Chapter 4. Model of Modern Poetry Commentary:
How to Comment on a Poem
Section 1. Two-Dimensional Thinking
When a critic faces each poem, they may need to repeatedly think from two dimensions:
(1) How to, based on objective theoretical tools such as rhetoric, grammar, discourse structure studies, aesthetics, psychology, hermeneutics, semiotics, etc., use one or several of these theories as evaluative foundations to extract various clues from paragraphs and sentences within the poem, and to generalize the poem’s basic explicit (external) qualities. This includes fully discussing formal elements such as poetic language, imagery, and musicality, thereby completing the “poetics construction of poetry criticism,” namely the “meta-text of modern poetry criticism.”
At this stage, the critic examines the formal elements of the poetic text using rhetoric, grammar, discourse structure studies, hermeneutics, and semiotics to analyze language and imagery; and uses phonology to examine the musicality of language and sentences, identifying flaws and also identifying strengths, thereby forming objective evaluative arguments regarding the text’s expressive techniques.
(2) Adopt specific critical strategies, based on one or more literary critical theories such as structuralism, deconstruction criticism, reader-response theory, feminist criticism, postcolonial perspectives, etc., to carry out deductive analysis, thereby uncovering certain latent (internal) characteristics of the poem.
Readers may then ask: must writing poetry criticism necessarily “quote the classics,” rely on these theoretical tools, and apply existing literary critical theories? Of course not. “Quoting the classics” serves, on one hand, to regulate the critic as a member of the literary community and to establish an inter-subjective (Inter-subjectivity) theoretical foundation; on the other hand, it provides objective standards of value judgment for critics to follow as a methodological basis.
Traditional Chinese poetic commentary systems across dynasties mostly lack complete logical structure and tend to become impressionistic “reading-response” criticism. They often discuss only one or a few “points,” and the issues involved are either broad stylistic generalizations or minor disputes over wording. They remain at the level of “viewpoint thinking” and do not treat the poetic text as a complete “spiritual product,” a quasi-organic whole under a holistic conceptual framework. As a result, opinions vary widely, everyone’s interpretation appears reasonable, and in the end the situation becomes “each excels in his own field, but no consensus is reached,” without an objective conclusion accepted by the majority.
Section 2. Five Observational Dimensions of Modern Poetry Texts
Perhaps due to the author’s extensive reading of poetry and exposure to works of various levels, as well as long-term immersion in the field of criticism, the standards for selecting excellent works are relatively strict and the threshold relatively high. A poem that merely satisfies three basic objective conditions—appropriate rhetoric, no major grammatical flaws, and stable structure—can only be considered “barely passing.” Without unexpected creativity and refreshing imagery, it remains an ordinary work. In other words, if a poem contains numerous grammatical errors, cannot adequately express emotion, or lacks appropriate formal design, it may generally be judged a “poor work.”
As for what is called “creativity,” the author does not intend to define its essence in detail, but in his humble view it may be observed from the following five dimensions:
(1) The specificity (defamiliarization) of subject matter selection
(2) The structural arrangement of the text and the logical (causal) development of imagistic thinking (imagery) between paragraphs, involving discourse structure theory
(3) The flexibility of grammatical sentence patterns, involving linguistic (grammar) studies
(4) The skillful mastery of expressive techniques, involving rhetoric, aesthetics, and phonology
(5) The narrativity of the text, involving narratological theory
As for “poetic realm” (aesthetic state), it is approached through close reading of the text, and from the thematic intention (intension) and interrelations among sentences and paragraphs, one explores the author’s latent spiritual activity behind the imagery. This includes the ideas and conceptual frameworks intended to be conveyed, ideological positions expressed, value systems advocated—serious metaphysical propositions—as well as aesthetic experience and aesthetic viewpoints as philosophical issues.
