How to Read Chinese Poetry: A Guided Anthology

The Shijing (The Book of Poetry) is the fountainhead of Chinese poetry. The three hundred–odd poems that make up this anthology are the earliest extant Chinese verse. The edition used today was compiled by a certain Master Mao during the Han dynasty; thus it has become a convention to refer to the poems by their titles and their Mao numbers (1–305). The poems are divided into three sections (sometimes considered three subgenres), given here in their presumed chronological order: song (hymns, laudes [Mao nos. 266–305]), ya (elegantiae or odes, subdivided into greater and lesser ya [Mao nos. 235–265, 161–234]), and feng (airs [Mao nos. 1–160]). There are three subsections of hymns: those of the state of Lu (from the late Spring and Autumn era), those of the Zhou court (the earliest poems dating from the early Western Zhou), and the pieces imitating those of the preceding Shang dynasty (written in the late Western Zhou period). The greater elegantiae are concerned with the Zhou kingdom and its conquest of the Shang, and the lesser elegantiae are often connected to the various regional courts of the states under Zhou control. The airs, sometimes referred to as the “airs of the states” (guo feng), are broken into fifteen sections, thirteen ascribed to northern states or places and two purported to be collections of songs (referred to as nan [southern songs]) of the southern regions under Zhou rule. These poems treat a broad range of subjects and themes, from dynastic songs of cultural heroes to paeans of battles or warriors, court rituals or sacrifice, hunts and feasts. More than half the poems, most found in the “airs of the states” section, are love poems, long considered by most readers to be the most interesting texts. They are thus the primary focus of this chapter. Regardless of a poem’s subject, however, three basic modes of presentation have been identified by scholars: fu (exposition), bi (comparison), and xing (affective image). Although we have little evidence concerning the conditions of composition, it seems clear from the poems themselves that the hymns and elegantiae were probably composed at court, while the airs were originally folk songs that were standardized (in terms of prosody as well as content) for presentation at court.

These folk songs were composed in a social setting that predated Confucian mores. Thus liaisons between unmarried young men and women were not only allowed but encouraged (as the Zhou li [Zhou Ritual] tells us). This, in turn, resulted in many love affairs that ended in disappointment and despair, especially for the young women involved. Many of the airs are plaints apparently sung by these abandoned lovers.

Some of the prosody of these songs may have been the creation of these young men and women themselves, perhaps in part determined by popular tunes associated with certain affective images (xing); “on the mountains there is X,” for example, was usually employed in songs about separation. But the standards in this regard were no doubt established by the court musicians who helped shape these songs before they took their final form in the late sixth century B.C.E. It is possible that the three thousand poems Confucius was supposed to have examined before selecting the three hundred for this class were largely different versions of the same poems, distinguished by region or era.

The standards refined by the court musicians include a four-word line, the four-line stanza, various formulae, a general 2 + 2 rhythm, rhymes on even lines, and the use of various tropes, including metaphor, simile, synecdoche, puns, onomatopoeia, rhyming and reduplicative compounds, alliteration, and puns. Parallelism, especially in stock phrases such as “on the mountains there is X, / in the lowlands there is Y,” is common (for this particular pattern, see Mao nos. 38, 84, 115, 132, 172, and 204). Although there are no fixed syntactic rules, the pattern of topic + comment discerned by many in later Chinese verse is also evident in the Book of Poetry: “Tao yao” (The Peach Tree Tender [Mao no. 6]) begins, “The peach tree budding and tender,” and “Zai qu” (Driving the Carriage Horses) opens, “They drove on the carriage horses, clippedly clop.” Finally, it has been argued that there may originally have been some significance to the sequence of these three hundred–plus poems. Whether such significance existed or can be seen in the extant text is difficult to determine. Yet it is clear that reading one poem in the context of another, often contiguous text proves useful.

I present in this chapter examples from each of the three sections of the Book of Poetry. Although lines from these poems were employed early on by speakers to make a political point and this line of interpretation developed into an identification between the poems and early historical contexts, for the most part I will focus on literary interpretations.

These interpretations, although directed by commentators old and new and informed by parallel poems in the Book of Poetry, represent only one of a number of possible readings. Unlike early Greek verse genres, which were defined by musical accompaniment (lyric), subject matter (iambus), or meter (elegy), the “airs,” “elegantiae,” and “hymns” are labels that are less definitive. Even the origins of the poems in this anthology are still debated, with some scholars denying their oral provenance. Much has been left to the imagination of the modern reader of the Book of Poetry. Thus when we see a dance or a courtship rite in a particular poem—reflecting an ongoing folk tradition with similarities to that which produced “mountain songs” (shan ge) in later eras—other modern readers may prefer other readings. Such is part of the greatness of this collection.

