Caught By Freedom

The relationship between a Chinese painting and a Chinese poem is often very strong. Sometimes the poem is a response to the painting or the painting is a response to the poem. By relating one artistic representation of a theme with another representation, a deeper understanding of the artistic whole can be obtained. Shen Zhou created an artistic pairing of a painting and a poem titled “Poet on a Mountain Top.” Only with a study of both Shen Zhou’s painting and poetry can a complete understanding of the poet’s struggle with his conflicting desires for freedom in nature and attachment to humanity be gained.

By switching the focus of the poem from natural concepts to the longing the poet feels for humanity, Zhou uses the poem to express the conflict in the poet over his desire for freedom. The beginning of the poem only describes settings and objects from nature such as “white clouds”, “mountains,” and “stone ledge”. As the poem develops a sign of humanity, the “narrow road”, is introduced but only as part of the natural world. This introduces the conflict between nature, or freedom, and humanity, or captivity. Once the conflict is established, the poet is introduced as “alone”, he belongs to neither nature or civilization. In a parallel to the beginning of the poem, the last stanza ties the poet with some form of humanity, the “sound of your flute,” to establish the conflict between the poet and civilization. These parallels and conflicts force the reader to consider the relationship between being completely independent and completely attached to humanity.

The poet himself struggles with resolving his desires for the humanity in the flute player and freedom in nature. Even though the poet wishes he “could take the sounding strea...

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...o draw focus to certain elements of the poem, Zhou places specific and concrete image words such as “white”, “stone”, and “bramble” to modify the elements of both nature and humanity. Since a painting can be considered as a whole, the pairing with the poem forces the viewer to consider the individual elements described by these words more closely; showing they have individual meaning to the themes of the artistic whole.

The struggle between freedom and attachment is not resolved by the specific pairing of the painting and the poem but expressed as a constant attempt to balance these two ideas. Studying the poem and the painting as a pairing adds dimension and significant amounts of understanding to how Shen Zhou considers the relationship between freedom and attachment. This exploration of the themes creates a very strong binding between the poem and the painting.