Shu Ting’s To an Oak
If I love you –
I’ll never be a clinging campsis flower
Resplendent in borrowed glory on your high boughs;
If I love you —
I’ll never mimic the silly infatuated birds
Repeating the same monotonous song for green shade;
Or be like a spring
Offering cool comfort all year long;
Or a lofty peak
Enhancing your stature, your eminence.
Even the sunlight,
Even spring rain,
None of the these suffice!
I must be a kapok, the image of
A tree standing together with you;
Our roots closely intertwined beneath the earth,
Our leaves touching in the clouds.
With every whiff of wind
We greet each other
But no one can
Understand our words.
You’ll have bronze limbs and iron trunk,
Like knives, swords
And halberds.
I’ll have my crimson flowers
Like sighs, heavy and deep,
Like heroic torches,
Together we’ll share
The cold tidal waves, storms, and thunderbolts;
Together we’ll share
The light mist, the colored rainbows;
We shall always depend on each other.
Only this can be called great love.
Wherein lies the faith, true and deep.
I love not only your stateliness
But also your firm stand, the earth beneath you.
Shu Ting’s poetry features descriptive, eye-catching, and symbolic images and the portrayal of moments of emotional surge. “To an Oak,” her masterpiece, can be understood as her romanticization of love, which functions as a necessary link, showing Shu Ting’s feminine consciousness together with “Huian Woman” and “Peak Shennu” (Goddess). Shu Ting projects a pair of novel artistic images—the kapok tree and the oak, two tall trees—to symbolize woman and man, respectively, then elaborates her view of love from the perspective of the woman.
The one-stanza poem can be divided into two parts. Opening with two ifs, the poem’s speaker is critical of two selfless symptoms of women in love and asserts that hers is different from the blind admiration of “the trumpet creeper” and the dependence of “the lovesick bird.” Then in a succession of similes involving a “brook,” a “peak,” “sunlight,” and “spring rain,” she emphasizes more clearly that to love does not mean simply to devote. In this way she has summarized what she thinks are incorrect and inappropriate understandings of love.
The second part of the poem establishes what she thinks is proper and true. The image of the kapok with the “huge, red flowers” is introduced to stand as an equal to the oak, with “trunk of steel and iron branches” when they salute and communicate, each with its own individuality and uniqueness. Focusing on the idea of sharing whatever comes up, be it “burdens of cold, storms, lightning” or “joys of mists, vapors, rainbows,” the poem’s speaker points out that this is the “great love,” when love is complete with physical and spiritual integrity.
“To an Oak” has been regarded as an early cry of feminism in contemporary Chinese poetry. Equality in love between men and women has often been interpreted as the theme of the poem. When it first appeared (in the late 1970s as China saw the end of the 10-year-long Cultural Revolution and when people were still bound by traditional attitudes toward love), the poem caused heated discussion. In an interview on April 23, 2000, in Chongqing, China, Shu Ting explained that the poem was triggered by a male poet’s doubt of the coexistence of talent and beauty in women. This anecdote adds to the feminist implication of the poem. For many young people, especially women, “To an Oak” has since served as a guide for their spiritual journeys and self-actualization.
Bibliography
Hung, Eva, ed. Selected Poems by Shu Ting. Hong Kong: Research Center for Translation and Chinese University of Hong Kong (Renditions Paperbacks), 1994, 24–25.
Categories: Chinese Literature, Literature, World Literature