Sikong Shu

Life

Early in life he went to the capital for the examinations but failed; when the An Lushan rebellion began, he took refuge in the south, and later passed the jinshi examination.

At the beginning of the Dali era under Emperor Daizong, he served as registrar of Luoyang and later entered the court as Left Reminder. During the Yongtai-to-early-Dali period, he exchanged poems with Lu Lun, Dugu Ji, and Qian Qi in Chang’an and was counted among the Ten Talents of the Dali era. Toward the end of Dali and during the Jianzhong period under Emperor Dezong, he was demoted from Left Reminder to deputy magistrate of Changlin County.

During the Zhenyuan era he joined Wei Gao’s staff in the Jiannan Xichuan command; the appointment is dated variously to 785 and to around the fourth year of Zhenyuan (788). He served as a staff officer holding the jianxiao title of Shui bu langzhong, and ended his career as Yubu langzhong.

Poetry and reception

Sikong Shu’s poetry consists largely of farewell poems, poems exchanged as gifts, and works of travel and displacement. In plain and direct diction, it conveys the experience of being stranded away from home and the sorrow and frustration of poverty and failure; he was particularly accomplished in regulated verse, especially five-character regulated verse.

Poems such as 《賊平後送人北歸》, 《雲陽館與韓紳卿宿別》, and 《喜外弟盧綸見宿》 use images of white hair in a foreign land, the green hills of the old country, yellow leaves in the rain, and a white-haired figure beneath a lamp to express displacement and grief; the celebrated lines are deep and restrained. His quatrains, including 《江村即事》, 《詠古寺花》, and 《金陵懷古》, were described as either graceful and lightly elegant or substantial and grave.

An appraisal of his poem addressed to the monk Jian emphasizes its East Woods setting, autumn rain, medicinal garden, and idle clouds, praising its secluded tone and fluent movement. Other assessments praise the precision of his poetic conception, the luminosity of his poetic atmosphere, the exactness of his descriptions, and the turns of his feeling.

Earlier critics described his verse as graceful, leisurely, and close to ordinary feeling, with clear atmosphere, finely wrought thought, and a strong emotional basis; one assessment placed him below Lu Lun and Li Yi among the Ten Talents of the Dali era. Another placed him among the small number of Tang poets accomplished in seven-character regulated verse, while warning that some of his seven-character verse anticipates the late-Tang tendency toward strangeness; his five-character poems were also praised for their ancient emotional force and lucid, elegant language.

Works

His two-volume collection is titled 《司空曙詩集》 and is also known as 《司空文明集》; the Complete Tang Poems and the fourth section of the New Book of Tang’s treatise on literature both include a two-volume poetic collection.