1. Look at “Plums are falling” specifically. What do you think this poem is about? Who is speaking? What does “plums” stand for? (It is a metaphor. It is helpful to think about when plums fall and what do ripe fruits usually stand for.)
2. Tradition has it, at least the legend goes, that in China it was very important for the emperors, the rulers, to know how the common people were feeling. And so they would send people out from the court into the countryside to hear what the people were singing. And the tradition is that the collection of these popular songs was a kind of measure of how people were feeling about their own lives and about the government. For example, conscripted soldiers are singing about how miserable they are being on forced march or how much they dislike being sent to war and how much they long for home and how poor the conditions are when they’re sent out to frontier battle duty.
In the selection you have read, can you identify a poem that is an expression of unhappiness toward the ruler? What is the complaint? What image did the poet used to represent the ruler? Why?
3. Poetry, in the Chinese tradition, was the preeminent literary form, understood as central to the expression of human emotions. Putting an image of the natural world side by side with an image of the human world, and forcing the reader to draw some sort of connection, to think about the two as in some way being in parallel or related to one another.
This is the essence of the lyric tradition throughout the next two and a half millennia in China, where natural imagery, metaphors of natural phenomena, are frequently used to illustrate human emotion or a human situation.
Choose one poem from the selection and describe how nature is used in such a way, and what is the poet trying to express?