Many of the texts, especially the love songs, need little interpretation. Yet through centuries of oral and written transmission of these three hundred songs, lines and even whole stanzas have been rearranged or lost. The situation admittedly is not as serious as with the Greek poetic fragments of the same period, where we find puzzling little snippets such as Archilochus’s (ca. 680–ca. 650 B.C.E.) fragment no. 107:

I hope that the Dog Star

will wither many of them

with his piercing rays.¹

Who “many of them” refers to is unclear, but the clarity of the poet’s enmity for them allows this poem to resonate even with modern readers. Alkman’s (seventh century B.C.E.?) fragment no. 82 is similar:

The girls sank down,

helplessly,

like birds beneath

a hovering hawk.²

What is the context here? Although without more of the poem or a commentary it remains difficult to say, the sinister image of the hovering hawk and the vulnerability of young girls lying helpless appeal to us across time. Many of the poems collected in the Book of Poetry also lack contexts and have puzzled readers. One such song is “Zhu lin” (The Grove at Zhu [Mao no. 144]):³

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[MSZJ 1.16b–17a]

As with the pieces by Archilochus and Alkman, the reader seeks a context for this song. Although the poem could be simply a love song about an anxious suitor, the references to the historical figure Xia Nan have caused most readers to identify the context of this poem with the affair between Duke Ling of Chen (r. 613–599 B.C.E.) and Xia Nan’s mother, as portrayed in the early Chinese historical text Zuo zhuan (Zuo Commentary on the “Spring and Autumn Annals”). There we learn that after continuing to see Xia Nan’s mother for some time, the duke insulted Xia Nan while they were drinking together. After the feast was finished, Xia Nan shot and killed Duke Ling with an arrow. The song was written, it is said, to satirize Duke Ling’s improper behavior. It is the duke who drove to Zhu. His impatience—he seems to have driven all night—as well as the erotic associations of the groves (where romantic liaisons were common), the racing colts, and even eating (breakfast) only heighten his impropriety even as he tries to excuse it. The demotic style and run-on lines of the final stanza, which allow the lines to be read quickly, suggest the duke’s urgency and his base nature.

As fascinating as this kind of interpretation may be, most of the great poems of the Book of Poetry either provide their own historical background or need no contextualization, as we can see in “Tao yao” (The Peach Tree Tender [Mao no. 6]):

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[MSZJ 1.6b–7a]

This epithalamium is built around the comparison (bi) between the bride and the peach tree: she is also budding and tender, vivid and bright. The peach itself has associations in traditional China with female fertility, but here the emphasis is on the bride’s suitability for the husband and his entire family, with whom she is going to live. The flowers refer to her beautiful face, which will appeal to her husband in their bedchamber—thus the precedence given to chamber over house in the last line of the first stanza. In the second stanza, the implication is that her body will be capable of producing many sons, the main concern of her parents-in-law, who are represented synecdochically here by their house. By the third stanza, the emphasis has moved from the flowers and the fruit to the leaves of the peach tree, suggesting the passing of seasons from spring to fall (similar to “Meng” [Common Fellow, Mao no. 58] or “Biao you mei” [Falling Plums, Mao no. 20]). The abundance of leaves, and the slightly revised structure of line 10 (here the adjectival reduplicative “luxuriant and lush” follows the noun “leaves”) suggests the children this bride will produce for the family. The lush leaves may also foreshadow a good relationship for the couple, as they do (by contrast) in “Di du” (The Russet Pear [Mao no. 119]) and in the subsequent poem by the same title (no. 169). The rhythm (tetrameter) and rhyme scheme (xaxa / xbxb / xcxc) are also perfectly regular, underlining the theme of the poem expressed in the final line: the bride will fit “with all in the family.” This balance is structurally built into the poem, as in the couplet “The peach tree budding and tender, / Vivid and bright its flowers.”

A similar poem is “Xi sang” (Mulberries in the Lowlands [Mao no. 228]):

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[MSZJ 15.8a–b]

Although the visual images of the mulberry tree and its leaves are similar to those seen in “Tao yao,” here the persona may be seen either as a subject who admires his lord greatly or as a young woman praising her intended. This ambiguity of this pair (subject to lord or female to male lover) is one commonly seen in later Chinese verse and turns on the term junzi, which means literally “lord” but can also be used to refer to a “lordly man”—that is, a husband, a lover, or someone the persona admires greatly. Indeed, interpretation of similar poems centering on a persona’s praise for a junzi often differs from one subgenre to another: poems in the ya sections (elegantiae) read as referring to the “lord” (compare the fifth stanza of “Chu ju” [The Carts Come Out, Mao no. 168] or “Lu xiao” [Tall Is the Southernwood, Mao no. 173]), in contrast to those in the feng section (airs) that are read as love poems in which junzi is interpreted as “lordly man” (“Cao chong” [Insects in the Grass, Mao no. 14], for example). In “Mulberries in the Lowlands” both meanings may apply.

