Fengzhi and Shao Xunmei, Chinese modern poets, wrote unique love poems about snakes that were shunned in classical Chinese poetry. The two poets’ poems, “Snake”, are their representative works and controversial works in modern Chinese poetry. Therefore, this study examined the reason why “Snake” was suddenly born during this period, and its significance in aesthetics and history of literature.
Published in 1927, Fengzhi’s “Snake” was born in the inspiration of A.V. Beardsley’s illustration in Wilde’s novel Salome. A snake is a metaphor for masculine self and sexual love, while a flower is a female genital and a femme fatale like Lorelei or Lilith. Written during this period, four poems of “A man Playing the Bamboo Flute”, “Insignia”, “Silkworm Horse”, and “In Front of the Temple Gate” combined the influences from German Romantic ballads by Goethe, Heine, and Novalis, the paintings of pre-Raphaelite, and Baudelaire’s “The Flower of Evil.” Fengzhi shows love, fate, thoughts on art and its tragedy through poetic connotation and the scenery of wisdom by combining the romantic love stories, using Chinese classical myths and legends, such as Various Hermits 列仙傳 and Strange Stories 搜神記, with Decadence.
Absorbed in the Greek female poets Sappho, Swinburne, and Baudelaire, Shao Xunmei gradually became interested in the literary works of Decadence in England and France at the end of the century, including Beardsley, Wilde, and George Moore. He intentionally exaggerates the demonism and anti-naturalist consciousness in Baudelaire’s “The Flower of Evil” through his poems “May”, “To Swinburne”, “Madonna Mia”, “Love of Decadence”, and The Sin like a Flower.” Created in 1931, “Snake” is the combination of Eros and Thanatos, which is both Salome of deadly temptation and a symbol of eternal immortality such as the Hanga(姮娥) of China. His pursuit of Dionysian pleasures and enjoyment, such as anti-religion, anti-nature, carnal desire, and lust, shows the characteristics of the aesthetic Decadence.