Lu You

Lu You a Chinese poet of the Southern Song dynasty (1125-1210) who wrote more than nine thousand surviving poems and became the most prolific and patriotic voice of his age. His verse, ranging from intimate reflections to fierce laments for the lost northern homeland, made him a national figure in the history of Chinese literature.

Early Life and Times

Lu You was born in 1125, in the very year in which the Jurchen Jin captured the Northern Song capital and took the emperor captive. His family fled south with the remnants of the court, and he grew up in a China whose northern heartland was under foreign rule and whose recovery was the consuming political passion of his generation.

The household into which he was born had a tradition of scholarship and office, and his education was thorough. He married young, in a union that his mother opposed, and the story of his first marriage, dissolved under family pressure, and of his later reunion with the woman in the garden of the Shen family, became one of the most famous tragic romances in Chinese literature.

He passed the imperial examination, but his career was obstructed by powerful men who resented his independence. He spent much of his life in provincial office, as an official in the south and briefly as an adviser on the frontier, and he was repeatedly dismissed for his outspoken support of resistance to the Jin.

Poetry of Patriotism

Lu You is best known as the poet of national recovery. Again and again he returned to the theme of the lost north, of the humiliating treaty that had surrendered it, and of the failure of the court to prepare for reconquest. His poems of longing for the recovery of the Central Plain are among the most powerful political verses in the language.

He served for a period on the northwestern frontier, and the experience of the military camps and the mountains of the border region gave his patriotic verse a vivid concreteness. He wrote of the snow and the horses, of the watchfires and the courage of the soldiers, and of his own frustration at being kept from the decisive struggle.

In old age the theme deepened rather than faded. He wrote to his sons in his last year, in one of the most quoted poems of the tradition, that when the imperial armies should recover the north, they must hold the ceremony at his grave and tell him of it. The lines express a hope that outlived his own life.

Range and Craft

Lu You was extraordinarily versatile. Alongside the patriotic poems he wrote a great body of verse on daily life: the pleasures of farming and country living, the beauty of the seasons, the delights of wine and friendship, and the quiet satisfactions of reading and gardening in retirement.

His poems of his native place and of his old age are tender and observant, and they show a warm and humorous temperament quite different from the fierce intensity of his political verse. He wrote about cats and children, about rain and plum blossoms, and about the ordinary texture of a scholar's life in the countryside.

In form he worked in all the principal modes of regulated and ancient verse, and he was master of the couplet. His images are drawn from a wide observation of nature, and his ability to combine the grand historical theme with the small detail of daily life gives his work its enduring appeal.

Life, Retirement and Family

After years in and out of office, Lu You settled at his family estate in the village of Shanyin, in Zhejiang province. There he lived the life of a gentleman farmer, gathering books, supervising the planting, and receiving friends and visitors from among the literary men of the region.

His household was large and his circumstances moderate, and his poems record the pleasures and anxieties of family life. He outlived his first wife, whose memory recurs in his late verse, and he took an interest in the education of his children and grandchildren.

His old age coincided with a period of relative peace, and he cultivated a stoical calm, though the longing for the north never left him. He died in 1210 at the age of eighty-five, having composed poems until nearly the end of his life, and his example of an active, engaged retirement became an ideal for later scholar-gentlemen.

Influence and Legacy

Lu You left behind an immense body of work that was edited and printed by his descendants and admirers. His surviving output of more than nine thousand poems makes him one of the most prolific major poets in world literature, and it documents an entire life with unusual fullness.

Later critics praised both the patriotic passion and the technical mastery of his verse. The Ming and Qing anthologists held him in high esteem, and his patriotic poems were invoked by Chinese writers and statesmen in periods of foreign threat, most notably in the twentieth century.

He died in 1210, and his poems remain central to the Chinese poetic canon. The love poem associated with his lost first wife and the verses written as his last testament are among the best loved works in the language, and his combination of private tenderness and public devotion has made him an enduring national poet.

See also

• Southern Song dynasty
• Xin Qiji
• Ci poetry
• Yue Fei