In addition to marriage in “Tao yao” and the more informal ties between the persona and her “lordly man” in “Xi sang,” we also find more direct depictions of courting in the Book of Poetry, as in the following poem, “Qiang Zhong Zi” (I Beg of You, Zhong Zi [Mao no. 76]), the second poem in the state of Zheng section and among the best known of these three hundred verses:

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[MSZJ 4.8a–9a]

Whereas joyous anticipation dominated the poems examined earlier, this is a poem of anticipation and anxiety. Although the persona may secretly welcome her lover’s approach, she is concerned about the reaction of her family and her village to her love affair. Zhong Zi (Second Son), whom we assume to be the singer’s paramour, is warned in lines 1–3 of the first stanza to keep his distance, but as the persona tries to explain to him (and perhaps to herself) why she is putting him off (lines 4–8), Zhong Zi takes advantage to come nearer, so that by line 2 of the second stanza he has progressed from the edge of the hamlet to the wall around her home.

The images in these first lines are of transgression (crossing and breaking), reinforced by the sharp consonantal endings (-eg in reconstructed ancient pronunciation) of the rhymes in lines 1–5 and 7. It is as if the singer is so focused on explaining her motives to hold off her lover that she forgets to vary the rhyme. If we could imagine a performance of this poem, there would be the potential for the singer to elongate the final syllables in lines 1 (a vowel-ending participle), 6, and 8 (both -er rhymes followed by vowel-ending participles). The contrast of these lengthy final syllables to the preceding staccato, consonant-rhymed lines suggest Zhong Zi’s halting (on the syllables ending in stops), then gliding to gain increasing proximity toward his beloved in the held-vowel endings. This effect might be enhanced by the singer’s perspective: her eyes look out over the entire hamlet in lines 1–3, then seem to turn to glance toward her family in lines 5–8. The performer might even choreograph her movements to suggest this change in point of view, first facing the audience, then slowly half turning her back on them in the final lines of the stanza.

Yet this is all very cerebral. The singer does not tell us what she sees, and we readers (or original listeners) can put the scene together only indirectly from her admonitions to Zhong Zi: in the distance, the hamlet wall and willows; closer, the wall around her family compound and the mulberries; and, finally, in the foreground, the hardwood trees on the border of the family garden.

The second stanza begins, as noted, with Zhong Zi now at the wall surrounding her home. Traditional commentators make much of the significance of the three trees the reader encounters, but the images’ intended effect may be simply to suggest Zhong Zi’s ardor, since the trees that are closer to the persona are larger and more of a barrier: from supple willow to denser mulberry to hardwood. As the distance between Zhong Zi and the singer is narrowed, the effect of his visit widens, going beyond the parents (of the first stanza) to include all the singer’s brothers in the second stanza. The rhyme incidence (or frequency) is still heavy, restricting the action and thereby maintaining the suspense: Will Zhong Zi reach the singer or not? By moving from the monotonous rhyme scheme (aaaxbxb) in the first stanza to a slightly more lively one in the second (xccxcbxb), the intended effect may be to suggest an end to the singer’s repetitive reverie.

The third stanza brings Zhong Zi yet closer to the persona (and the reader). Perhaps since we can see him only through his lover’s eyes, there is no physical description of Zhong Zi. Of more importance is his increasing proximity, not his appearance. Rather than a marriage partner, as in “Tao yao,” here we have an aggressive suitor whose sexuality is the main concern. Now he is perhaps only a few feet away from the singer. In this scenario, she speaks no more of family (father, mother, or brothers), who might want to protect her from such a liaison, but of the neighbors, who will want to gossip about her. Through this change of emphasis from family to outsiders, she suggests that the “embraceable” Zhong Zi is sure to live up to his epithet. They will become the couple Mengzi (Mengzi, 3B.3) decries who “climb walls to be with each other” and thus will be despised by their parents and the people of their state. Their lovemaking seems inevitable. The trees are not luxuriant and colorful, as in “Tao yao,” but in danger of being damaged, as is the persona.

This kind of progression in the Book of Poetry has come to be called incremental repetition. In “I Beg of You, Zhong Zi,” there are two such repetitions: Zhong Zi physically crashing through barriers and tree branches to reach his beloved, juxtaposed to the singer’s widening mental picture of those who will object to his wooing. The result is a chiasmatic (the inversion of word order of similar phrases in an a-b-b-a pattern) tension: Zhong Zi approaching in increments, and the effects thereof distancing themselves beyond the singer’s control—or so she imagines it, her emotions crossing in parallel to the chiasmatic repetitions in her song.

