Please refer to your copy of Hawkes's translation of "Hsiang chün" ( "The Princess of the Hsiang," pp. 63-64 of the Birch Anthology). That translation is considerably different from the one in the article (which I've excised), but it suffices for our purposes.--MLA

I am referring, of course, to Wang I's [pinyin: Wang Yi's] statement that Chiu ko ["Jiu ge"] is a literary recasting of traditional religious material. He makes no such statement about any other work in the corpus, and what he says about Chiu ko is notoriously suspect. Nevertheless I believe that this statement was an inspired and fruitful guess which might well prove the key to a better understanding of the whole collection. If we could analyse the use which Ch'u [Chu] poets made of an existing religious tradition, we should, I believe, be well on the way to understanding the nature of poetic inspiration and the workings of poetic imagination in that remote and formative era of Chinese literary art.

I should like to begin an attempt at such an analysis by re-examining what must surely be one of the most variously interpreted poems in the Chinese language: Hsiang chün ["Xiang jun"]. . . . This translation assumes a single speaker throughout: the male shaman who seeks, but fails to make contact with, the river goddess. He has hopes of her appearing. He even hears the music of her pipes; but it is not for him that she plays. For one reason or another she fails to emerge; and the shaman leaves disconsolately, after first casting jade offerings into the waters of the river.

The singer's appearing to be sometimes in a boat, which he describes in considerable detail, and sometimes on a flying dragon is not a difficulty. Ts'ao Hsü [Cao Xu], the Chekiang [Zhejiang] shaman who was drowned in A.D. 143 while going out in a boat to seek the river god met his death on the fifth day of the fifth month, the day of the Dragon Boat Festival, whose great antiquity has been demonstrated by Wen I-to [Wen Yiduo]. It seems highly probable that Ts'ao Hsü's craft was a dragon boat, and equally probable that the "cassia boat" and "flying dragon" of this poem both refer to one and the same vessel.

That the poem was designed to be sung by a shaman actually in motion on the water is perhaps questionable. The Hsiang Chün, as we know, had an island shrine in lake Tung-t'ing [Dongting], and it is true that the poem contains references to the goddess's failure to appear from her island, to the shaman's journey to Tung-t'ing, and to the water which laps beneath the goddess's hall. Nevertheless the journeys indicated in this poem must be purely imaginary ones. This becomes evident when we try to map out Ts'en-yang [Cenyang], the Yangtze, the rivers Yüan [Yuan], Hsiang [Xiang] and Li, and lake Tung-t'ing–all mentioned in this poem–and find ourselves unable to fit them into an area of much less than one hundred miles square; or when we reflect that a whole day is supposed to elapse during the course of two lines of the poem. We may therefore suppose either that the poem was intended to be sung and mimed on a stationary boat moored at the foot of a waterside temple. In that case we must probably imagine a whole flotilla of boats, of which the leading one was occupied by the shaman and his rowers and the others by spectators and worshippers arriving for a seasonal or perhaps annual rite at an island shrine, probably with its back to the jungle and approachable only by water. Or else we may suppose that the poem was to be used in a performance on dry land with the shaman standing in a grounded boat, or symbolic representation of a boat, or even, perhaps, holding a toy boat–a dragon-headed stick with a miniature paddle tied across its neck, or something of the sort. It is impossible to be sure, and we are, it seems to me, entitled to choose whichever it amuses us most to believe.

If we do opt for the view that the poem implies a water-borne shaman, there is ample evidence to show that shamans did on occasion take to the water for their ceremonies, from the unfortunate case of Ts'ao Hsü already mentioned, to the numerous instances cited by Mr. Wen C'hung-i [Wen Chongyi] in his invaluable study of these matters. Of course, it is still open to us to accept Wang I's thesis that the poem is a literary improvement, and therefore not written for performance at all, but for reading and recitation. But even if we do, the problem of how the oral originals were performed still remains to be answered.

However, none of these details of performance is very important. The point I wish to establish is that by far the best sense is made of this poem–and incidentally also of the companion-piece Hsiang fu-jen ["Xiang furen"] which follows it–if we assume that the whole of it is sung by the questing shaman, who, for the benefit of an audience of worshippers, describes the extraordinary difficulties of his journey in pursuit of the goddess, the extremely evasive nature of her behavior when at last he draws near her, and finally his quite understandable failure to do much more than, as it were leave his visiting-card at her doorway before departing. For the goddess, it is hinted, is already closeted with a Very Important Person–none other, we are given to understand, than her male consort. Under the circumstances the shaman, who has done his level best, could hardly be expected to achieve more. Everyone feels sorry for him. He feels sorry for himself. Though, curiously, the phrases which round off the poem seem to imply that his outing has been successful and enjoyable. I shall say more of them presently.

There is no question but that this poem, even though it may have been subjected to literary improvement by a poet whose preoccupations were other than religious ones, embodies a religious rite whose pattern has been evolved and hallowed by long tradition; whose very words, we may confidently assert, if we compare this with the other poems of Chiu ko, contain time-honoured formulae, the use of which was dictated more by ritual appropriateness than by logical necessity. Thus the shaman will convey some sense of the great length of his journey by conventional reference to the passage of time: "In the morning I do such-and-such; in the evening I do so-and-so." His route is described in conventional phraseology: "Now I bend my course towards so-and-so"; "Now I halt my pace at such-and-such." He will, either in his own person or that of a god whom he represents, praise the entertainment provided as being so delightful that he "forgets to return." The excuses he makes in order to explain the non-appearance of the goddess–somewhat reminiscent of the reasons sarcastically suggested by Elijah to the priests of Baal to explain the non-appearance of their deity–are couched in conventional language. And finally, the parting words, "I wish I could stay and enjoy myself a little longer" are a set formula used, as we have just observed, even in contexts where they do not seem strictly appropriate.

(73-77)