Page:A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (1919).djvu/174

 restoring it to its proper intellectual level. It is an irony that he should be chiefly known to posterity, in China, Japan, and the West, as the author of the "Everlasting Wrong." He set little store by the poem himself, and, though a certain political moral might be read into it, its appeal is clearly romantic.

His other poem of sentiment, the "Lute Girl," accords even less with his stated principles. With these he ranks his Lü-shih; and it should here be noted that all the satires and long poems are in the old style of versification, while his lighter poems are in the strict, modern form. With his satires he classes his "reflective" poems, such as "Singing in the Mountains," "On being removed from Hsün-yang," "Pruning Trees," etc. These are all in the old style.

No poet in the world can ever have enjoyed greater contemporary popularity than Po. His poems were "on the mouths of kings, princes, concubines, ladies, plough-boys, and grooms." They were inscribed "on the walls of village-schools, temples, and ships-cabins." "A certain Captain Kao Hsia-yü was courting a dancing-girl. 'You must not think I am an ordinary dancing-girl,' she said to him, 'I can recite Master Po's "Everlasting Wrong. And she put up her price."

But this popularity was confined to the long, romantic poems and the Lü-shih. "The world," writes Po to Yüan Chēn, "values highest just those of my poems which I most despise. Of contemporaries you alone have understood my satires and reflective poems. A hundred, a thousand years hence perhaps some one will come who will understand them as you have done."

The popularity of his lighter poems lasted till the Ming [ 168 ]