If we assume that, as with any oral song, this one would have been performed differently each time it was sung, we can also imagine that there may have been much longer versions of “I Beg of You, Zhong Zi,” in which Zhong Zi might have forded small streams or stepped through thresholds. Moreover, we can imagine the singer redesigning the imagistic furniture (what was jumped or crossed and the breakable foliage one had to be careful with) to fit local conditions and audiences.

Any discussion of “I Beg of You, Zhong Zi” would be incomplete without some comparison with “Ru fen” (The Banks of the Ru [Mao no. 10]), which also invokes the awe and respect most young lovers showed their parents:

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[MSZJ 1.8b.–9b]

“Ru fen” has traditionally been read with the final couplet developing from the xing of the reddened bream in line 9. Wang shi, which is here rendered literally as “royal chamber,” is normally understood pars pro toto (a part for the whole) as referring to the royal court, which is “as if ablaze” in some sort of crisis. The final two lines are then read as the wife urging her husband, who is serving at court, to return home because of his parents (which would mean he would also return to her). There is another line of commentary that reads the poem in just the opposite way, of urging her husband to serve an oppressive court so that his parents could be well cared for. But as an air, the poem might easily be read as a love poem sung by a wife whose husband has been away serving the state but who has now returned. This would fit the gathering-plant imagery of lines 1–2 and 5–6, which is often associated with male–female relations. The image of the bream with the reddened tail in line 9, however, is problematic in either reading. Wen Yiduo (1899–1946) has argued that fish are symbols of lovers in the Book of Poetry. Thus the lover in this poem would be ardent after such a long absence from his wife. Hunger (line 4), too, is often equated with sexual desire in these poems. Although there have also been erotic readings of this poem by modern Western scholars, Wen Yiduo’s interpretation of wang shi as referring metonymically to a member of the royal court (as a parallel to two other expressions referring to courtiers, zong shi and wang sun) seems most reasonable. Lines 10–12 would then read:

The royal courtier as if ablaze;

Even though he is as if ablaze,

Father and mother are very near.

In support of Wen’s overall reading of the poem, the following roughly contemporaneous Egyptian love song (thirteenth or fourteenth century B.C.E.) might be cited:

Love, how I’d love to slip down to the pond,

bathe with you close by on the bank.

Just for you I’d wear my new Memphis swimsuit,

made of sheer linen, fit for a queen—

Come and see how it looks in the water!

Couldn’t I coax you to wade in with me?

Let the cool creep slowly around us?

Then I’d dive deep down

and come up with you dripping,

Let you fill your eyes

with the little red fish that I’d catch.

And I’d say, standing there tall in the shallows:

Look at my fish, love,

how it lies in my hand.

How my fingers caress it,

slip down its sides …

But then I’d say softer,

eyes bright with your seeing:

A gift, love, no words.

Come closer and

look, it’s all me.⁴

Men are not always portrayed as aggressive, as in “I Beg of You, Zhong Zi,” or as long-absent courtiers, as in “Ru fen.” Sometimes they can only stand and wait for their partners, as does the young man who is the persona in “Jing nü” (The Retiring Girl [Mao no. 42]):

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[MSZJ 2.15b–16b]

“The Retiring Girl” is a poem that shows us only a few minutes of a relationship in real time, but it suggests much more. The first stanza provides an exposition of sorts: we hear of the two characters, their relationship (at least to some degree), and their location, and we are allowed to wait with the young man for the girl to show herself. With him, we look toward the corner of the wall, where he seems to know she is (since he seems certain that she is hiding there). She is reticent to meet him, even in this out-of-the-way place (the corner of the city wall). Of course, she is depicted as a “retiring” or “quiet girl,” but the third stanza suggests they may already be lovers and her hiding may be simply playful. The final line of the first stanza, “As I scratch my head, pace up and down,” slows the action (three of the first four lines rhyme [aaxa] enhancing this stasis) and serves as a background for the persona’s musings that follow in the second and third stanzas. The reader joins the young man in looking inward. Without the quiet girl present, the man’s thoughts wander back, in the second stanza, to the last time he has seen her. He examines a bright-red stalk that the girl had given him then. The vivid color of this natural object in his hand symbolizes the girl’s loveliness and begins to bring her alive for the reader as well. The changed rhymed scheme in this stanza (bbcc) underlines the parallel between gift and girl.

In the third stanza, the persona flashes back to another gift—a reed sprout that his love brought him from the pasture, perhaps the site of a previous rendezvous. At this point, the reader is well prepared for a second comparison of the love token to the lover. This time the token is a small reed sprout. The mundane nature of this token—not even brightly colored—makes it clear that the repeated use of the adjective “beautiful” (mei) in the final five lines (it is used four times!) implicitly refers to the girl. Twice mei is the stressed rhyme word in these final lines, linking the persona’s reveries in the resulting cc / cdcd pattern. In the final couplet, the young man’s impatience for his beloved leads him to address the reed sprout directly. This rhetorical device, known as apostrophe, is yet another thread between the three beautiful “objects” that weave the stanzas together: girl, stalk, and sprout. Read in this fashion, the poem begins as an exposition (fu) in the first stanza but comes to end unresolved in a series of comparisons (bi). The circularity of the young man’s thoughts, as well as the metaphoric binding of gifts and girl, are highlighted by another rhetorical device, the linking of lines 6 and 7 through the repetition of “vermilion stalk” and the doubled “beautiful” that links line 11 to line 12 (a device known in Chinese as lianzhu [linking pearls] and in English as anadiplosis).

