A Thousand Cups of Wine: Tang Friendship Poetry

A Thousand Cups of Wine:Tang Friendship Poetry Aaron Poochigian (bio) A thousand cups of wine do not suffice when true friends meet. —Chinese proverb In the poetry of the Tang dynasty (618–907), friends feature more often than people in any other role—more than lovers, more than soldiers, more than monks or nuns or politicians. The public display of friendship in verse grew more pronounced at this time at least partly because of unprecedented social mobility. There was an increasing incentive both to have a network of beneficial social connections (guanxi) and to make them publicly known. Whatever their origins, friendships between poets and others could evolve into very sincere, lifelong affairs, and in some instances, the autobiographical tendency of Tang poetry allows us to plot the courses of friendships from shared youthful enthusiasm to shared senescent weariness. The Song dynasty scholar Hong Mai (1123–1202) cites pairs of Tang poets as models of ideal friendship in his essay collection the Rongzhai suibi and proclaims: "They were together from birth till death and allowed neither death nor life, neither wealth nor poverty, to change their hearts." True friendship, according to his treatise and Tang poetry itself, remains constant, no matter what vicissitudes the world throws at the friends involved. But there is a dark side. The emphasis on impeccable loyalty betrays anxieties about social and economic advancement. The all-important government examination (jinshi) that led to financial security and prestige in official positions assessed not only talent but also reputation. Furthermore, even if one managed to land such a position, a disparaging comment that reached the ears of the emperor, slanderous or not, could lead to demotion, dismissal, or even execution. The effusive professions of mutual fidelity that we find in Tang friendship poetry imply an obligation: a friend should always defend and never sully a friend's good name. In his poem "Examining Connections," Meng Jiao (751–814) advises the reader to shop warily in the marketplace of potential friends. An ill-chosen one could "turn traitor": When people plant a tree, they choose good ground:both root and trunk go wrong in rotten soil.Choose prudently when settling on a friendor face, in midlife, slanderous betrayal. End Page 60 Stubborn and truculent, Meng did not get far in the world of official appointments. When he did at last agree to take the government exam at age forty-six, it was at the insistence of his mother. Though he passed, he only ever received bottom-tier positions. The formidable criteria for friendship (unwavering consistency and reliability) promulgated later in Meng's poem would, in practice, have prevented him from acquiring "friends of opportunity" who might have advanced his career. When he died in relative indigence, his friend Han Yu (768–824) chipped in money for funeral expenses and wrote him a eulogistic epitaph. In the biographical preface to that poem, Han defensively asserts that Meng was "capable of respect and friendship," as if this capability were in question. Though he cannot omit the unsuccess and poverty that defined his friend's life, Han praises the sharpness of Meng's literary work and concludes: "He had nothing to bequeath at death but the brilliance of his poetry." Loyal to his friend even beyond the grave, Han makes sure that we see Meng as not a self-sabotaging disappointment but a poet's poet. There are many subgenres of friendship poetry, including funerary (like Han's epitaph for Meng) and thanksgiving, in return for a gift. The most common kind voices a farewell to a friend or friends as one, both, or all of the parties present go their separate ways. In what are, most often, dramatic monologues, poets address comrades with a passion that, in Western literature, is usually reserved for parting lovers. Grief at the upcoming separation is at times so great that it overflows from human minds and bodies into external reality, finding expression, through pathetic fallacy, in an animal or object. In "Seeing Off a Friend," after comparing his friend at the start of a long journey to a windblown wisp of grass and a roaming cloud, Li Bai (701–762) concludes: Our horses...