Wang Wei: Master of Jintishi

Authors Avatar

Jessica Montello

ART383

Prof. Kent

Wang Wei

 Master of Jintishi

        During the Tang Dynasty, poetry continued to flourish in China with Wang Wei as one of the three most prominent poets. His poems reflect the three main teachings of the major schools of thought of the time, the Buddhist ideals concerning the impermanence of life, the philosophical Taoist ideal of eremitism, and the Confucian emphasis on moral responsibility and government service. The poems, succinct in length, appeal to the senses with vivid imagery that lets the imagination fly. Although Wang Wei lived life at court, he built an expansive country estate as his escape as was popular among officials of the time. It was here amidst his gardens that many of the poems in his canon were written. Many of his poems are written in a type of standard form made to balance the four tones of classical Chinese, a level tone, rising, falling, and entering tone. Tang Dynasty poets perfected this regulated verse, or Jintishi meaning the “modern-form poetry”. Of his poems, “Fields and Gardens by the River Qi” and “Mourning Yin Yao” are ideal poems to analyze as they exemplify traditions of Tang dynasty poetry including regulated verse.

        “Field and Gardens by the River Qi” is written in the lüshi form, the basic form of jintishi. Poems in this style are 8 lines long and divided into couplets with a parallelism between the second and third couplets. Paul Rouzer’s translation stays true to the formal elements of the Chinese. The opening couplet sets the scene and the second and third elaborate giving details of the landscape and the time of day. The requisite parallelism is easily seen in lines 3 and four of the poem in which nouns, verbs, and adjectives are paired, “The sun darkens beyond the mulberry trees; / The river glistens through the villages.” By creating these parallelisms and juxtaposing the images, Wang Wei was instilling them with deeper meaning, placing the human world as a part of the natural world rather than the uncultivated wild being separate from the world of villages and neatly kept gardens made by man. In the third couplet he establishes the contrast between hunting and agrarian life. Wang Wei also brings in philosophical ideas setting the speaker of the poem as a man who has withdrawn from society to live as a recluse, reflecting the Taoist ideal of eremitism, as well as posing the question, “When a man’s at peace, what business does he have?” which may be interpreted as addressing the Buddhist idea that we should not get caught up in the “ensnaring passions and appetites (that) keep us from our better natures.”(Weinberger 17) Overall this poem is a recluse’s contemplation life and the world around him.

Join now!

        Wang Wei’s “Mourning Yin Yao” is a very different poem from “Fields and Gardens by the River Qi” in not only form, but also in content. It is written in a form of jintishi called pailü, which follows the same conventions of parallelism as lüshi but may be any length. In this poem Wang Wei establishes his Buddhist beliefs in the opening couplet, which not only sets the scene by alerting us to the death of an individual, but also points to the Buddhist belief in life’s transience, and the idea of wu or non-being. Parallelism can be seen clearly ...

This is a preview of the whole essay