Chapter 12, “Dreams in the Mortal World, Yet Still Unawakened”: An Analysis of the Beauty and Sorrow in the Poetry of Xi Murong ∕ Chen Qufei
Female poet Xi Murong was born in 1943 in Chongqing, the rear area during the later stage of the War of Resistance Against Japan. During her childhood, she moved with her family to Hong Kong and later relocated to Hsinchu City, Taiwan, where she spent her adolescence and early youth in the Windy City. She completed her studies in the Department of Fine Arts at National Taiwan Normal University and then pursued further education at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, Belgium. Growing up during the turbulent era of the Chinese Civil War, she experienced the hardships of displacement and wandering. Trained as an artist, Xi Murong taught for many years at the Provincial Hsinchu Teachers College (the predecessor of Hsinchu Education University). She established herself in the Windy City and embarked on a creative career in modern poetry and prose. Her poetry primarily centers on romantic relationships between men and women. Her diction is simple yet elegant, her imagery bright and easily understood, and her rhythms graceful and gentle. Romantic and emotional in style, her works have long been welcomed and loved by young readers and students throughout the Chinese-speaking world. This popularity developed into a “Xi Murong whirlwind” that lasted for more than twenty years. She was even hailed as the “Queen of Poetry” and the “Qiong Yao of the Poetry World.” This enduring emotional whirlwind possesses the distinctive force of the northeast monsoon unique to Hsinchu, the Windy City. Regarding this phenomenon, literary critics on both sides of the Taiwan Strait seem to have deliberately adopted a policy of “cold treatment” for a long time. In both quality and quantity, critical attention has been noticeably disproportionate.
The reason Xi Murong’s poetry is widely favored by young readers is not, in the author’s view, something that should be simplistically reduced, as some popular commentators have done, to “vulgar popularization.” Such a generalized argument puts the cart before the horse. After carefully reading her poetic texts, the author’s preliminary understanding is this: “The writing is not excessively profound, the language is not excessively vulgar; therefore, it can be appreciated by both refined and popular audiences.” The gentle tone, fresh language, clear imagery, atmosphere blending beauty and sorrow, and graceful lyrical rhythms are all characteristics of this female poet’s work. With romantic love as its principal subject matter, her poetry, compared with the masculine styles of male poets—such as the strange imagery and grand scope of Luo Fu, the gentle elegance of Yu Guangzhong, the romantic sensitivity of Zheng Chouyu, and the black humor of Ya Xian—undoubtedly resonates more broadly with young men and women.
This article will discuss only the thematic preferences and rhetorical aesthetics found in Xi Murong’s poetry. The aim is to identify the rhetorical characteristics that account for the widespread appeal of her poems among young readers and to provide a reference indicator for the future promotion of modern poetry reading in Taiwan.
Keywords: female poet, rhetoric, aesthetics
I. Poetry as the Mirror of Life’s Emotional Tone
There are many reasons why Xi Murong’s poetry is widely loved by young readers. Certainly, it is not merely because the subjects she chooses are mostly centered on love and relationships. Other female poets of the same period (the 1970s to the 1990s), such as Jiong Hong, Luo Ying, and later Shen Huamo and Feng Qing, also focused on emotional themes, yet the popularity of their works never approached that of Xi Murong. After analyzing Xi’s works, the author summarizes their characteristics as follows: language that is simple yet beautiful, imagery that is clear and luminous, and a lyrical tone tinged with faint sorrow. Her style is melancholically beautiful and graceful, sweet without becoming cloying. These qualities are not only manifestations of Xi Murong’s feminine characteristics but also projections of her emotional temperament. For poets with genuine feelings, whether their works are realistic or expressive, poetry is often the embodiment of their life experiences and the projection of their emotional disposition.
Some critics have questioned Xi Murong’s decades-long focus on romantic relationships, describing her as a “love-struck girl who refuses to grow up.” Indeed, even into middle age, romantic relationships remained the central focus of her writing. This also became a form of “self-limitation.” In recent years, however, her vision has increasingly included the Mongolian grasslands of her homeland, and themes of homesickness and family affection have become important concerns. Some critics regard this as a significant turning point and view it with hopeful expectations for Xi’s growth. The author believes that whenever a poet undergoes an obvious “turning point” (or “stylistic shift”) in the creative process, it is usually triggered by dramatic changes in the external environment. Such shifts are often reflected in subject selection, formal structure, language usage, and even rhetorical techniques. These are the external conditions most readily noticed by critics and readers. Internal psychological factors—such as emotional temperament and the fluctuations of joy and sorrow—must instead be examined through methods such as psychoanalysis or archetypal criticism. Only then can clues be uncovered through comparisons between earlier and later styles.
When Xi Murong returned to her homeland of Inner Mongolia in 1989, the magnificent landscapes of grasslands and deserts became important settings in her poetry. These experiences enriched her subject matter, expanded the scope of her creative vision, and broadened her horizons. The emotional impact of these external environments inspired her to write from deeper perspectives involving time, space, historical consciousness, and homesickness. Critics naturally regard this as an “important turning point” in her creative journey. For this reason, this article will focus on analyzing the rhetorical techniques found in Xi Murong’s poetry and exploring the aesthetic qualities of her rhetoric.
