Poems Written at Huangzhou on the Cold Food Festival
Su Shi (1037 to 1101) · 1082, Northern Song dynasty
A sheet of paper carries two poems in running script, and the writing changes as you read. It begins small and controlled, then the characters swell, thicken and lean, some columns crowding together, others spaced wide, a few characters crossed out and corrected. The writer is Su Shi, the greatest poet of the Song dynasty, and he was in exile in Huangzhou on the Yangtze when he wrote these lines on the Cold Food Festival of ten eighty two, a day when fires were put out and families visited the graves of their ancestors. He could not visit his own. The poems speak of rain, a leaking kitchen, cold ashes and a heart like dead wood.
Calligraphy in China is read as the trace of a person's mind in motion, and this scroll is the classic example. Look at how the brush speeds up as the emotion rises, at the heavy wet strokes where the writer pressed hard, and at the way the characters for crow and for the poet's own grave grow large and dark. Nothing is neat, and that is the point: the writing is honest. After the poems come colophons by Su Shi's friend Huang Tingjian, who wrote that he could not have done better, and by later collectors and emperors.
The scroll is counted as the third greatest piece of running script calligraphy in Chinese history, after Wang Xizhi and Yan Zhenqing. It passed through private hands, was in Japan for a time in the early twentieth century, survived a fire with scorch marks that are still visible, and was bought back for the museum in nineteen eighty seven. It is shown rarely, so if it is on view, take your time in front of it.
Did You Know? The scroll survived a house fire in Japan in the nineteen twenties, and the singed edges of the paper can still be seen.
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