Section 3. Sample Poetry Commentary
“Sky Burial” / Niuniu (Lin Ya-ruo)
Ah
my beloved sky burial master
please cleanse my body
please shatter my skull
so that my brain, which has boiled for a hundred years of longing, may finally breathe
use a sharp Tibetan knife to cut open my chest wall
look—my heart bears witness to love in vivid red
Muttering incantations echo on the sky burial platform
my lover is already stretching his neck in expectation
that joy and satisfaction of becoming one
is continuously imagined
my lover, your white teeth stretch like snow peaks here
feathers tremble with excitement
yes, I can feel your soul’s eternal longing
Our love was once not permitted by this vast world
you cultivated for hundreds of lifetimes as a lama and forged yourself into a divine eagle
while I remain beautiful within samsara
accumulating countless virtues and chastity in exchange for your kiss
recklessly and wildly upon my body
How anxious you are
before I can smile at you
you have already sealed my lips
hungrily pecking at my entire body
every muscle and organ
licking the juice from every fragment of bone
oh I love you
feeling your body inch by inch of flesh
your mouth, esophagus, stomach, and intestines are embracing me
Huge and abundant wings unfold toward the blue sky
from your soaring eyes I see heaven
heaven is far more transparent than wind
This poem, after repeated contemplation, deeply moves the author.
Overall, this poem satisfies the two subjective evaluative conditions of “unexpected creativity and refreshing imagery.” First, the author will discuss “creativity” from four aspects:
(1) Subject matter selection: Readers in Taiwan, living on a subtropical island, are highly curious about Tibet, located on the “roof of the world,” living under towering mountains and high-altitude environments. Their cultural system—religious beliefs (Tantric Buddhism), lifestyle, customs, and social practices—is full of fascination. This poem “Sky Burial” directly involves the Tibetan funerary practice. Whether the Buddhist tale of “offering one’s flesh to feed the eagle” inspired Tibetan culture to form the practice of “sky burial” is not something the author intends to speculate on. As for returning the body to nature after death, it should be considered the most natural way of handling life’s end.
(2) The structure and arrangement of the text, and the logical (causal) deductive progression of imagistic thinking (imagery) between sections: this poem speaks from the perspective of the first-person “I,” and this “I” is a collective designation for every Tibetan “deceased” throughout history who has undergone this ritual, rather than referring to any specific individual deceased person.
The first and second stanzas function as the opening and developing sections, entering from a realistic scene and unfolding with a realist brush. In the opening stanza, the author immediately uses a close-up shot to pull the screen forward, presenting an almost cruel image:
Ah
my beloved sky burial master
please cleanse my body
please shatter my skull
so that my brain, which has boiled for a hundred years of longing, may finally breathe
use a sharp Tibetan knife to cut open my chest wall
look, my heart bears witness to love in vivid red
The author, that is, the first-person “I” who is the deceased in this poem, is lying naked on the sky burial platform, witnessing everything the sky burial master is doing to his body: pulling out tendons, cutting flesh, breaking bones, dismembering the corpse.
Muttering incantations echo on the sky burial platform
my lover is already stretching his neck in expectation
that joy and satisfaction of becoming one
is continuously imagined
my lover, your white teeth stretch like snow peaks here
feathers tremble with excitement
yes, I can feel your soul’s eternal longing
The camera in the second stanza pushes forward (to push forward), with its focus falling on the vultures not far away, describing these waiting vultures as “already stretching their necks in expectation,” and further, from a reversed perspective, imagining the vultures’ “joy and satisfaction of becoming one.” In this section, the author deliberately avoids directly naming the image of the “vulture,” and instead uses metonymy, where “parts” (teeth and feathers) stand for the whole (the vulture).
Our love was once not permitted by this vast world
you cultivated for hundreds of lifetimes as a lama and forged yourself into a divine eagle
while I remain beautiful within samsara
accumulating countless virtues and chastity in exchange for your kiss
recklessly and wildly upon my body
The third stanza functions as a “turning point” in the narrative. The first three lines use retrospective presentation, pulling the camera back into a past temporal dimension through memory and flashback. Through the Buddhist view of reincarnation, the poem transitions from lama to divine eagle, explaining the karmic relationship between the deceased and the vulture across lifetimes, linking the entanglement of love between man and woman, thereby creating a myth-like, tragically beautiful atmosphere. The final two lines then return to reality, using a montage-like cinematic cut (dissolve) to seamlessly connect memory of the past with present scenes.
