The reeds are lush and green; white dew has turned to frost. The one I long for is somewhere across the water. I go upstream to follow: the way is blocked and long. I go downstream to seek: she seems to stand midstream.
The reeds are dense; white dew has not yet dried. The one I long for is at the water’s edge. I go upstream to follow: the way is steep and hard. I go downstream to seek: she seems upon a shoal.
The reeds are full; white dew has not yet ceased. The one I long for is on the riverbank. I go upstream to follow: the way is blocked and winding. I go downstream to seek: she seems upon an islet.
This is “Jian Jia,” from the Qin Feng section of the Classic of Poetry. I came back to it last night while playing feihualing with my daughter—a poetry game in which players take turns quoting lines that contain a chosen character. The character was bai, “white.” The more poetry she memorizes, the more obvious it becomes that my own store is thin. I used to beat her without much effort; these days I am often the one who loses.
While we were playing, “Jian Jia” suddenly surfaced in my mind, and I answered with “Jian jia cang cang, bai lu wei shuang” — “The reeds are thick and green, the white dew has turned to frost.” My daughter looked surprised: “You know that one too?”
That led to a conversation about the poem. I asked her what she thought it meant. She said it was probably a love poem. My vague impression was different—I had somehow remembered it as a poem about friendship. It was late, she was nearly asleep, and we did not stop to check any references.
The next morning I looked up explanations and found that “Jian Jia” has been read in several ways.
One reading takes it as a love poem: someone longs for a lover, for a person who remains just out of reach.
Another sees it as political allegory. The poet, grieving over a friend, criticizes Duke Xiang of Qin for failing to honor worthy scholars with proper courtesy. As a result, capable men withdrew into seclusion and would not take office.
A third reads it as a friendship poem, expressing the writer’s longing for a good friend.
So what state of mind does “Jian Jia” actually convey?
Jian is the young miscanthus before it has grown its ear; jia is the newly sprouted reed. Reeds were so common that in old texts such as Han Shi Waizhuan, volume two, and Yizhongyuan, jianjia appears as a figure for something humble or lowly.
In the lonely, clear autumn morning of the poem, the autumn water is smooth as white silk and the white dew has become frost. The speaker stands on a bank overgrown with reeds, gazing toward the “yiren”—the person he longs for. That figure is both faint and vivid: seemingly there, yet impossible to reach. However he searches, the yiren cannot be attained. All that remains is the vast autumn water and the dew-covered reeds swaying in the wind—dim, desolate, sorrowful.
Who is the yiren?
It cannot be determined.
The person could be a friend; the person could be a beloved. The fact that many readers now take the poem for granted as a love poem may have something to do with Qiong Yao’s novel Zai Shui Yi Fang (On the Water Side). But the beauty of classical poetry lies partly in those unanswered question marks. A thousand readers may imagine a thousand different yiren.
So there is no need to insist on a final answer about what kind of poem this is. It is enough to savor the beauty in it.