ABSTRACT
A Chinese poem is like an artichoke: people have to know how to eat it before you can enjoy it. Like an artichoke, a Chinese poem does not have a message. It has a taste. The Chinese have long recognized both the impossibility of fully expressing truth in words as well as the paradoxical necessity of using words to convey this sense of the ineffable. In reading any Chinese poem, native readers and critics are accustomed to look for its best line or couplet and within that line to seek out the most striking word. Chinese readers constantly point to the couplet chosen by Wang Kuo-wei, and particularly to its second line: "Picking chrysanthemums by the eastern hedge, Distantly, I see South Mountain". Within the window, the language is concrete rather than abstract. The chrysanthemum, hedge, mountain, sun and birds are all concrete images, all easily pictured in mind.