A fondness for themes of romantic relationships should not automatically be equated with a “refusal to grow up.” It reflects the poet’s “scope of life experience” or “personal preference.” Such criticism would be justified only if the poet’s expressive techniques remained stagnant and refused to develop. Yet the author has found no such evidence in Xi Murong’s works from different periods. In other words, to accuse Xi directly of “refusing to grow” seems somewhat exaggerated. The author believes that if Edge of Light and Shadow is taken as the watershed marking Xi’s stylistic transformation, a more balanced view would be that her earlier works possessed a narrower scope and showed limited variation in technique, whereas her later works expanded in scope. Nevertheless, there remains room for improvement in the consistency of poetic quality, because Xi was not previously adept at handling subjects of grand scale. That is all. Based on the author’s reading experience, some poets’ later works are actually inferior to their earlier works, exhibiting a phenomenon of decline. The wandering poets Zheng Chouyu and Yang Mu are examples.
In response to critics who accuse her of “refusing to grow” and “standing still,” Xi adopts the attitude expressed in Hu Shi’s line, “You cannot compose my poems, just as I cannot dream your dreams.” She takes criticism with good humor. Consider how she gently mocks herself in her poem “The Prison of Poetry” (included in Book of Lost Poems):
How vast this heaven and earth are
My love, why is it that some people can never understand
That the kingdom they guard so stubbornly
Is precisely the prison
We never wished to enter
Every poet possesses a unique personality, mode of thinking, and value system. Regardless of the subjects they choose to address, as long as their poetry can resonate with a particular social class or group of readers, they are already poets in the fullest sense of the word. As for literary critics, their examinations of a poet’s artistic and social significance are inevitably based on their own aesthetic perceptions and value judgments. Such criticisms and conclusions do not necessarily alter established facts or historical evaluations.
The Tang Dynasty social poets Yuan Zhen and Bai Juyi provide clear historical examples. We cannot arbitrarily claim that Bai Juyi’s and Du Fu’s straightforward social poems lack artistic merit, while only highly artistic monumental works such as T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, rich in allusion and literary references, deserve to endure. This is because “artistic merit” is not the sole aesthetic condition determining whether poetry can be widely accepted by readers and preserved through history.
Therefore, literary critics need not universalize their own aesthetics and values, demanding that every poet pass through their particular set of standards. Still less should they usurp the poet’s role by insisting that poets conform to frameworks established by critics before being deemed worthy of the poet’s laurel crown.
The author, too, possesses a personal set of aesthetic standards when writing criticism. These standards are grounded in the objective principles of rhetoric and serve as a means of “sifting gold from sand.” Yet the author believes that rhetorical beauty is merely one relatively objective tool among expressive techniques. It is a measuring stick for evaluating the quality of poetry and a foundational methodology. As for poetic mood, spiritual depth, and stylistic character, more systematic approaches—such as psychoanalysis, aesthetic evaluation, and hermeneutics—must be employed. Through processes of induction, deduction, comparison, and dialectical analysis, these qualities can be distilled and refined.
II. Romance and Lyricism in Xi Murong’s Poetry
The “artistry” found in Xi Murong’s poetry is not the kind of mysterious suggestiveness characteristic of Surrealism, unconstrained by rationality and logic. Nor is it the chaotic imagery and thematic collapse associated with Postmodernism, which stands in opposition to aesthetics. Rather, it resembles the delicate and graceful lyrical tone of Romanticism. Strong emotion serves as the foundation of aesthetic experience, while imagination and association are employed to express aesthetic emotions such as anxiety, melancholy beauty, fear, loss, and sorrow. Likewise, when confronted with the grandeur of nature, her poetry conveys heartfelt awe and admiration.
A close reading of Xi Murong’s poems leaves a vivid impression through the simplicity and purity of her techniques. She is not a poet who follows dominant intellectual trends, nor is she a pioneering innovator. Critics need not burden her with the responsibility of reflecting the pulse of the age. Xi Murong is like a clear and shallow spring. Her aim is not to create a new world or establish benchmarks, nor does she seek to astonish readers with startling language. Yet her poetry enables many readers to experience fully the sweetness of love and the softness of imagery. It moves and comforts the human spirit. As a result, she is able to draw closer to readers’ hearts, causing her lines to ring the little bells hidden within them and awaken endless echoes of resonance.
Examining her choice of subjects, Xi Murong’s lyrical tone in her earlier period (Qilixiang, A Youth Without Regrets, Nine Chapters of Time) focused primarily on objects, emotions, and people. In her later period (Book of Lost Poems, I Fold My Love, Edge of Light and Shadow, In the Name of Poetry), she incorporated more themes of homesickness, the passage of time, landscape description, epistolary poems written in response to friends, and narrative poems marked by historical consciousness. The scope of her work expanded quite noticeably.
