Passions among Cork Oaks and Lotuses. Vegetable Metaphors in Midnight Songs (Ziyege 子夜歌, 4th‒5th century)

Abstract

Midnight Songs or Ziyege 子夜歌 is a cycle of forty-two anonymous pentasyllabic quatrains written by, or for, female singers, whose composition can be dated back to the 4^th and 5^th centuries. The poems were then gathered together and transmitted to us a few centuries later by the erudite Song dynasty scholar Guo Maoqian 郭茂倩 (1050‒1126) in his encyclopaedic Anthology of yuefu poetry (Yuefu shiji 樂府詩集). This article analyses the metaphors inspired by the natural world in the Midnight Songs, focusing on plants and trees. The relevance of such metaphors is validated by the distinctive characteristics of Chinese language, in which monosyllabism, tonality, homophony, and polysemy, together with the language’s iconic nature, tend to create profound and complex correspondences between sounds, meanings and images. In Chinese, metaphors are something that reveal already existing correspondences rather than inventions of the poet’s inspiration, as is often the case in Western culture. Another objective of this article is to examine a peculiar and so far little studied feature of the Midnight Songs, namely its extensive use of puns (shuangguanyu 雙關語), which is mainly based on homophony and polysemy. While creating parallel and alternative texts, the interaction between puns and metaphors also sets a very complex metaphorical environment which amplifies and even alters the expression and significance of the emotions inherent in the songs.