The Colonel

Just more kind of rose

Born amid flame

In the buckwheat fields they encountered their greatest battle

And one of his legs said goodbye to him in 1943

He has heard the sound of history and of laughter

What is undying

Cough syrup, razor blades. last month's rent, and so on

And amid the skirmishes of his wife's sewing machine

He feels that nothing can ever take him captive

Except the sun

Wang Ch'ing-lin's pseudonym Ya Hsien means a "mute string". However, the performance of the string has proved otherwise. His one book of verse, The Abyss (1970), clearly indicates that its author is one of the few poets of the sixties that survive. Nine years after he published his last poems, Ya Hsien is still one of the major influences on contemporary poetry.

Born in Honan in 1932, Ya Hsien spent twenty years in the Chinese Navy and retired recently as a lieutenant commander. A student of drama, he has been a successful actor, an instructor, and an editor. In 1966-68 he attended the Iowa International Writing Program. Since his return in 1968 he has been the editor-in-chief of Youth Literature. He is currently the editor-in-chief of the literary supplement of United Daily News and the Director of Unitas (a literary monthly).

Spanning a period of nine years, the sixty-odd poems in The Abyss have undergone several stylistic changes. The poet began in the tradition of Chinese ballad and of modern Chinese poetry of the thirties. The scene was northern China, the language spontaneous and sometimes colloquial, and the mood ranging from nostalgia to humor. This was followed by impressionistic pieces on foreign lands, such as Paris and London, which coincided with the period of exoticism in the late fifties but are unmistakably individual because of their dramatic rather than merely lyrical treatment. A collection of character sketches, such as "The Colonel," "The Prima Donna," and "The Late Governor," sets the author apart as a keenly observant poet capable of concise characterization, an area seldom explored by other poets of his generation. The title poem, "The Abyss," is still impressive in its Existentialist mood typical of the sixties, but the less ambitious poems of the late period, such as "Andante Cantabile" seem to have been better received by both the critic and the reader.