Most of these subjects tend toward the expression of the “individual self”—that is, personalized aesthetic experience. For lyrical poets who favor expressive writing, individuality and personal distinctiveness are often more pronounced than in realist social poets. The author will first compare poems of similar subject matter from different periods, examining changes in poetic texture and emotional quality. Through this comparison, the differing expressive techniques employed by the poet at various stages of her career can be interpreted, providing diachronic evidence of her creative evolution.
I. A Focus on Personal Themes: Object Poems, Emotional Poems, and Character Poems
[1] Object Poems: “Inspired by Things, Therefore Singing” in “A Chance Encounter on a Narrow Road”
Xi Murong’s object poems inherit the tradition of Chinese object-centered poetry. Going beyond the mere depiction of an object’s appearance and form, they not only express the character and charm of the object being celebrated, but also weave into it the author’s own thoughts and emotions. This is what the ancients referred to as “inspired by things, therefore singing”: “embedding emotion within objects” or “arousing emotion through objects.” An example is the early poem “A Flowering Tree” (included in Qilixiang, pp. 6–7):
How can I make you meet me
At my most beautiful moment? For this
I have prayed before the Buddha for five hundred years
Praying that He would grant us a destined bond in this mortal world
And so the Buddha transformed me into a tree
Growing beside the road you must pass
Under the sunlight, solemnly bursting into blossoms
Every flower is a hope from my previous life
When you draw near, please listen carefully
Those trembling leaves are the passion of my waiting
And when at last you pass by without noticing
Scattered all over the ground behind you
My friend, those are not flower petals
They are my withered heart
In the opening stanza, the author appears in the image of an innocent young maiden clasping her hands in prayer before the Buddha.
Beginning with the second stanza, she transforms herself into an object through the technique of personification through objectification, borrowing the object to express emotion and deepen the poem’s sentiment.
She says that the blossoms blooming upon the branches are her “hopes from a previous life,” concretizing the abstract feeling of “hopes from a previous life” through the metaphor of “flowers in this life.”
In the final stanza, the entire poem is narrated from the perspective of the “object” (the flowering tree).
The line “Those trembling leaves are the passion of my waiting,” and the statement that the flower petals scattered across the ground behind the beloved “are my withered heart,” place abstract emotions upon the concrete and perceptible realities of the tree’s flowers and leaves.
In this way, the physical object becomes imbued with human feeling.
Regarding this poem, Xi Murong once recounted its creative process during a lecture.¹
She recalled that she was teaching at Hsinchu Teachers College in Taiwan at the time.
One day in May, she was riding a train through the mountains of Miaoli.
The train continuously entered and emerged from tunnels.
After emerging from a particularly long tunnel, she casually turned her head and looked toward the mountains behind it.
There, on a high hillside, she saw a tung tree covered with white blossoms.
“At that moment, I almost cried out. I thought, how could there be such a tree, so solemnly covered with flowers from top to bottom, with no green leaves visible, standing on the hillside like a magnificent canopy. But just as I was about to take a closer look, the train rounded a curve, and the tree disappeared from sight.”
It was this tung tree, which truly existed in the living reality of Xi Murong’s experience, that remained unforgettable to her.
Xi Murong said:
“This is a love poem I wrote for nature. I encountered a flowering tree in the living scene of my life, and I was speaking on its behalf.”
Just as Liu Xie wrote in The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons: On Poetry:
“Human beings are endowed with the seven emotions; when they respond to things, they are moved. Moved by things, they sing their aspirations—nothing could be more natural.”
The poet, “moved by a scene and inspired by an object,” projected her emotions onto a tung tree covered with white blossoms, encountered by chance during a journey.
Through the process of emotional transference, subject and object merged into one.
The tung tree thus became a substitute for the poet herself.
This confirms the poet’s own statement:
“Poetry is a chance encounter with life on a narrow road.”
These poems centered on objects are precisely the “chance encounters on narrow roads” between the poet and the colorful phenomena of the external world, encounters that give rise to “the emotion of beauty.”
Let us now look at a middle-to-late-period work included in Book of Lost Poems (p. 094):
“Song of the Wild Horse”
Please do not speak any more of wind and frost
I have already grown accustomed to the sunlight of the South
All memories have become blurred
Now I am silent and tame
Only the fierce wind still roars in my dreams at night
Who can hear the sorrowful cry of that life?
When has the longing within my heart ever ceased?
Only in the dreams of the night, in the dreams of the night
Can my soul return to being a wild horse
Running wildly toward you, toward the northern wilderness
Only in the dreams of the night
In the dreams of the night
In this poem, the poet employs the technique of objectification, and through the imaginative device of prophetic manifestation, “returns” herself into a wild horse.
She returns to the northern wilderness that haunts her thoughts and dreams.
The Nineteen Ancient Poems contains the line:
“The northern horse leans toward the northern wind; the southern bird nests upon a southern branch.”
Deep affection and attachment to one’s homeland are innate.