How anxious you are
before I can smile at you
you have already sealed my lips
hungrily pecking at my entire body
every muscle and organ
licking the juice from every fragment of bone
oh, I love you
feeling your body inch by inch of flesh
your mouth, esophagus, stomach, and intestines are embracing me
The fourth stanza depicts the vultures’ impatient feeding scene. To continue the tragic aesthetic atmosphere established in the third stanza, the author again uses bodily entanglement between lovers as a “parallel image” to synchronize with the feeding of the vultures, thereby evoking in readers a tragic aesthetic association under realistic imagery and reducing the sense of horror produced by the close-up detailed depiction in this section.
Huge and abundant wings unfold toward the blue sky
from your soaring eyes I see heaven
heaven is far more transparent than wind
In the final stanza, the author employs an abrupt shift, using a “camera transition” method to cut to the vultures after they have finished feeding. The camera first shows the vultures’ thick wings; after the feast, the vultures all spread their wings and rise into flight. The camera follows them, slowly pulling back, with the focus expanding into infinity, as several vultures gradually disappear into the blue sky in the distance. Then the author executes a sudden reversal, immediately refocusing on the vultures’ “soaring eyes,” and then abruptly declares that from those soaring eyes he sees “heaven,” a spiritual realm more transparent than wind and free of all attachments. Of course, at this point, the author—that is, the deceased within the sky burial ritual—has already been fully consumed; the body no longer exists, leaving only a liberated soul, drifting freely between heaven and earth.
(3) The flexibility of grammatical sentence patterns and the skillful mastery of expressive techniques
This poem “Sky Burial,” in terms of subject matter, should be classified as a “love poem,” exploring the intertwined themes of love and death and the tension between them, using the Buddhist concept of reincarnation as the linking thread. A love poem belongs to the category of lyric poetry, but in order to allow readers to fully experience the tragic beauty of this poem, the poet adopts a “dialogic form” for narrative lyric expression, where the first-person “I” speaks, and the second-person “you” (the vulture) serves as a specific addressee, with both existing in a conversational relationship.
The dialogic form is widely used in love poetry. Through a progressive dialogue between the author and the divine eagle—the embodiment of the lover—the syntactic (sentence pattern) variations follow the fluctuations of the plot. Although the variation is not highly complex, and the author employs many low-density prose-like syntactic structures to maintain rhythmic fluency, each stanza nonetheless appropriately balances concrete imagistic language (figurative nouns) and abstract emotional language (thoughts and abstract nouns), producing an effect of “mutual complementarity between the real and the abstract.” This allows the poem to appear linguistically simple on the surface, yet capable of conveying deeply moving tragic aesthetic emotion.
Among the love poems I have read, this one is no longer an ordinary work; it is plain in language yet profound in meaning, and this is precisely the author’s sophistication. Consider the following passage:
My beloved sky burial master (image, real scene)
help me cleanse my body (image, real scene)
please shatter my skull (image, real scene)
so that my brain, which has boiled for a hundred years of longing, may finally breathe (thought, virtual scene: virtualizing the real or virtual reality)
use a sharp Tibetan knife to cut open my chest wall (image, real scene)
look, my heart uses vivid red to bear witness to love (thought, virtual scene: returning from the real to the virtual)
In the sentence “so that my brain, which has boiled for a hundred years of longing, may finally breathe,” image and thought are fused. “Boiled for a hundred years of longing” is emotional language; emotional language is a “product of imagination,” expressing emotions such as joy, anger, sorrow, and happiness, as well as value choices or value judgments of right and wrong, good and evil. It is not a concrete object or real scene. Therefore, once the concrete object “brain matter” (noun used as object) is added, the preceding emotional language becomes a “dynamic adjective.” It is called “dynamic” because the word “boiling” is originally a verb. “Boiling” is converted into an adjective modifying (describing) the noun “brain matter.” This sentence pattern is what the author calls “entering the real through the virtual or virtual reality.” As for “the brain matter, which has boiled for a hundred years of longing,” the author uses the temporal adverb “a hundred years” to emphasize long temporal-spatial distance and separation, and it also serves an exaggerative (hyperbolic) function.
