李賀の詩 : 特にその色彩について

Abstract

Li Ho, a late T'ang poet, who died very young, is esteemed as an enfant terrible, by contemporary and later critics. He seems to be unusual in his frequent employment of colours, the ratio of which reaches 513 to the 15, 517 characters he used in his whole work. Expressed in percentage, this is 3.3, not only surpassing the 1.5 % of Wang Wei, a poet of quite another style, but also surpassing the 0.8 % of Han Yu, who was Li's teacher and consequently has been considered to belong to the same school. Li's anxiety to depict extraordinary scenes might be one reason. This difference between Han and Li, however, might suggest the fundamental gap between the two poets : Li was less explicit and more symbolic than Han. Li's distinct preference to gold, silver and darker colours makes his poetry gloomy as well as colourful. The author also points out his new usage of the character 白, white, which does not really mean white. In his lines such as 秋野明，秋風白 "The autumn field is bright, the autumn wind is white, " "white" no mere means white, but it has come to mean emptiness, the perfect lack of colours.