If this is true even of birds and beasts, it is all the more true of human beings.
This poem was written in September 2000.
Compared with her earlier object poems, Xi Murong’s vision after returning to visit her homeland had clearly broadened.
Beyond themes of romantic affection, she had begun to touch upon the subject of homesickness.
[2] Lyric Poetry: Sweet Without Being Cloying, Sorrowful Without Being Wounding
Lyric poetry is easy to write but difficult to perfect.
Whether one chooses the restraint of “speaking only three-tenths of what one means” or the sincerity of direct emotional expression, achieving the proper balance is never easy.
Xi Murong’s lyric poetry is “sweet without being cloying, sorrowful without being wounding.”
It possesses a remarkable ability to stir the sensitive heartstrings of young men and women.
This is precisely one of the main reasons why her poetry has been so widely loved by readers.
Consider this early work included in Qilixiang (p. 062):
“Parting While Still Alive”
Please look again
Look at me one more time
In the wind, in the rain
Turn back and gaze once more
At my face tonight
Please keep this moment
Firmly in your memory, only because
After this moment, with a single turn
You and I will become strangers
Nothing is sadder than parting while still alive
And in some future year, in
A reunion that cannot be foreseen
I will never again
Never again, never
Be as beautiful as I am tonight
This poem was later adapted into a song by selecting the first and final stanzas, and it was performed by the singer Pan Yueyun.
The poem is permeated with an atmosphere of beauty and sorrow following the loss of love.
The helplessness and regret of an irretrievable separation are quietly unfolded through one final gaze before parting.
The effect is deeply moving.
The line “Nothing is sadder than parting while still alive” originates from “Jiu Ge: Shao Siming” in the Songs of Chu.
Parting in life and separation in death are among the most painful experiences in human existence.
Through this poem, one can feel the grief and powerless sorrow within the heart of a deeply loving young woman facing imminent separation.
The final stanza, beginning with “And in some future year, in a reunion that cannot be foreseen,” employs the technique of prophetic manifestation.
The scene is projected many years into the future.
Standing at a future point in time, after the ravages and vicissitudes of the years have altered her appearance, the speaker looks back and concludes:
The beautiful face deliberately adorned “for you” tonight is contrasted against that future self.
This juxtaposition creates a profound sense of regret over the truth that youthful beauty can never fully return once it has passed.
“Frontier Song” (Qilixiang, p. 102)
Please sing for me a song of the frontier
In that ancient language long forgotten
Please call softly with your beautiful trembling voice
To the magnificent rivers and mountains within my heart
That fragrance found only beyond the Great Wall
Who says the melodies of frontier songs are always too sorrowful
If you do not love to hear them
It is because the song contains none of your longing
And we must always sing them again and again
Thinking of the grasslands stretching a thousand miles, glittering with golden light
Thinking of wind and sand howling across the great desert
Thinking of the banks of the Yellow River, beside the Yin Mountains
Heroes riding their horses, riding home to their homeland
This poem was written in 1979.
Although the frontier scenes within the poem originate from imagination, one can nevertheless feel the poet’s longing for the magnificent deserts and grasslands and her deep emotional attachment to them.
This homesickness grew stronger with the passing years.
The poem was later slightly revised by Li Nanhua, set to music, and performed by Tsai Chin.
Together with the campus folk-song movement, it became a shared youthful memory for many people of the fourth, fifth, and sixth generations.
“Song of the Wild Geese—Written for the Fragmented Plateau”
(Edge of Light and Shadow, p. 97)
The land deeply loved by our ancestors now belongs to others
Yet the sky still remains
The brave bodies of their descendants can no longer belong to themselves
Yet the soul still remains
Histories as precious as gold have all been altered by others
Yet memory still remains
And because of this we cannot help but silently gaze at you
Whenever you slowly spread your wings across the heavens
You pierce our souls and uncover our memories
O wild geese burdened with sorrow
Where are you flying to?
O wild geese burdened with sorrow
Where are you flying to?
This poem was written in 1994.
Having already returned to the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, her homeland, Xi Murong uses the image of wild geese soaring through the grassland skies to express her profound cultural homesickness.
The first three statements employ parallel sentence structures and repeated patterns.
They successively point out the transformations brought about by the vicissitudes of time and history:
from land
to the body
to history.
The repeated question at the conclusion deepens the author’s anxiety concerning the uncertain future of her nomadic people who follow water and pasture.
This poem not only possesses a broad and profound historical vision, but also reveals a deep concern for the rise and decline of her people's collective culture.
It has clearly moved beyond the earlier framework of personal romantic joys and sorrows.
[2] Poems of Youthful Years: “Youth and Beauty” and “Reflections on the Passage of Time”
Time is merciless, and beauty fades easily.
A woman's youth is like an hourglass, flowing away grain by grain through the years.
Women are often attentive to changes in their own appearance.
Such themes frequently become the special domain of female poets.
Xi Murong is naturally no exception.
In her poetry, there are many works of this kind.
In her earlier period, they revolve around youth and beauty.