Although the poems presented earlier should suggest that tetrameter is the standard rhythm for the Book of Poetry as a whole (over 91 percent of the lines are in tetrameter, about 6 percent in pentameter, and most of the remaining 3 percent in trimeter), there are also a few poems written in lines of varying length, such as “Jiang you si” (The River Has Branches [Mao no. 22]) in trimeter or “Xing lu” (Treading Frost [Mao no. 17]) in pentameter. “Xing lu” is a bit different. There are seven tetrasyllabic lines in this piece. Strictly speaking, there is not a single pentasyllabic poem in the Book of Poetry, while “Jiang you si” is obviously a trisyllabic poem. Both songs are found in the second section of the airs, “Shao nan” (Nan-Type Songs from the States Set Up by the Duke of Shao), and it is likely that both this section and the paired “Zhou nan” (Nan-Type Songs from the States Set Up by the Duke of Zhou) had a musical base that differed from that of the other airs.⁵ To us moderns, however, only the text remains:

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[MSZJ 1.16b–17a]

Line 1 of this poem, along with its variants (lines 6 and 11), has been identified as a xing. It also functions as a comparison (bi), linking the lover, who is often absent, to the River (the ancient name of the Yangtze River), which has branches that wander off from the main channel. Perhaps the wayward lover is a merchant. Each stanza of the poem is in trimeter until the final line, which reverts to tetrameter. Yet even these final lines break on the particle ye, yielding a 3:1 rhythm, the final syllable constituting a kind of exclamation: “And afterward … regret!” and so on. If the final lines are scanned so, in performing the poem there seems to be great potential for controlling the audience. The listeners would have empathized with the persona and hoped that her unfaithful mate would somehow be punished. If the singer stressed the ye (which, as a particle, would normally be unstressed), if he or she held this word longer before revealing to the audience the negative effects on the unfaithful lover, the power of the poetic justice would have increased with this suspense. The final line of the third stanza would thereby reveal the ultimate surprise: that the errant lover’s anguish would become the plot for a song—this song. Although the emotions weigh down the reader, the effect of rhyming nearly every line (axaaa, bxbbb, cxccc) lightens the mood and prepares for the almost mocking closing line.

Structurally, there is here, too, a kind of incremental repetition. In the first stanza, although branches of the river depart from the main channel, they return. In contrast, the lover seems to have left for good. His initial emotion will be merely regret. In the second stanza, the many channels between the islets may suggest the lover’s coursing between more than one love interest. Because of this, he did not even try to soften his departure with a final rendezvous. This, the persona tells us, will cause him more anguish even than leaving her. Finally, in the last stanza, there is a suggestion that the river has joined with someone else (as the Tuo joins the River) and that he did not even stop by to see his former lover before leaving. As a result, his anguish will someday cause him to wail, a sorrow that the persona promises to put to song. The more he demonstrates his coldness toward her, the more she wants to believe he will eventually suffer. The force of this reading lies in the contrast between the reality of the first four lines of each stanza and the singer’s fantasy in the final lines.

This poem has also been interpreted as the lament of a young female relative of a bride who has left the relative behind as the bride headed off to be married (line 2 of each stanza could also be read, “She has gone to be married,” as in “Tao yao”). It was a common practice for a bride to take along several young women of her family, who became the husband’s secondary wives or concubines. This reading comes no doubt in part because this poem immediately follows a related poem, “Xiao xing” (Little Stars [Mao no. 21]):

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[MSZJ 1.16a–b]

The xing (affective image) that opens this poem is also a bi (comparison), linking the stars to lower-ranking palace women. In the growing light of dawn—which may symbolize the waking of the ruler’s favorite—these three and five “stars” grow ever fainter. Why not three or four stars? The answer is that these three and five stars are those in ancient Chinese constellations comparable with our Orion and the Pleiades, the stars that remain visible the longest in the winter’s morning sky. This unusual trope allows the first stanza to link to the second, where the metaphor becomes clearer. The theme of this song is similar to the meaning of the ancient Chinese saying “The hungry sing of their food, the labored sing of their service.” The persona here laments her lower status, which makes it impossible for her to attend her lord for the entire night, as the main wife would. Thus she and her fellow court ladies hurry about. The image of these women with the coverlets and sheets draped on their shoulders suggests both the canopy of the sky (in the appearance of the women) and the hierarchy of the palace women themselves (seen in their hardship). The prosody of this poem is regular except for the “extra” fifth line in each stanza, perhaps lending emphasis to the plaint of the final lines, an emphasis heightened by the rhyme scheme ababb, acacc.

