One of the best-known poets of the Middle TANG
DYNASTY, Bo Juyi was a successful government official who believed that poetry should be accessible
to all, and that it should be used for the betterment
of society. He was the most prolific of all Tang
poets, leaving a legacy of more than 2,800 poems.
Bo was born in China’s Shaanxi (Shensi)
province. His father was a scholar, and at 29, Bo
passed the JINSHI—the national civil service examination—and entered a life of public service. He
had a successful political career, being appointed to
a succession of positions in various parts of the
Tang empire. Perhaps it was this broad experience
that made him more keenly aware of the plight of
the common people in the empire. In any case he
became an advocate for the poor and the disenfranchised. With his friend YUAN ZHEN, Bo developed a theory of literature that called for a poetry
that was both straightforward and socially conscious. The ideal Confucian poet, in his view, was
one that used his literary talent to persuade those
in power to cure social ills. In his xin yuefu, or “new
yuefu,” Bo used a traditional form, not unlike a
BALLAD or folk song in Western tradition, to dramatize the abuses suffered by the common people. In
his poem “Watching the Reapers,” for example, he
expresses his feeling of shame at how well he is
paid as a government bureaucrat at the same time
that government policies are causing others to
starve:
They lost in grain-tax the whole of their
crop;
What they glean here is all they will have to
eat. . . .
At the year’s end I have still grain in hand.
Thinking of this, secretly I grew ashamed
And all day the thought lingered in my
head.
(Waley 1941, “Watching the Reapers,”
ll. 19–26)
In this poem and others like it, Bo deliberately
aimed for a style of verbal simplicity. According to
one old legend, he read all of his poems to an old
peasant woman before publishing them, and he reworked any parts of the poem that she did not understand. Such a story is probably apocryphal, but
it does indicate how important Bo thought it was
to make his poems accessible to all.
While Bo thought his poems of social commentary were his most important, the majority of his
readers over the centuries have preferred some of
his other productions. His most popular poem has
probably been “A Song of Unending Sorrow,”
which tells the story of a tragic love affair, based on
the historical liaison between the Emperor Xuanzong (Hsuan-tsung) and a young concubine
named Yang Guifei (Yang Kuei-fei). But critical appreciation has been most kind to his personal
poems. Like his great predecessor Du Fu, Bo used
small incidents in his own life to reflect in poetic
form on his inner responses. He writes of little
things—gardening, eating, family concerns—often
with humor, but sometimes with great poignancy,
as in the following poem where he remembers the
death of his three-year-old daughter, jarred into
remembering her when by chance he runs into her
nurse on the street:
There came a day—they suddenly took her
from me;
Her soul’s shadow wandered I know not
where.
And when I remember how just at the time
she died
She lisped strange sounds, beginning to
learn to talk,
Then I know that the ties of flesh and blood
Only bind us to a load of grief and sorrow.
(Waley 1941, “Remembering Golden Bells,”
ll. 7–10)
With his colloquial diction, his outspoken social criticism, and his autobiographical poems that
provided a model for a number of later poets in
the genre, Bo Juyi, is a unique figure among the
Tang poets. Though not of the stature of Du Fu or
Li BAI, he is one of the more important voices of
the era.
Bibliography
Waley, Arthur. The Life and Times of Po-Chü-i,
772–846 A.D. London: Allen and Unwin, 1940.
———, trans. Translations from the Chinese. New
York: Knopf, 1941.
Watson, Burton, trans. Po Chü-i: Selected Poems. New
York: Columbia University Press, 2000.