And the sentence “look, my heart uses vivid red to bear witness to love” is exactly the opposite. The preceding “my heart uses vivid red” is a concrete object; “bears witness to love,” where “love” is an abstract noun without physical form. This is what the author calls “returning from the real to the virtual.” In addition, it is worth noting that in “my heart uses vivid red to bear witness to love,” “vivid red” is originally the adjective form “vivid red blood,” which should be followed by the noun “blood” to form a semantically complete prepositional phrase. However, the author deliberately omits “blood” and the particle equivalent of “-ly/-of,” causing “vivid red” to function as a metonymy for blood, using metonymy in the sense of “substituting by characteristic or emblem.” 1
This poem still has a few minor flaws. For example, “my lover, your white bright teeth stretch like snow peaks here” may easily lead to misreading or misjudgment by readers, because if “lover” refers to the “divine eagle” in the latter part, then a raptor such as a vulture does not seem to have “white bright teeth,” which are “eating instruments” belonging to humans or canines and felines. Such an expression appears to contradict common sense, so readers may speculate in another direction, such as whether this “lover” here also includes canids such as wolves, thereby arriving at a result inconsistent with the later “divine eagle.” Another example: “recklessly and wildly upon my body” contains grammatical errors. “Wildly” and “recklessly” are both abstract emotional language; combining them makes the meaning even more abstract and difficult to interpret. Moreover, these two terms share the same part of speech (both can function as adjectives or verbs) and have similar meanings. If “wildly” is taken as an adjective and “recklessly” as a noun, not only does semantic redundancy occur, but it also violates the grammatical rule that one should not “use the virtual to metaphorize (modify) the virtual.” Although here the author again seems to employ metonymy, using “recklessly” to stand for “wild kissing.” Of course, this sentence only needs to delete “wildly” to conform to an inverted sentence structure: the adjective “recklessly” at the end then retroactively modifies the noun phrase functioning as subject, “upon my body.”
Although this poem “Sky Burial” contains minor linguistic flaws, its merits outweigh its defects. Overall, it remains a commendable work. In particular, the alternation between long and short lines is still properly matched to narrative development and emotional intensity: short lines are used when emotion is intense, long lines when emotion is relaxed. The rhythm shows appropriate control, and the exclamatory words “ah” and “oh” are also reasonably used in accordance with narrative needs, enhancing tone and emotion. The rhythm, intensity, and melodic rise and fall of the entire poem feel well-balanced, and although it adopts a first-person “I” perspective and unfolds in a dialogic form, the author clearly adopts a “recitative-like” (humming-like) rhythm to create a sorrowful and exquisitely beautiful emotional melody, yet with a relatively light and fluid rhythmic sense.
In the final section of the poem, although the transition (camera cut) is slightly too fast and somewhat stiff, the closing line “heaven is far more transparent than wind” appears on the surface to be lightly sketched, yet its implication is profoundly “transcendent” and rich in philosophical depth and religious meaning. It appears highly incisive, with a force of “ten thousand jun,” forming a suddenly rising peak-like melody, suspended in midair above the ethereal world.
Note:
1: “Chapter 8: Metonymy,” p. 93, Rhetoric, author: Chen Zhengzhi. Wunan Publishing Company, first edition, first printing, September 2001, Taipei, Taiwan.
Postscript: This draft of poetry analysis was written in early February 2002, after reading the poem “Sky Burial” by the flight attendant Lin Ya-ruo, who used the pen name Niuniu, and was subsequently posted online. On October 27, 2013, Lin Ya-ruo died in a traffic accident while traveling independently in Australia. During her lifetime I had promised to write another analysis of her poetry, but it was never fulfilled in time. This early critical essay is included here to commemorate this never-met beloved muse.
