"We may then further specify this tentative definition: the xing is the vehicle of a trope of which the tenor is man and his actions. But is Mao’s xing, thus defined, identical with the “motif,” as Wang sees it?
Poem 188, “Wo xing qi ye 我行其野,” contains the “plant-plucking motif”:
我行其野 I walk into the fields; 言采其蓫 I pluck the pokeweed. 昏姻之故 It was as bride and wife, 言就爾宿 That I came to live with you; 爾不我畜 Now as you will not keep me, 言歸斯復 I walk, back to where I came from.
Plant-picking is frequently described in the Odes, a fact that justifies Wang’s designation “motif.” But is it a xing, as Mao understood the term? According to Wang, “plantpicking” occurs in poems describing women in distress. The plant-picking motif is thus used by the poet to make the listener, in a cognitive process better described as metonymic or synecdochic than metaphoric, associate to “women in distress,” and this link-of-association had been established long before this poem was actually composed."
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Re: 188. 我行其野 - Wo Xing Qi Ye
Date: 2021-04-12 12:43 pm (UTC)Poem 188, “Wo xing qi ye 我行其野,” contains the “plant-plucking motif”:
我行其野 I walk into the fields;
言采其蓫 I pluck the pokeweed.
昏姻之故 It was as bride and wife,
言就爾宿 That I came to live with you;
爾不我畜 Now as you will not keep me,
言歸斯復 I walk, back to where I came from.
Plant-picking is frequently described in the Odes, a fact that justifies Wang’s designation “motif.” But is it a xing, as Mao understood the term? According to Wang, “plantpicking” occurs in poems describing women in distress. The plant-picking motif is thus used by the poet to make the listener, in a cognitive process better described as metonymic or synecdochic than metaphoric, associate to “women in distress,” and this link-of-association had been established long before this poem was actually composed."
Comparative Poetics in the Raw, http://130.241.151.208/digitalAssets/1700/1700640_4.-mse-comparative-poetics-in-the-raw.pdf