Frontier Chant Song Soul Aria

Nalan Xingde is a distinctive personage in the history of Chinese ci (poetry written to certain tunes with strict tonal patterns and rhyme schemes in fixed numbers of lines and words). His ci style is terribly incommensurate with his family background, social status, and upbringing, which has arrested people's multi-faceted analyses and conjectures. Liang Qichao once noted, " This person had his distinctive dispositions. He was the son of a powerful high-ranking official at that time, a peerlessly pampered son. His parents set their affections on him very much. From an ordinaiy person's perspective, there was nothing he should have felt discontented with. It is inconceivable why he always construed his milieu as lamentable. To appraise this person critically, only this ancient saying can be referred to-'Those ancient grieved persons had their ulterior sensibilities'. His writings frequently manifested this kind of crazy eccentricity" (The Sensibilities Expressed in Chinese Poesy).This incommensurate state also appeared in his ci of describing frontier life, rendering his ci permeated with a doleful, sentimental, plaintive, and distressful aura, and with an inexplicably worried, frazzled, and weary vein. It seems that he were a homeless wastrel in dire straits rather than a dignified favorite aide serving the emperor.Hereby, the author attempts to depart from his ci of describing frontier life, exploring the source and manifestation of his such paradox and meanwhile reading the nitty-gritty of his mysterious and distinctive psychology. It is because these ci of describing frontier life were written when he was wandering around the frontier far away from his home. At such time, he was totally devoid of any esthetic mood to empathize with the nature, and of any circumlocution to pretentiously utter worriment. Ci had become his life's refuge and outlet, only unveiling his true feelings and emotions, and best representing a true Nalan. The author intends to analyze his ci in terms ofthree dimensions: Zeitgeist, Nalan's personalities, and style characteristics of his ci.The depressed and sentimental moods pervading throughout Nalan's ci were inseparable from the era when he lived. In the Qing dynasty, which was different from the Tang and Song dynasties, diffuse residual feelings proper to the late Ming dynasty and sentimental moods proper to Manchu intermingled, in the broad setting in which Manchu and Han cultures clashed, to paint the era with the hue of pathos, which tinted Nalan's ci with lingering bleakness, perplexedness, and evasiveness.Zeitgeist was only an extrinsic factor. What really works crucially was the writer's personalities, namely, his distinctive characters and frenetic idiosyncrasies. His pain was, de facto, not without source. His ambitions could not be accomplished, which rendered his ideals out of joint with the realities. This was the source of all his pain, and eventually led to his tragic life experience, externalized in his extreme repulsion and aversion to an aide's life. When his feelings had nowhere to take refuge in, and his pain had no outlet to vent, home hence became his best spiritual niche for a settled and peaceful mind. Therefore though he was in the frontier, he was all the time concerned with home; consequently, he integrated a lot of boudoir-related feelings into his ci, thus happily combining frontier scenery and boudoir-related feelings. Meanwhile, due to his special psychological experiences, his profound exclamations in the face of the frontier sites of historic significance were devoid of exultation and hubris proper to fresh nouveaux riches; conversely, were tinged with the feelings proper to Han people who were under the sway of the Manchu government. In order to describe his special life experiences in the frontier, he resorted to dusks, sunsets, homesick dreams, feelings of guestship as the carriers for his feelings and the spokespersons for the voice from his heart, thus uttering his smoldering indignation, palpitant heart, and lonely, gloomy feelings of...