The Life Journey of Wang Changling, Master of the Quatrain
Wang Changling (c. 698-756), of the capital region, was the 'Sage of the Seven-Character Quatrain,' the 'Master-Teacher of Poets.' He took the frontier into the quatrain and made it permanent — 'the Qin moon, the Han passes' — then spent his official life falling: from palace library to a river county, from Jiangning to exile at Longbiao in the far west. When the An Lushan chaos broke he started home and was murdered by a jealous prefect: the master of the border poem dying by an official's hand.
Timeline of the Journey
698 · Jingzhao — Farm-house boy of the capital region: plough and books together, the Guanzhong plain's hard weather already in his blood and later his verse.
718 · Mount Song — Early manhood as a Daoist recluse among the peaks: herbs, meditation, the unworldly air his frontier poems never quite lost.
722 · Liangzhou — West along the Hexi corridor to the garrison country: the first great border quatrains, cavalry dust and moonlight, written from the armies themselves.
723 · Yumen Pass — Out past the Jade Gate: 'the Qin moon and the Han passes, the long march of ten thousand miles' — Out of the Pass distilled from the very waste it describes.
727 · Chang'an — The jinshi examination passed at last, collator in the Palace Library; the name already on every tongue in the capital.
734 · Sishui — Through the erudite-words examination to a lieutenancy on the Yellow River by Hulao Pass — wine and meditations on the Chu-Han battlefields.
740 · Jiangning — Banished south to Lingnan in 738, amnestied on the road in 739, then assistant magistrate at Jiangning — the permanent byname 'Wang Jiangning.' The southern rains turned his hand to farewell.
748 · Longbiao — The second fall, a thousand li deeper — county defender at Longbiao in the Five-Streams country. Li Bai's poem flew after him: 'I hear you banished to Longbiao; the cuckoo cries through the flowers.'
756 · Haozhou — The empire breaking, the old poet leaving Longbiao for home — killed at Haozhou by the prefect Luqiu Xiao. All the world of letters wept.
'A heart of ice in a cup of jade.' The frontier's supreme technician and the farewell's truest voice — Wang Changling wrote the shortest poems of his age, and the age never finished them.