Chinese poetry traditions and literary forms

Chinese Poetry - critical analysis of Wuchi Liu's Lord of the River Hsiang & in the Wilds there is a Dead Doe

Women Subjugation & Nature as Refuge

Analyses of the poems Lord of the River Hsiang and In the Wilds there is a Dead Doe by Wuchi Liu showed two emergent themes reflecting Chinese culture: the society's norm and regard towards their treatment of women and the use of nature to personify beauty and solace that women it (nature). The following discussion and analyses centers on a comparison of the two poems, centering on the similarities and differences that Liu utilized in using these emergent themes: that is, that of women subjugation and nature as refuge for women.

Evidently manifested in Liu's poems is the presence of women characters as subjects of each poem. Each illustrates the woman character as delicate, beautiful, and "fair," qualities that serve as stereotypes to illustrate Chinese women. "In the wilds" explicitly provides a comparison of a woman's beauty with that of a precious stone ("There was a girl as fair as a jade"), while the "Lord" did not focus so much on the woman's beauty than on her docility and patience in waiting for her lover to arrive. Furthermore, what sets apart the two poems from each other is the use of a third person speaker in "In the wilds" and the first person (the woman's character) in "Lord."

However, beneath these profuse use of imagery lies the main theme of each poem: women who are waiting for their lover or 'man of their life,' whose displayed patience and docility in the poems illustrates their voluntary subjugation to men. Indeed, as men went on with their lives battling or traveling in other places, women are held within the confines of their home and natural surroundings to patiently wait for their lover's return.

Lord" expresses the sorrow and eventual acceptance of the woman's plight as the man he loves, as has been implied in the poem, sought another woman's love. This is illustrated symbolically in the line, "...Playing the panpipes, of whom do I think?" Sorrow is evident as the woman learns that the man she loves does not love her back. She eventually resigns herself to accepting her 'fate' of being not the 'chosen one' of the man she loves by saying, "Time once gone by will never come back, I will just loiter around to ease my mind." Though "In the wilds" similarly displays women subjugation, it differs from "Lord" in that the women ends up triumphantly with her loved-one and shows control over him (lines 9-11).