Everlasting Sorrow

In the eighth year of Yuanhe, Bai Juyi wrote a long poem about an earlier emperor’s love and an earlier woman’s death. Chang hen ge, the Song of Everlasting Sorrow, begins in splendour: Xuanzong, the Tang court, Yang Yuhuan taken into the rank of Guifei. The language is silk, music, the slow disaster of a man who governs an empire as if it were a room with one bed in it.

Then An Lushan’s rebellion. The court flees Chang’an. At Mawei the imperial guard stops. They will not go further while Yang Guifei lives. She is taken aside and killed. Traditional accounts give a silk cord, a Buddhist shrine, a body that had been called the nation’s beauty. It is an execution extracted by soldiers from a panicked sovereign. It is not a sacrifice she authored, and it is not beautiful because a poem later made a night of it.

Bai Juyi knew he was writing elegy. He also wrote the emperor’s longing as if longing were the highest remaining form of rule. A Daoist is sent to seek her in the other world; a token is returned; a vow is reported: in heaven to be birds flying wing to wing, on earth two trees with branches joined. The last couplet refuses consolation. Heaven and earth will end; this regret will not.

Read the poem as art of the first order. Then read what it cannot say. Yang Yuhuan does not get a stanza in which she refuses the death. The grief is imperial. The self-pity is imperial. Later painters and operas will keep dressing her for the gaze that killed her. This office will not call the killing a consummation.

Chang’an is dust and grid and memory. Xi’an still holds the plan of that capital. The poem is more famous than the woman, which is the ordinary scandal of elegy. What qing means here, feeling, passion, the stain of the heart, is not innocence. It is the name of an attachment that could command a realm and could not command a road at Mawei.