李商隱の戀愛詩

Abstract

The love poems of Li Shang-yin (813?-58) appear to derive from the Six Dynasties anthology of love poetry known as the Yü-t'ai hsinyung and the love poetry of Li Ho (791-817). But whereas earlier poems in folk song style had often pictured love as a group activity and were characterized by an air of delight and even abandon, Li Shang-yin's poetry deals exclusively with the love of the individual, often an individual who is being oppressed by the group, and dwells upon the gloom and sorrow associated with love. Yüan Chen (779-831), a poet somewhat older than Li Shang-yin, wrote love poetry that was clearly based upon his own personal experiences. The language of the poems indicates that they are addressed to a particular individual and are confessions of the poet's love for her, and the poems convey a clear picture of the place and manner in which the love affair proceeded. Li Shang-yin's love poetry, however, is quite the opposite, expressing not the love for any single individual but the generalized emotions of longing and despair, and deliberately eschewing a concrete description of the lover's surroundings in favor of the creation of an atmosphere of haziness and ambiguity. In this last respect they resemble the works of Li Ho, whom Li Shang-yin admired and took as his model, for Li Ho often employed circumlocations and substitute terms in order to avoid the names of things associated with everyday life. The deliberate haziness of Li Shang-yin's love poetry stands in marked contrast to the technique employed in his " Short Biography of Li Ho, " in which unreal events are given an air of reality through the use of concrete and detailed description. But it was some distant world of the imagination to which Li Shang-yin felt drawn, and his longing finds symbolic expression in the images of dreams, rain, and twilight which appear so often in his poetry. His love poems display the same characteristics, hovering as they do upon the border between the real and the unreal.