39: Midnight the Poet, and Silkworms

A few notes:

The Midnight of the title refers not (or, given that this is Medieval Chinese, not only) to the time of night, but to a person. Specifically it refers to a woman of the Jin Dynasty (265-420) who took Ziye, here translated as "Midnight", as a pseudonym and under that name authored a series of poetic songs known by the same name: Midnight Four Season Songs (子夜四时歌). Though her work is much longer than Li Bai's (compare Ziye's and Li Bai's) and of quite different subject matter, Li Bai's poems explicitly take Ziye's song-poems as their model. Both Li Bai's Midnight Four Season Songs and the original also go by the name "Midnight Wu Song" (子夜吴歌), since the original Four Season Songs were in the Han "Music Bureau" (乐府) style, and would have been sung to the "Wu tune" (they were "吴声歌曲").

The silkworm is a potent symbol throughout Chinese literature, so it bears mentioning a few facts about it. While there exist wild silkworms, the silkworms that are used to produce most silk (bombyx mori) are a domestic creature bred by and entirely dependent on humans. Their primary food is the leaf of a white mulberry tree, though they can eat leaves of other types of mulberry trees. Mulberry trees take decades to mature, which combined with the skill involved in breeding and caring for the silkworms creates high barriers to entry, even in ancient China where such skills were originally developed. Indeed, silk-making was a jealously guarded industry, especially once Silk Road trade had begun to take off in the Han Dynasty (see History of Silk). During the Tang Dynasty, special land-use laws carved out exceptions from the then-standard "equal-field system" for land where mulberry trees grew, since it could be used to produce silk -- testifying both to the special status of silk producers and the economic importance of the silk trade vis-a-vis other industries. Silk manufacture's cultural pedigree was unique: by the mid-Tang (early to mid 8th century CE), silk had been produced in China for millennia, and in large amounts since the Han. Only since around the 6th century CE had it begun to be produced in other parts of the world, escaping the efforts of Chinese silk interests to prevent the knowledge from leaving China. From all of this we can infer that when the young woman of the poem gathers mulberry leaves, she is raising silkworms, and if the silkworms go hungry she has either left them or imagines leaving. They, like small children, cannot feed themselves, and depend on their 'mother' -- a metaphor relevant also for the fact that silkworm raising in Imperial and pre-Imperial China was often associated with women rather than men.