There is a second, relatively common reading of this poem that identifies the persona as a low-ranking courtier (a member of the shi, or petit nobility) who scurries to be on time for the dawn audience, his own star obscured by the higher-ranking grandees of the court. Indeed, many traditional poems have been interpreted variously as political or love songs. Yet the coverlets and sheets argue of love here, and the entire poem bears some resemblance to Sappho’s (late seventh–early sixth century B.C.E.) fragment no. 34:⁶

Stars around the lovely moon

Hide their gleaming beauty away

Whenever she at the full sheds

Over the earth her radiant glow.

Although once again a Greek fragment offers us no context, the juxtaposition of some central female figure (the moon) to her subordinate women (the stars around her) is not unlike the situation in “Little Stars.” That such women could be seen to be “in the ruler’s service” is also apparent from “Cai fan” (Gathering the White Artemesia [Mao no. 13]):

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[MSZJ 1.10b–11a]

Artemesia, varieties of which are also known as wormwood or southernwood, is a decorative, aromatic plant (used for wreaths in modern times). The white variant was used both in sacrifices and as food for silkworms, leading traditional commentators to read this poem as either the plaint of a palace woman who is preparing a sacrifice for her ruler’s ancestors or a peasant girl’s gathering the plant as part of the silk-making process. Since the bi that is referred to twice in the last stanza was a kind of hairpiece woven into the hair atop the head for certain rituals, my reading will follow the former interpretation.

The palace woman’s task is onerous, taking her to various out-of-the-way places. She asks where she will find the plant, not literally to check herself, but to heighten her suffering for her audience. Although her journey from the nearby ponds to the river islets and then up the small valley of a tributary may not seem too arduous, the final stanza reveals the toll it takes. Portrayed synecdocically through her hair knot, the woman works day and night and ends up as exhausted as her fallen coiffure suggests. Her motion is suggested in the first two stanzas by the staccato rhyme scheme: xaxa / xbxb. The doubled rhyme of the first couplet of the final stanza (ccdd) slackens the pace of the song and allows the persona a moment to reflect on her disheveled coiffure as she rushes to return.

The gathering of white artemesia was clearly women’s work, as we read in the final stanza of “Chu ju” (Send Out the Chariots [Mao no. 168]), which depicts the return of a victorious army and the preparation for sacrifices to celebrate that victory:

[MSZJ 9.10a]

The oriole seems to symbolize the return from the martial life on campaign to the domestic world of the family, as in “Dong shan” (East Mountain [Mao no. 156]). Another poem about gathering plants is “Ge tan” (The Kudzu Vine Grows Longer [Mao no. 2]):

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[MSZJ 1.3b–4b]

This poem is more disjointed and obscure than any we have examined. Images that may have been familiar to the early Zhou audience have grown strange to us. This has naturally attracted readers and led to many varied interpretations over the centuries. Given the proper textual contexts, however, we can see that this is the song of a bride who is excitedly preparing for the traditional visit back to her parents’ home three days after being married. The key to understanding the poem lies in the xing: “The kudzu vine is grown longer / Spread to the middle of the valley.” The kudzu vine was used in a ceremony celebrated by the Zhou dynasty nobility in which the bridegroom personally received the bride.⁷ At this ceremony, the bride’s mother would receive several pairs of kudzu-vine sandals and then have her daughter tread in them (symbolizing conjugal relations). Thereafter, the mother would give the daughter various instructions about how to comport herself, receive her daughter’s obeisance, and finally place the bride’s hands in those of the groom, who would then lead his wife from the room.

The vine itself produces many narrow pods filled with seeds, which symbolize fertility (the word zi means both “seeds” and “children”), and its fiber is durable, symbolizing a strong relationship between the wife and her husband. In this poem, the affective image is also meant to suggest (by comparison) the initial success of the marriage, in which the bonds have already grown stronger in the first few days of the relationship, as the vines have grown longer. The vines may also suggest the ties to the bride’s new family, as they clearly do in “Ge lei” (Kudzu Vine and Bean Creeper [Mao no. 71]). Although the nature of the persona’s relationship to her in-laws depicted in “Ge lei” differs from that in “Ge tan,” the image of the kudzu as the new entwinements of the bride with her in-laws is the same. Line 3 of “Ge tan” emphasizes the successes the bride is having with her new family, the luxuriant leaves echoing the same image (and same significance) seen earlier in “Tao yao.”

