"Ode to the Taotie" with Author's Commentary

"The tripods of Zhou are decorated with the Taotie. It has a head but no body. It devours people, but since it can never swallow them, its actions bring harm to itself. This expresses the principle of retribution. Acting contrary to the good is quite like this."

The Annals of Lü Buwei

1O ferocious, O terrible, O you
who live in four millennia of bronze:
cast off, abandon the green patina
masking your fierceness, once unbridled rage;
5take up new residence upon my skin,
and with ancient jealousy guard my blood,
as of old sacred offerings you held.
Untwine, untie, undo the bonds that keep
dim obscurity upon your bright eyes,
10share your sharp, long-sighted vision with me.
Like black mist flashing brightly, coil about
my circumference, and solidify,
wreak upon new matter ven'rable form.

Like the metal molded, now I bear thee!
15O you spirit of dim periphery
to brightness of new life come, who is there
can escape your piercing stare unentranced?
Ever-turning time who undoes all men,
and with eternal patience gnaws away
20even bronze, couldn't bury you in ages.
Here you are, and here you and I remain:
at the numinous heart of all 'neath Heaven,
feeling the currents in the winds and stones.

II. Commentary on the lines
• The epigram: The passage is the earliest written reference to the taotie, a mysterious creature used ubiquitously as the defining motif of ancient Chinese bronze vessels. Later forms of the pattern became very clearly zoomorphic masks, but the earlier iterations were mostly abstract swirls forming an indistinct face around a prominent pair of staring eyes (to which the poet refers). It seems to be this amorphous, undefined sort of taotie that the poem takes as its subject. (An example of this variety of the design has been attached.)

The nature of the taotie is quite uncertain, and while numerous notions of its significance are circulating, none is definitive. The passage quoted as the epigram puts forward the notion of the taotie as a devouring beast; yet, even this earliest reference comes more than a thousand years after the appearance of the taotie. Nonetheless, it remains a prevalent one: in modern Chinese, the word taotie means 'voracious and gluttonous.' The poet, however, seems to be appealing to quite different notions of the taotie, considering it as the embodiment of the shapeless and invisible, yet profoundly present numinousness existing at the periphery of the known. The uncertain, swirling shape of the early taotie pattern suggests this invisibility, but its transfixing eyes make clear that while it is unseen, it sees.

The author also alludes to the significance of the taotie's presence on ritual vessels, which held offerings and sacrifices in high antiquity. Such reference adds a suggestion of the notion of the taotie as a protector spirit, dreadful to the clan's enemies, but a proud comfort to members.

• Lines 1-5: The actual occasion for the poem isobliquely stated here: the poet is inviting the taotie pattern to come from its ancient habitation of patina'd bronzes and be inscribed on him as a tattoo. The purpose of the invocation is to initiate a process parallel to the physical transference of the design: the poet hopes that the taotie spirit itself will deign to reside in him, and share its spiritual power with him, as the following lines elaborate.

• Lines 6-7: Here is the allusion to the taotie as guardian spirit of sacrificial offerings; by taking on the taotie in spirit, the poet asks for its protection as he becomes himself a living offering to the Gods.

• Lines 8-10: The bonds are those of time, to which subject the poet returns near the end of the poem. These first lines may be read with a sort of proleptic undertone of doubt (that the taotie can in fact be reached from such a temporal distance), but the poet never questions his ability to summon the taotie, despite the generally insuperable bonds of obscurity placed on the past by time's passage. The long-sighted vision of the invoked spirit may be what allows it to perceive the invocation and emerge.

• Lines 11-13: The poet presents the taotie with an opportunity to take on a new form, inasmuch as the misty idea of inscribing the design will solidify as a tattoo. Moreover, though, the poet is offering the spirit the opportunity to take on a new form as himself. "Circumference" refers at once both to the circumference of the part of the body about which the tattooed design will wrap, but also to the circumference of the poet's being; he is thus inviting the taotie to wrap itself entirely around him, embracing him wholly.

• Line 14: Recalling Keats' "Ode to the Nightingale", the invocation is suddenly completed. Unlike Keats, however, it would seem the invoked spirit has successfully come. The poet uses "thee" in this line to indicate the specific taotie pattern now borne on his body, as opposed to the "you" used elsewhere, which addresses the taotie spirits generally.

• Lines 15-17: Here we find a question, but it hardly seems dialectical: no interrupting doubt is raised as to the success of the invocation, and the poet's ability to invoke seems to be affirmed, contrary to the expectant student of Fry's model.

• Lines 18-20: The poet affirms the taotie's survival of time's obscurity. Having identified himself with the taotie, the poet may also be read as suggesting that he will share this grand fate. In the Chinese ancestral cult, the dead joined the ranks of the clan's ancestors as spirits ever more highly exalted with the passing of time, until ultimately dissolving their own personal identity into that of the clan progenitor. They thus achieved a sort of escape from destruction by time. By becoming the human-taotie, the poet has joined himself to this grand order as a protector of offerings to these ancestral spirits, and thus made himself part of the forces whose operation cannot be buried by time.

At the same time, however, the poet does acknowledge that time "undoes all men", and even though he has become the man-spirit, he may be tacitly admitting that the mortal component of him will still perish. Ultimately by invoking the taotie, he has simply willingly lent the strength of his being to its timeless spirit, which will persist even after the poet himself fades away. Recall the poet's offering of himself as the sacrificial offering in lines 6 and 7.

• Lines 21-23: Not dwelling on the suggestions of the above lines, though, the poet ends by focusing on his present state, joined with the taotie and in touch with the workings of the cosmos. Here you are: That is, here in the present, not confined to the past as the doubter might have expected at the beginning of the poem. "All 'neath Heaven" alludes to the common Chinese phrase tianxia, literally "below Heaven" (often translated "all under Heaven"), which refers generally to the whole world. By being at the numinous heart of the world, that is, by being spiritually centered through union with the taotie, the poet is able to feel the currents in the wind and stones: to perceive the trends of movement in both the rarefied and fluid, and the condensed and solid. Thereby he is able to spontaneously accord with them, and move as freely and powerfully as the taotie.

III. Concluding Analysis
"Ode to the Taotie" is certainly not a hymn - it fulfills none of the three hymnic offices Fry identifies - but its status as an ode in Fry's terms is rather dubious as well. Invocation it has in spades: the entire first verse paragraph is a long apostrophe calling in the taotie. One is hard pressed, though, to find prolepsis properly so-called. As noted in the commentary above, one desperate to find an anticipatory instance might try to suggest that some of the first several lines hint at the unlikelihood that the poet can call in so temporally removed a numen; yet, he does just that, and with great success. If there really is any prolepsis, it depends on the interpretation put forth in the commentary: the first verse paragraph suggests that the poet will be somehow empowered, possibly even immortalized by invoking the taotie. While he does successfully invoke it and is spiritually empowered by doing so, this does not place his person beyond mortality, and he has actually given himself up to empower the invoked spirit with new life.

The one instance of a question in the whole poem, as the commentary notes, inverts Fry's expectations of the dialectic question: rather than calling into doubt the numen and the poet's power to invoke it, the question, like the rest of the poem, does exactly the opposite.

If we wish to accept the poem as an ode, we must accept it as one with a different purpose than the usual 'doubtful' ode, one which ultimately affirms the power of the poet to invoke. We might take the author to be suggesting with this piece that the real heart of an ode is the invocation itself, not its success or failure.