Carpe Diem – Chōyō (Chrysanthemum Festival)

· by · in poetry. ·


The Ninth Month, Chôyô by Keisai Eisen

The double ninth festival or chrysanthemum festival on the significant ninth day of the ninth month all throughout Asia. Nine has a lot of yang in it, so it’s a potentially dangerous date. To protect against evil it has become a custom to drink wine with chrysanthemum petals submerged in it.

protection –
floating in my wine
chrysanthemum

Since it occurs during autumn it has become a festival to celebrate ancestors. Burning incense and eating suckling pigs is a tradition in part of China. A very famous Chinese poem by Wang Wei from the Tang dynasty reads:

On the ninth day of the ninth month, I remember my brothers from Shan Dong.
As a lonely stranger in a foreign land,
At every holiday my homesickness increases.
Far away, I know my brothers have reached the peak;
They are planting flowers, but one is not present.

It has become more and more associated with the flower and today one can see wonderful events associated with the flowers and also as a harvest festival.

chrysanthemums
adorns her silk kimono
double ninth

Linked to Carpe Diem
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September 24, 2013

14 responses to “Carpe Diem – Chōyō (Chrysanthemum Festival)”

  9. Never liked the number nine–but never knew why. Fear, b/c of its ying vibrations. Also it alwys seems to block my notions of evenness of 8 and 10. Thanks for the information…if learning had always been this easy, I might have stayed awake during trig and physics–

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