Birds in flight (line 4) are sometimes compared with the appearance of humans, especially in ritual situations (as in “Zhen lu” [Egrets in Flight, Mao no. 278], discussed later). The flight of these yellow birds (probably siskins) may symbolize the bride’s joining the new flock of her husband’s family. Now settled after the bustle of the marriage ceremony, the family is in harmony, as are the birds in their song.

The second stanza reiterates the harmony of the marriage in lines 1–3, echoed by the repeated rhyme scheme (xabbab, xaccac). But in line 10, we move to the making of clothes from the kudzu, also perhaps a marriage ritual. The coarse and fine cloth and the persona’s willingness to wear either without tiring may be something similar to the vows we exchange in marriage: “For better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do us part.”

In the final stanza, there is an immediacy and urgency absent in the two previous stanzas. The shi shi in line 13, translated as “duenna,” would normally have indicated a Zhou dynasty official in charge of instructing noblewomen. But here, in a poem about a common young girl, it is used—parallel to the use of junzi for both “lord” and “lordly man”—to refer to a female servant. Lines 13–17 all contain repetition, reflecting the excited state of mind of the persona, a state of mind we all share before setting out on a journey, especially a journey home to our parents. The persona feels comfortable enough in her new home to banter idly with the duenna—“What should I wash, what not?”—and it is this comfort that she hopes to take back to her parents.

Although “Ge tan” shares the motif of gathering plants with “Cai fan,” the ideal mate of “Cai fan” must be “Cai pin” (Gathering the Duckweed [Mao no. 15]):

C1.11

[MSZJ 1.12a–13a]

This poem is also tied to the ritual of marriage (according to the “Hun yi” [Meaning of Marriage] chapter of the Li ji [Record of Rituals]). Three months before the marriage is to take place, the prospective bride is instructed at the family’s ancestral shrine in how she is expected to speak and act in her new setting as a wife. At the culmination of her lessons, sacrifices of fish, duckweed, and water grasses are offered. The question-and-answer form of the poem reflects that of the more formal catechism the girl has underdone at the ancestral shrine (perhaps reflected in the balanced rhyme scheme aabb / xcxc / xdxd). The first stanza depicts where the bride-to-be should search for the sacrificial plants; the second, how to prepare them; and the third, where to position them. The shi referred to in the penultimate line is the person who impersonates the ancestors in sacrifices: here the young woman who is to be married. The poem seems not to be sung by her, but about her, perhaps by the women who picked duckweed or other plants regularly.

Sacrifice is a regular theme of the song hymns, as “Zhen lu” (Egrets in Flight [Mao no. 278]) illustrates:

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[MSZJ 19.7b–8a]

The host is the Zhou king, who invites the descendants of the former dynasties (Xia and Shang) to come to court and present sacrifices to their ancestors (and the Zhou predecessors). It has been argued that egrets were selected for this metaphoric poem because the immediate predecessors of the Zhou, the Shang, honored white above all colors. But egrets are elegant birds and are used metaphorically to describe courtiers in “You bi” (The Robust Horse [Mao no. 298]) as well. The idea of the flight of birds suggesting a comparison with human activities is a common one in the Book of Poetry (for example, “Hong yan” [Wild Geese, Mao no. 181]). In this sacrificial hymn, we can imagine perhaps two rows of supplicants: one of the Xia line and the other of the Shang descendants, the rows suggesting the formation of the egrets in flight. After the scene has been set in the first stanza, the second offers the hope that the supplicants will be diligent and the ancestral spirits receptive. In this way, the song argues, both ancestral lines will become immortal. The rhyme scheme (xaxa, bbbb) is striking and seems to suggest (in the second stanza), in its repetitiveness, the solemnity of the moment, perhaps echoed by bells or drums.

The final poem to be examined, “Mian” (Woven [Mao no. 237]), is one of the series of pieces in the “Da ya” (Greater Elegantiae) that depicts the founding of the Zhou dynasty, particularly the exploits of its first ruler, King Wen:

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[MSZJ 16.4b–7b]

Although this poem is primarily expositional in style, it opens with an affective image that suggests the “woven and unbroken” history of the Zhou people, as portrayed in the “Da ya” section. This poem contains an account of Dan Fu, the grandfather of King Wen. The most detailed account of his life and rule can be found in the “Basic Annals of the Zhou” in Sima Qian’s (145–86? B.C.E.) Shiji (Records of the Grand Scribe):