In her later years, after entering middle age, they center upon lamenting the passage of time and reflective remembrance.
“A Thousand-Year Wish” (Qilixiang, p. 16)
I always hope
That moonlit night when I was twenty years old
Could return once more
So that I might live it all over again
Yet
The winds of the Shang Dynasty
The rains of the Tang Dynasty
How many blossoms
How many carefree maidens
I imagine that after they turned back upon the jade steps
They too could only cut roses in vain
And place them in a vase
“Youth, Part One” (Qilixiang, p. 34)
Every ending has already been written
Every tear has already set out upon its journey
Yet suddenly I have forgotten what kind of beginning it was
On that ancient summer day that can never return
No matter how I search
The young you pass by only like the shadow of a cloud
And your smiling face, so faint and so pale
Gradually disappears into the mountain mists after sunset
So I open those yellowed pages
Fate has bound them together most clumsily
With tears in my eyes, I read them again and again
Yet I must admit
Youth is a book written in far too much haste
These two early poems were written in 1965 and 1968 respectively.
The poet had only recently passed the age of twenty.
Regarding the youth that was about to depart, her state of mind gradually underwent a transformation.
She moved from the longing expressed in “to live it all over again”
to the realization expressed in “I must admit that youth is a book written in far too much haste.”
She calmly acknowledged and accepted her approach toward middle age.
For middle-aged and elderly people, youth often feels hurried and brief.
After all, upon the tracks of time, the train of life has never paused especially for anyone.
“Forty Years Old” (Nine Chapters of Time, pp. 56–57)
Before raising the cup, I always feel
That there is still something more I wish to say
Perhaps it was that voyage upon the sea
Perhaps it was those many summer nights
When we gazed together at the constellations
Those days of newly fermented time
Have they truly already become
An age so distant
An age glittering so faintly far away?
And before the banquet laid out by the years
We smile simply and urge one another to drink
As though all the loves and reluctances that have been shed
Are hidden behind the words we speak
Before raising the cup, perhaps
We already understand that from this moment onward
There will never again be wine
More mellow and more beautiful than the cup in our hands
There will never again be
A better reason than this moment
To drain it completely
Having entered middle age, Xi Murong came to understand that youth could never return.
Although traces of nostalgia still remained, she nevertheless had to face honestly the later years that lay ahead.
This poem, “Forty Years Old,” was written in 1985.
The lines,
“As though all the loves and reluctances that have been shed
Are hidden behind the words we speak”
present a situation akin to wanting to speak, yet finding words no longer necessary.
While reminiscing about the beautiful years of youth, the poet realizes that all those loves and reluctances have already become things of the past.
As a result, her attitude grows more restrained and practical.
Rather than dwelling upon the past, it is better to urge one another to finish another cup of fine wine.
For the life that lies ahead can only move gradually toward the dimming light of evening.
“Taklamakan”
There is no colour more lucid than black.
There is no answer more resonant than silence.
There is no barrier more solid than ignorance.
Taklamakan—today, only you truly know.
There is no plunder more barbaric than civilisation.
At the beginning, you once nourished me with a mother’s breast.
You were my fertile and merciful homeland.
Within my own greed, you once died.
And now, you are to die once again—
Taklamakan, the boundless earth.
Taklamakan—who is hollowing out your body and draining your blood?
At this moment, what is it that is collapsing before my eyes, beside me, like flowing sand—
Is it the memories you once cherished without limit?
Note: In Uyghur, “Taklamakan” means “homeland.”
In recent years, witnessing the enormous oil and natural gas extraction projects here with my own eyes has made me tremble. After a recent deep conversation with Teacher Wu Sheng, I came to understand the pervasive reach of large conglomerates.
This landscape poem was written in 2010. It is evident that the poet’s vision has expanded to include familial affection and historical consciousness.
The opening adopts a powerful paradoxical diction to highlight the immense trauma inflicted upon this desert by human development.
The poet uses an epistolary mode, and the addressee “you” refers to the Taklamakan Desert.
It once “nourished me with a mother’s breast / was my fertile and merciful homeland,” yet now it is being plundered by corporate extraction of mineral resources—oil and natural gas.
“Emptying your body and draining your blood” gradually strips it of its original image of “fertility and mercy.”
The poem directly confronts the “more barbaric than civilisation” plunder carried out by corporations, expressing a sorrowful accusation and mourning the irreversible damage done to nature.
[4] Epistolary Poetry: A Deep Address to “You”
Xi Murong’s epistolary poems mostly address a “you” as the lyrical narrative recipient.
Even when “I” does not explicitly appear in the lines, a latent first-person speaker can still be inferred.
“Bitter Fruit” (Nine Chapters of Time, p. 40)
In a happiness throughout an entire life that can never be grasped,
what is it that keeps probing
my fate, which was already set in stone?
What is it that keeps calling
my pursuit that I had already given up?
What is it, through flickering thoughts,
ambushing at the boundary between day and night, waiting only for me to stumble?
The mask I once treasured has already shattered into mud.
