Posted: February 13th, 2017

Wonders in Daily Life in Song Poetry (Owen, 637-703)

  1. Wonders

    in

    Daily Life in Song Poetry (Owen, 637-703)

Song poetry often deals with small, mundane details of everyday life. And yet it can still address larger, philosophical issues through those small details. Choose one to three Song dynasty poems and discuss what larger issues of life they address (either implicitly or explicitly) through close observation of experience.

  1. Texts:

“Shi Cang-shu’s “Hall of Drunken Ink (1068),” Su Shi. (Owen, 640-641)

“Getting up at Night in a Boat (1079),” Su Shi. (Owen, 667-668)

  1. Thesis:

Su Shi’s poetries provide the idea of personal social care and concern to the social publics. The implication of social and political concerns through his beautiful and artist description of daily life, which inspires the readers to realize the real situation of the society throughout his poetic works.

  1. Outline:
  • Introduction: Su Shi’s writing on the arts are among the most remarkable in the Song. Su Shi is chatty, humorous, sometimes perverse. The following poem is to an acquaintance who was adept in “draft cursive” (cao-shu), a free, often unreadable script in which a man of culture was supposed to be able to give expression to an otherwise suppressed extravagance of spirit.
  • He uses the ridicule tone to express the daily life and reflects the theme of political career emotion.
  • He provides the imagery of natural scenery and voice, which display an extremely beautiful environment to readers, and finally reflects the helpless emotion of bureaucracy.
  • His poems deal with small, mundane detail of daily life, but reveals the real situation of political and social concerns to the audience.
  • His poetic works are always providing a relaxed emotion to the audience, but the implication of social concerns is always reflecting behind the construction of beautiful words.
  1. Two other sources:
  • James M. Hargett. “What Need is There to Go Home? Travel as a Leisure Activity in the Travel Records (Youji 游記) of Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037–1101).” This article shows that Su Shi uses the daily life as a topic and records trips during the leisure time. The texts he wrote describing these journeys have influenced countless numbers of writer-travelers in China. Throughout his writings, people could realize a larger meaning from mundane detail of daily life.
  • James Hargett. “Su Shi and Mount Lu” in Department of East Asian Studies State University of New York, Albany, USA. This book shows the goal of Su’s political career, which make the audience could be easier to realize the real meaning behind Su’s poetic words.

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