The ancient honorable Dan Fu again cultivated the enterprise [to establish the Zhou dynasty] of Hou Ji and Gong Liu, accumulated virtue, and carried out justice. The people of the capital all supported him. When the Xunyu and the Rong-Di attacked him, desiring to obtain wealth and goods, he gave it to them. Again they attacked, desiring to obtain his territory and his people. The people were all angry and wanted to give battle. The ancient and honorable one said, “The people enthrone a lord in order that he will bring benefits to them. Now the reason the Rong-Di are attacking and battling us is to take my territory and people. For the people to be with me or for them to be with those others, what is the difference? The people want to give battle because of me, but I cannot bear to kill people’s fathers and sons to keep myself their lord.” Thus he left Bin [the capital] with his personal attendants, crossed the Qi and the Ju rivers, traversed Mount Liang, and stopped at the foot of Mount Qi. Every person in Bin, holding up their elders and carrying their children, again submitted themselves to Dan Fu at the foot of Mount Qi. When other, neighboring states learned of the ancient honorable one’s humanity, many indeed submitted to him. At this, the ancient honorable one then abandoned the customs of the Rong-Di, built city walls and residences, and settled the people in various cities. He appointed officials for the five offices. The people all put this to song and music to praise his virtue.⁸

Thus Dan Fu (literally, Generous Man) is the leader of the Zhou who broke with the barbarian customs and moved his people away from the Rong-Di to what is modern southeastern Shaanxi. The other parallels to the more general Shiji account provide a running commentary to this poem. It is only necessary to add that walls were built in the early Zhou era by tamping earth between wooden planks lashed together with ropes (lines 29–33).

Although not a highly literary piece, this long poem evinces careful attention to sound patterns. Almost every line is rhymed. The third through fifth stanzas, lines that could be considered an account of the preparations for the building of Dan Fu’s new capital, are joined by words that all rhyme to the same rhyme category. The rhyme words in the sixth stanza, in which the sounds of construction reverberate, were also skillfully chosen, each ending in the sonorous nasal -ng.

In the final stanza, the focus suddenly switches from Dan Fu to his grandson, King Wen. This section could be a later interpolation designed to help fit “Mian” into the epiclike account of King Wen that dominates most “Da ya” poems.

This selection of poems should provide a good introduction to this classical anthology and to its prosody. Its various themes and even the language helped shape countless later works while providing a source for allusion down to modern times. Many of the poems in the Book of Poetry remain paradoxically alive for the modern reader because of the simple beauty of their imagery juxtaposed to the complexity—often the obscurity—of their messages.

The tetrasyllabic line that the poets of early Zhou times found so natural may represent speech or musical patterns of that era. This meter declined from the sixth century B.C.E. on. By the Han dynasty, when the new pentasyllabic line had become increasingly popular (chap. 5), tetrasyllabic verse had taken on an archaic tone. From the Han on, it was used mainly for hymns and state pieces.

Finally, it must be noted that, although the interpretative approach in this chapter is similar to that promulgated by most modern scholars, in attempting to read these poems as folk songs that have been reworked by court singers, the traditional interpretation of the Book of Poetry as a collection of allegorical works is belied. The reading of these poems as allegories, or the attempts to contextualize them in the complex history of pre-Qin China, dominated the understanding of all three hundred of the poems from the time the poems were first written down in the middle of the first millennium B.C.E. through the early Song dynasty (mid-eleventh century). These traditional interpretations were often quite explicit. The “Xiao xu” (Little Preface) of the Han dynasty, for example, read “I Beg of You, Zhong Zi” not as a love poem (as I did earlier) but as a criticism of the failure by Duke Zhuang of Zheng (r. 743–701 B.C.E.) to restrain his mother. If this correlation seems forced to us moderns, it was nevertheless accepted by most traditional readers until the Song dynasty scholars of the eleventh century began to argue for more literal interpretations of these songs. Nevertheless, some readers continued to understand the three hundred poems in the Book of Poetry as political poems into modern times. Moreover, the millenary acceptance of reading the Book of Poetry’s love poems as politically motivated verse influenced many readers (and writers) of traditional poetry in all genres over many centuries, as will be seen in the following chapters.

William H. Nienhauser Jr.

NOTES

1. Barbara Hughes Fowler, trans., Archaic Greek Poetry: An Anthology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 53.

2. Fowler, Archaic Greek Poetry, 106.

3. This and all subsequent translations are the author’s.

4. “[Love, how I’d love to slip down to the pond]”, trans. John L. Foster, in The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, vol. 1, Beginnings to 1650, ed. Maynard Mack (New York: Norton, 1995), 58.

5. On the meaning of nan, see the detailed discussion in Chen Zhi, “From Standardization to Localization: Reconsidering the Section Divisions of the Book of Songs” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1999), 283–284.

6. Fowler, Archaic Greek Poetry, 133.

7. See the excellent discussion by Chow Tse-tsung, “The Childbirth Myth and Ancient Chinese Medicine, a Study of Aspects of the Wu Tradition,” in Ancient China: Studies in Early Civilization, ed. David T. Roy and Tsuen-hsuin Tsien (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1978), 43–89, especially 47–53.

8. Sima Qian, Shiji (Records of the Grand Scribe) (Beijing: Zhonghua zhuju, 1959), 4.113–114.