All of this is only because I still love you deeply.
In a happiness throughout an entire life that can never be grasped,
no matter what kind of bait, what kind of illusion,
I am willing to believe, willing
to walk toward the ocean filled with tears and sorrow for you.
My heart wanders between waves,
wanders between waiting and recollection,
wanders between heaven and hell.
No matter what kind of bait, what kind of illusion,
the bitter fruit born because of you—I will taste it all.
“When Time Passes — To a Kucha Woman” (In the Name of Poetry, p. 109)
When time passes, its wind howls fiercely,
erasing the remaining blurred memories and shattering yesterday into collapse.
There is in fact nothing to worry about.
Within life’s inner depths, are there not still many
continuing delicate threads
that shape you through the faces of your ancestors?
When time passes, its sound rustles,
like a pack of wolves swiftly crossing an autumn-yellowed grassland.
There is in fact nothing to fear.
Long before antiquity,
hadn’t words already been carved into the cliff walls as gentle inscriptions,
foretelling that we will inevitably become what we are,
and inevitably belong to what belongs to us?
Like all things having their own names,
their own promised dreamlands of heaven,
their own origin that, after a thousand years of separation and wandering,
can still trace the old road home.
Thus you stand within the Kizil Grottoes,
amid walls of vivid colours and flowing lines of flying apsaras,
as if encountering old friends,
weeping with overwhelming joy.
(Inserted commentary section)
Only a small number of poems use the “second person”—“you”—as the narrative subject.
Yet in fact, they express the poet’s own emotions or reflections.
In other words, they are written to herself.
The following poem uses the second person “you” as the narrative subject, a poem written to herself as a declaration of poetic intent.
“Youth Without Regret” (The Unregretful Youth, p. 6)
In your youth,
if you fall in love with someone,
please be gentle with her.
No matter how long or how short your love may be.
If you can always treat each other gently, then
every moment will become flawless beauty.
If you must part,
you must also say goodbye properly,
and keep gratitude in your heart—
be grateful she gave you a memory.
Only when you grow up will you understand
that in the sudden moment of looking back,
a youth without resentment
is one without regret,
like a quiet evening moon on a hillside.
“Edge of Light and Shadow” (Edge of Light and Shadow, pp. 136–137)
Many years later, you question love within poetry,
yet still remember that flowering tree, petals falling like snow…
Beauty, it turns out, waits at the edge of love—
in the mottled interwoven light of a quiet descent,
in a moment’s distraction that hides even deeper.
It turns out life is only meant to be lived briefly and intensely—
like the wild cicadas of midsummer, like flowers blooming and fading,
like the bright moon over an empty wilderness,
like the fragrance of an entire pine forest under steaming sunlight,
like you within the forest,
walking toward me slowly with a smile, your dress pure white,
still trembling slightly in that year’s summer wind,
as if completely oblivious to the vast transformations of the world.
[5] Narrative Poetry with Historical Consciousness
These poems emerged after Xi Murong’s journey of cultural return to Outer Mongolia.
The expansion of vision and structure comes from external stimulation,
which pushed the poet to extend her aesthetic experience beyond earlier imagined “paper landscapes.”
In her recent collections I Fold My Love and In the Name of Poetry,
there are many large-scale works with broad vision and structure.
Notable examples include:
In I Fold My Love:
“Old Khitan Affairs,” “June Sunshine,” “Genesis Poems,”
“Elegy 2003,” “Father’s Grassland, Mother’s River,”
“Late Desire,” “Two Kilometres of Moonlight.”
In In the Name of Poetry:
Section 7 “In the Name of Poetry” (eight poems),
Section 8 “Listening to ‘Yijinsang’” (eight poems),
and Section 9 “Hero Suite” (three poems).
Altogether more than twenty poems.
Among them, the three historical figure poems in “Hero Suite,” written in 2011,
are particularly epic in structure and narrative scale.
In that year, the poet’s creative energy experienced an explosive surge.
The following excerpts present the prelude to the long heroic poems
“Hero Jebe” and “Hero Galdan.”
“Old Khitan Affairs”
1
Who can still sing today when wind and sand strike the face?
Who, on their own land, still has to wander in exile?
Who travels thousands of miles, only in order to, inside a museum,
face from afar a honeysuckle flower engraved on a gilded ornament?
(in-between omitted)
6
A thousand years later, you stand on stage passionately depicting our grasslands,
while I sit in the dark auditorium, tears falling like rain.
“Elegy 2003”
How can I make you believe that, right at this moment,
what I am placing into your hands with both hands
is not only a hunting rifle, but also
our way of life, never once acknowledged by you,
and the devout faith
handed down through our ancestors.
How can I make you believe
that from this moment on, I possess nothing at all,
except for a tiny fragment of freedom within my soul.
You—
you have always been an unpersuadable majority.
How can I make you believe
that the happiness you have designed for me
is not equal to my happiness.
How can I make you believe
that before your eyes is an absurd extermination and expulsion;
that a forest deprived of beasts and reindeer
will inevitably also gradually lose its memory.
