Edmund Hardy Reads the Armed Chrysanthemums

At Bite the Weeds, poet and scholar Edmund Hardy reads a poem by "rebel-scholar" Huang Chao (835–884) about revolution against the Tang Dynasty via armed chrysanthemum. "The large smuggling networks combined with farmers and land-owners hit by drought to form the organisation for an armed peasant revolt against the Tang rulers in 875," writes Hardy in an introduction to Huang Chao, who "led a rebellion which eventually captured the capital, and he declared himself emperor. Although Huang Chao’s occupation of Chang’an was overturned in 884, the revolt fatally weakened the Tang dynasty. Huang also wrote a small number of poems." The poem, "Failing the examination, or Chrysanthemums," follows. From Hardy's reading:

A threat of armed revolt within a quatrain and a season: there’s only one day left before the ninth day of the ninth month, recoded as the day of uprising. The poem is in suspension, beginning with ‘waiting’ (待, dài) which neatly rhymes with arrival (来, lái) at either end of the first tetrasyllabic unit (the upper four), just as the next season arrives and the autumn festival will be tomorrow. In the quatrain of seven character lines (qijue), the second line adds understanding to what the first line brought into being. My flowers (我花) immediately recodes the context; this autumn poem is abstracted by the first person. Its autumn is a prophetic one, hollowing out the literary idea of the festival and of chrysanthemums with a fragrant contempt: the historical nostalgia of Du Fu seeing chrysanthemums bloom for the second time, Tao Qin plucking chrysanthemums beneath the eastern fence, or the longed-for return to the golden chamber of home in Wang Changling, a thousand poems of the Tang dynasty provide the shell of Huang Chao’s turn to the future, his call to arms and his contempt for Tang power. The second line pits flower against flower across the two segments: my flowers blooming, countless, and a hundred flowers dying, an uprising of numbers which leaves any evocation of faded summer and refulgent autumn in the repetition of huā – flower 花which is grass艹 plus change 化  – turned towards the decapitation of the Tang elite, a power which had lost its purchase. . .

Read on, if it pleases you, at Bite the Weeds.