectives quite different from his Chinese counterpart.
This question will be further discussed in other papers.
Works Cited
Hegel. Esthetics. Vol.I. Beijing: The Commercial Press, 1979.
Wu Lifu. Selected Works of Western Literary Theory. Shanghai Translation publishing house,
1979.
Ye Weilian. Chinese Poetics. SDX joint publishing company, 1992.
Zhu Guangqian. History of Western Esthetics.Vol. II. Beijing: people’s Literature Publishing
House, 1979.
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