How can I make you believe, ah, that in the future
we will return to you only absolute blankness.
Perhaps you need not trouble yourself at all for this.
Since the hall of history is constructed by you,
there will always be enough gold leaf and diligent craftsmen
to cast your belief and your insistence into a golden body.
So please stop trying, by any means whatsoever,
to search for traces of us.
I assure you—I assure you—
I have already become the very last, last
of the Nivkh people.
that one—hunter.
Postscript:
“Hero Jebe” (written in 2011)
(?—1224)
Yes, we cannot be certain in which year he was born,
yet we remember clearly the year of his death.
We almost no longer mention his original surname,
yet we forever remember the name given to him by the Khan.
Jebe—literally translated as “arrowhead.”
As a warrior’s name, it carries profound meaning:
it signifies
a single
forward-rushing arrow released from the bow.
(excerpt)
“Hero Galdan” (written in 2011)
(1644–1697)
A broken-winged eagle is still an eagle.
In the high heavens, there remains an unyielding ambition.
I come here today in devout kneeling,
to face from afar the
Khan of the Dzungar Khanate,
Boshtu Khan—
our
hero Galdan.
The red sun is about to sink.
The dusk carrying dust and sand becomes even more desolate.
The khalkha suli-de still guarded by the people
still stands upon the earth.
The angry black tassel continues to flutter in the wind.
Listen—Oirat descendants still call across the plains,
calling our, our
hero Galdan.
Listen—the call that has not dispersed for three hundred years
still lingers across the fields, turning back toward the smoke of history.
How violent were the turns of fate.
Why is it that every gesture of farewell
is always so decisive?
(excerpt)
These large-scale, broad-vision works, even when placed among similar thematic creations by contemporary male poets such as Luo Fu, Yang Mu, Zheng Chouyu, and Lo Men, would not be easily ignored.
They not only overturn the long-standing critical prejudice that Xi Murong is confined to “romantic entanglements of love and grief,”
but also demonstrate that, in her mature years, Xi Murong gradually developed a vast vision akin to “seeing cattle and sheep beneath the wind-swept grass.”
III. On the Rhetorical and Aesthetic Beauty of Xi Murong’s Poetry
From a comprehensive observation of Xi Murong’s half-century poetic career and her seven published poetry collections (excluding selected editions), one can draw a general impression:
Xi Murong does not follow the mainstream poetic trends of her time, and thus minimizes the influence of dominant movements such as surrealism and postmodernism.
In her early period, she appears almost like an outsider wandering at the margins of the poetry world, writing lyric poems that express personal joy and sorrow, while insisting on a romantic and emotional tone.
In terms of technique, she remains disciplined and conventional.
She does not participate in modernist formal experimentation, nor does she engage in obscure linguistic puzzles or wordplay.
Her thematic scope is relatively self-limited; the image of the “eternal少女 (eternal girl)” led critics to question and criticize her, even mocking her as a “Qiong Yao of the poetry world,” suggesting she was a poet of romantic fantasy trapped in an ivory tower.
In the later twenty years, after encountering her homeland in the Mongolian grasslands, Xi Murong’s vision broadened.
She began to reflect more seriously on homeland, land, history, and cultural issues of a larger scale.
In form and language, she made some new attempts, but they appear to be only “light explorations,” without a clear declaration of radical change or transformation.
There is no obvious shift toward mainstream modernism.
For example, her mid-to-late poem “Migratory Birds” (Lost Poetry Collection) is a “visual poem” in which the text is arranged in the shape of a flying goose.
Such formal experimentation is rare in her work and should be regarded as occasional experimentation rather than systematic innovation.
At the level of rhetorical technique, Xi Murong’s early style is somewhat conservative.
In expression, she frequently employs basic rhetorical devices such as metaphor, depiction (enargeia), and personification.
More complex devices—such as symbolism, hyperbole, synaesthesia, and image distortion—appear only rarely.
In structural design, she more often uses repetition, parallelism, and incremental progression, which are relatively elementary rhetorical forms.
In her later period, there are some changes in rhetorical technique.
Advanced rhetorical devices such as symbolism, synaesthesia, and hyperbole appear more frequently.
However, the degree of variation remains limited.
Even though she became acquainted with Xia Yu, a poet associated with postmodern linguistic experimentation, she was not significantly influenced by Xia Yu’s tonal or disruptive language style.
She continues to follow a stable romantic-lyric trajectory.
Even in her earliest collection Seven-Li Fragrance, one can already find many refined structural designs and expressive techniques.
Thus, it is not accurate to describe her poetry, as some critics have, as merely “plain and shallow.”
