Emotional Honesty in "The Book of Songs"

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Emotional Honesty in The Book of Songs
The Book of Songs is a collection of ‘folk poems’ believed to have been gathered from the communities living in the fields and alleys around the Yellow River. The 305 poems date back to the early years of the Chou dynasty and capture early Chinese literature and thought. A common feature among all works is the use of evocative image to capture the guileless expression of the human heart. The poems in The Book of Songs invoke lively imagery from nature to express feelings of love, betrayal, anguish, desire, and frustration. Reading through the poems, one can perceive the natural sentiments of the common people preserved through centuries of time. The thesis of this paper is: The Book of Songs is a wondrous collection of simple folk poems that express the unaffected emotive states of ordinary people living in the early years of the Chou dynasty.
“Northern Gate” is an example of the eloquence and sincerity with which The Book of Songs captures the emotions of everyday life events. The poem narrates the hardships of a state official who is poor, destitute, and set apart by the community. No one gives attention to his sufferings and deep is his grief that he blames the heavens for heaping misery on him: “Deep is my grief./I am utterly poverty-stricken and destitute;/Yet no one heeds my misfortunes./Well, all is over now./No doubt it was Heaven’s doing,/So what’s the good of talking about it?” (Waley, 35). The state official complains that the king overwhelmed him with work and that his kin admonished him for offering his years of service to the government. It may be that he was always away on state business that he rarely spent time with other members of the household, or that he worked for a corrupt regime. Still, for all his troubles and commitment to the state, he was left impoverished and isolated. The king gave him numerous state affairs of every kind and a heavy workload was constantly laden on him. Whenever he returned home from government duties, he was poorly received by members of his household. Everyone in his family turned against him and insulted him for taking too much time on state affairs. The persona is downcast because his service to the king made him a social pariah and left him penniless. Although he finds no point in discussing the matter any longer, he is glad that the king’s business is all over and finds comfort in the notion that he was just a victim of fate.
Another illustration of the emotional sincerity in The Book of Songs is the poem “Fountain Water”. The poem narrates the anxieties of a bride who is going to be married in a far off city: “High spurt the waters of that fountain,/Yet it flows back into the Qi./My love is in Wei,/No day but I think of him./Dear are my many cousins;/It would be well to take counsel with them:” (Waley, 34). She is eager to get to Wei, where her husband is waiting for her, and therefore consults her kin about how to get to her new marital home. The various female members of the clan are distraught by the fact that she will soon be leaving her parents and siblings. Her elder sister gives the directions, but using evocative wor...