Kilian 1 Patrick Kilian Professor Wu CHIN 130: Classical Chinese Poetry and Drama 10 May 2009 Quoth the

Owl, The Poetic Exposition on the Owl and The Raven on the Subject of Death Across vast cultural divides, hundreds of miles around the globe, and worlds apart historically and ideologically, human beings, when faced with creatures who inhabit the nightly realm invariably conjure up images of the macabre or the melancholy. We live our lives under the sun and fear the denizens of that darker time, when our eyes fail us and our imaginations haunt us with phantom sensations. We fear the night and its creatures because we cannot see in it, cannot understand what we cannot see with our own two eyes, and always fear what we do not understand. Hence, the night, and by extension nocturnal creatures, connote other things we fear, especially loss and death. Both the American poet Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849) and the Han Dynasty statesman Jia Yi (201 BCE- 169 BCE) have both written long, metered verse concerning this very subject, highlighting the distinction between Chinese and American thought on the subject of death and the differing conceptions of the afterlife that have come about due to Christianity in the West and Daoism in China. The melancholy poem, The Raven by Poe, follows the account of a speaker stricken with grief over his departed love, the woman Lenore, and his descent into despair, as a raven, a harbinger of bad news, alights above his doorframe. The bird repeats, again and again the word Nevermore, cryptically tormenting the speaker with

Kilian 2 the words association with death, bringing back the painful realization that his loved one will never be with him on earth again; She shall press, ah, nevermore! (Poe 78). Prior to the poems outset, the speaker has attempted to move past his loss, but the ominous birds incessant croaking has dredged the pain back into the forefront of his mind. He says, Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer Swung by Seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor. `Wretch,' I cried, `thy God hath lent thee - by these angels he has sent thee Respite - respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore! Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore!' Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.' (Poe 79-84) Nepenthe refers to a potion of forgetfulness used in Homers Odyssey to chase away sorrow. Here, associated with the domain of the Christian God, sent by Seraphim and angels and spread by a censer, a container for burning incense used in Catholic ritual, this forgetfulness should bless the speaker with reprieve from his woes but does not, for he does not know what fate has befallen Lenores soul. At the peak of his delirium, he cries at the raven, thing of evil! prophet still, if bird or devil! ... tell me truly, I implore - / Is there is there balm in Gilead?, to which the bird replies with his nihilistic trademark (Poe 85-89). The balm in Gilead alludes to the Old Testament of the Bible, where a powerful healing salve could be found in the town called Gilead; the speaker desperately wants to know if his wounded heart will ever heal, and the raven answers no. The speaker refers to the raven however, as a thing of evil and a devil, meaning he should not trust it he knows its moral value yet heeds its counsel for evil thoughts come easily to melancholy minds. In the poems final stanza, Poe relates the speakers ultimate mental state:

Kilian 3 And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door; And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming, And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor; And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor Shall be lifted - nevermore! (Poe 113-118) That the evil bird sits above the bust of Pallas, the name for the Greek goddess Pallas Athena, goddess of wisdom, indicates that its endless refrain, Nevermore, should not hold sway in the mind of a rational, functioning individual, further supported by the heavy tone of the shadow that it casts over the floor and the speakers soul both. Pain and loss though, take their toll. In The Raven, the speaker clearly delineates good, with the divine aspects attributed to forgetting Lenore and continuing to live, and evil, with the raven and the loss of reason it brings. Upon close examination (declaring the ravens input immaterial), the speaker also supports the idea that Heaven, the Christian afterlife, exists, as does a hell, since the devil figure appears in feathery guise. However, from a Western standpoint, the existence of Heaven does little to assuage the grief felt by those left behind. In The Poetic Exposition on the Owl by Jia Yi, the speaker, here Jia Yi himself is also plagued by a bird, in this case an owl. He says in his introduction to the poem, It was a Fu owland a bird of ill omenI mourned my lot, taking this to mean that I did not have long to live (Jia Yi 110). In contrast to The Raven though, Jia Yi concludes that a man should disengage as much as possible from all worldly attachments, including the bonds between lovers or friends, since without attachment, loss does not exist, and death is only an inevitable change from one state of being to another. He writes, All of a

Kilian 4 sudden it is a man- / why is that worth clinging to? / Then he is changed to some other thing- / and why is that an affliction? (Jia Yi 67-70). This stanza echoes the Buddhist thought that reached Han China during the period when Jia Yi lived and wrote, though most of the poem exhibits solely Daoist ideas. The Buddhist dogma of reincarnation teaches that as one dies, his essence is reborn as another form of life, lower if he performed misdeeds in the previous life, higher if good deeds pervaded, but always, the persons essence remained. Death then represents merely a change of state, and one should not fear this occurrence. Since Buddhism and Daoism both heavily influence the Chinese way of thinking, it does not stretch too far to suggest that many Chinese people, including Jia Yi, believe that death holds no finality and that the possibility of seeing loved ones again in another guise is quite likely. Therefore, why grieve? Also, according to the Dao, in the beginning existed nothing, one comes from nothing and returns back to it upon death. Unlike the Christian concept of hell, this idea does not produce the terror of eternal punishment, and so gives less cause for anxiety. In the final section of the poem, Jia Yi admonishes himself and the reader with the words, Small wisdom favors the self, / demeaning others, honoring Me. / The Perfected Man has larger views, / that nothing there is that is not right (Jia Yi 71-74). The word wisdom here echoes the idea of the bust of Pallas in Poes work, saying that a person should not focus on his own insignificant concerns, for in the scheme of things, the universe maintains a point of equilibrium. It does not make sense to worry about what comes after death or to grieve too much over someones passing. After all, as Jia Yi so succinctly says in his poems ending couplet, Trivial problems, picayune troubles / are not worth bringing anxieties (Jia Yi 107-108).

Kilian 5 Compared to The Raven, with its clear distinction between good and evil, the Eastern Daoism presented in The Poetic Exposition on the Owl argues that good and evil intertwine in all things, flowing one into the other. The notion of moral dualism, and therefore of absolute right and wrong, seems foreign to the Chinese mind, as does the preoccupation that Westerners have with religion and what follows this life. The Chinese Daoist at least would instead say, live this life well once, and then forget about the rest. We only get the one, so make it count, but it does not last forever, so expect nothing different.