II. Techniques of Expression
In terms of expressive techniques, Xi Murong—who stands outside the mainstream wave of modernism—neither has the noisy clamor of feminist poets nor the repetitive chanting and “jump-cut” fragmentation of postmodern women poets. She is like a lily in a secluded valley reflecting its image on water—quiet, light, elegant, and fragrant:
1. Metaphor
(1) Simile (explicit comparison)
In a young night
I heard a song
pure and lingering
like mountain wind brushing through lilies
——〈Twilight〉
(2) Metaphor (implicit comparison)
And today I am a drop of remorseful melting snow
at the end of wandering, turning into a thousand-foot waterfall
a roar rises from a chest torn by pain
——〈Song of the Wanderer〉
2. Description (mimesis)
(1) Visual description
The sea has already surged in
over the sandy beach of my life
and then retreats so quickly
sweeping away youth in a single roll
——〈Wish of the Laurel Tree〉
(2) Tactile description
I only wish to know how to embroider this moment
to embroider a dense and continuous page of painting
to embroider into the hearts of both of us
stitch by stitch, sorrow and
pain
——〈Reunion I〉
(3) Auditory description
The song of home is a distant flute
always sounding on nights when the moon is present
——〈Nostalgia〉
3. Personification (transference of form)
(1) Objectified as human
You are forever a heartless structure
crouching on the barren mountain peak
coldly observing human joys and sorrows
——〈Ballad of the Great Wall〉
4. Conversion of word class
——〈Seven-Li Fragrance〉
(1) Noun used as verb
Moonlight clothes me in elegant garments
——〈Mountain Moon〉
5. Evident imagery (Shi Xian)
(1) Recollection-based evocation: retrieval of past memory
In front of the hedge of green trees and white flowers
we once so easily waved goodbye
And after twenty years of vicissitudes
our souls return every night
when the breeze passes
it transforms into a garden full of fragrance
——〈Seven-Li Fragrance〉
(2) Projected imagination: distant or separated visualization
Song of the Shang era wind
rain of the Tang dynasty
how many blossoms
how many leisurely young women
after turning back on jade stairs
could only cut roses in vain
and place them into vases
——〈Mountain Moon〉
The rhetorical device “Shi Xian” appears in Xi Murong’s works with a frequency second only to description and metaphor. “Shi Xian” is the main method by which temporal and spatial scenes are transformed within her poetry. Her poems often mark temporal or spatial indicators (such as “that year,” “at that time,” “once”), thereby unfolding narrative segments with characters and interaction. This is one of her stylistic characteristics.
6. Symbolism
Only because I keep imagining
that when transformation takes place
there will be radiant wings
and your eternal waiting
In this life I willingly become
a lonely silkworm of spring
inside a golden cocoon
awaiting a promise
from a future life
——〈Spring Silkworm〉
7. Hyperbole
If I were to come to this world once
only to meet you once
only for that instant among billions of light-years
and all the sweetness and sorrow within that instant
Then let everything that should happen
appear in a single moment
——〈Choice〉
8. Interplay of virtual and real imagery
Early white hair once again reveals
my sorrow
——〈Dawn Mirror〉
Time has cast a vast net from the sky
what cannot escape
is your pain, and
my sorrow
——〈Prison〉
9. Others
(1) Paradoxical expression
And what will never heal in the heart
is the wound that does not bleed
——〈Prison〉
Conclusion
This critical essay does not deliberately glorify Xi Murong. From the standpoint of an ordinary reader, it serves as a reminder to emerging poets and poetry critics that there is no need for an arrogant sense of “supreme genius belongs only to me.”
In terms of influence, Xi Murong undeniably reached the general readership and successfully promoted the popularization of modern poetry, greatly expanding the population of poetry readers. This is an undeniable historical fact.
Admittedly, Zheng Chouyu and Ya Xian are among my personal favorites—one emotional, one humanistic, both representative of their era. Luo Fu, with his Zen-infused surrealist technique, became a benchmark for many later poets.
However, when we speak of the constellation of poets active in Taiwan and the broader Chinese-language poetic world in the second half of the twentieth century, there is no reason to deliberately overlook Xi Murong.
“Every step leaves a trace.”
Her poetry has entered deeply into everyday life, soothing the hearts of countless young men and women. This is a real literary history that should not be erased by any form of bias against the “emotional Xi Murong phenomenon.”
Note:
(1) See the speech record of Xi Murong, invited to attend the Fujian Province “Straits Poetry Conference”:
http://news.xinhuanet.com/tai_gang_ao/2007-12/22/content_7297137.htm
References (Listed in Chronological Order of Publication)
Xi Murong (1981). Seven-Li Fragrance. Taipei: Erya Publishing House.
Xi Murong (1982). No Regrets in Youth. Taipei: Erya Publishing House.
Xi Murong (1999). Edge of Light and Shadow. Taipei: Erya Publishing House.
Xi Murong (2002). Poetry Collection of Lost Paths. Taipei: Erya Publishing House.
Xi Murong (2005). Nine Chapters of Time. Taipei: Yuan Shen Publishing House.
Xi Murong (2005). I Fold My Love. Taipei: Yuan Shen Publishing House.
Xi Murong (2011). In the Name of Poetry (or In the Name of Poetry, poetry anthology). Taipei: relevant publishing institutions (multiple editions; commonly Lianjing Publishing or revised anthology systems).
