Major Aspects of Chinese Poetry
Poetry enjoys an unrivaled status in traditional Chinese literature and culture. The Shijing (The Book of Poetry), compiled around 600 B.C.E., is the earliest extant collection of Chinese poems and was regarded by Confucius as an essential part of his educational program. He considered its mastery as a prerequisite for anyone entrusted with state business. In subsequent dynasties, the status of poetry steadily increased. Not only did scholars assiduously study the Book of Poetry as a Confucian classic, but they also occupied themselves with writing poetry in ever more diverse and complex forms. Poetic composition became their indispensable medium of self-expression, social criticism, and even career advancement. Poetic excellence often earned them social prestige as well as entry into officialdom. Common people were equally engaged in composing, chanting, and singing poetry. Their oral tradition was instrumental to the rise of all major Chinese poetic genres.
This anthology traces the evolution of this great poetic tradition as it presents 143 famous poems composed over the long period of almost three millennia. As we read through these poems, we shall gain insight into the major aspects of Chinese poetry. To prepare for our intense engagement with the poems, let me provide highlights of these aspects.
THEMES
A quick and easy way to get acquainted with Chinese poetry is to review the eleven themes listed in the thematic table of contents, which lie at the core of the evolving Chinese poetic canon.
“Love and Courtship” is a prominent theme in the airs of the Book of Poetry. Many of the airs are bona fide erotic love songs, featuring unabashed accounts of a tryst or an affair. In these songs, women show few signs of inhibition and, indeed, are often the daring and resourceful initiators of a secret affair. Such uninhibited, self-willed women are not seen in later literati compositions, with the exception of Yuan song poems (sanqu [chap. 16]). In most literati compositions, women often fall into two rather static types: the beautiful and the abandoned.
“The Beautiful Woman” shows how the literati reconceptualized woman as an abstract, static object of desire—for spiritual fulfillment, sensual pleasure, or both. In “On Encountering Trouble” (C2.3), by Qu Yuan (340?–278 B.C.E.), the first-known literati poet, we can already see feminine beauty conspicuously transformed into a symbol of moral virtue. This allegorization of feminine beauty continues to figure prominently in later poetry and criticism. At the same time, the beautiful woman often appears as a tangible, pleasurable object of a male poet’s gaze (C12.5). By depicting her with evocative yet elegant diction, a male poet seeks to play out his erotic fantasy in a “cultured” fashion. This aestheticization of erotic engagement, real or imagined, is a prominent feature of countless poems about palace ladies and courtesans. According to many critics, some poems on palace ladies written by the Liang poets were also, if not solely, meant to convey the Buddhist belief about the illusory nature of human existence (C7.6). In these poems, the allegorical and the sensual, the sacred and the profane, seem to be intertwined.
“The Abandoned Woman” is a theme that usually involves female impersonation by literati poets. It is true that many anonymous yuefu and ci poems on this theme strike us as authentic self-expressions of real-world abandoned women. If composed by a male literatus, however, a poem on the abandoned woman is most likely a thinly veiled lamentation of his own. By using the persona of an abandoned woman, a literatus hoped to touch his estranged patron and thus increase his chances of regaining his favor (C5.4–7).
“Eulogy and Admonition” is probably a major ancient theme that ceased to be prominent after the Han. Most of the great odes and hymns in the Book of Poetry are eulogies to dynastic founders, mythical or historical (C1.13). Along with praise for dynastic founders, these poems often contain admonitory passages, usually a general warning to the Zhou people rather than a full-fledged admonition directed to a specific ruler. The theme of eulogy and admonition reaches its high point in the large fu (dafu) of the Han. In the grand fu on the Han capitals by Ban Gu (32–92) and Zhang Heng (78–139), we see a profound transformation of the eulogistic tradition. If the odes and hymns in the Book of Poetry praise the ancient rulers by enumerating their heroic deeds, these famous fu works eulogize the living Han emperors through an encyclopedic display of the splendors of their empire. The transformation of the admonitory tradition is equally profound in the large fu. In “Fu on the Imperial Park” (C3.1), by Sima Xiangru (179–117 B.C.E.), for instance, we observe the author tactfully admonishing the emperor for his indulgence in hunting by telling a story about an extravagant imperial hunting excursion. Lord No-such and the Son of Heaven, two key figures of that story, mirror the author and his intended reader or listener, Emperor Wu. This admonitory poem is a far cry from the general, impersonal admonitions of the Book of Poetry.
New themes on the lives of the literati rose to take center stage during the Six Dynasties period. These themes reflect the three worlds in which the literati lived: the worlds of culture and politics, of nature, and of the imagination.
“The Wandering Man” (youzi) is an enduring theme about the world of culture and politics. It comprises a broad array of depressing topos and motifs: the physical hardships of travel on official duty, the unreliability of political patrons, the treacherousness of court politics, the spectacle of famine and exploitation, the incessant frontier wars, the prolonged introspection of an insomniac man, the departure of a beloved friend, and, above all, the constant homesickness of a scholar-official. Whether for genuine self-expression or as pure literary exercise, literati poets habitually chose to portray themselves as lonely, world-weary wanderers perpetually yearning for home. Of course, in reality the world of culture and politics is not all travail and suffering. “The Depiction of Things” speaks to the leisurely lifestyle enjoyed by some literati poets closely associated with the imperial court.
The world of nature, by contrast, furnishes a backdrop for two themes marked by spontaneous joy and spiritual fulfillment: “Landscape” and “Farming and Reclusion.” For Xie Lingyun (385–433), Xie Tiao (464–499), and others caught in the throes of public life, a landscape-viewing journey provided a welcome escape from cares and offered pleasures of the mind unobtainable by viewing palace ladies or objects of culture. To lofty-minded poets like Tao Qian (365?–427), it is a tranquil farmstead that promised deliverance from the corrupt political world and a transcendent union with the Dao, the everlasting process of nature. Together, the two Xies’ landscape poetry and Tao Qian’s farmstead poetry marked the epoch-making discovery of nature as a primary poetic subject in its own right.
The world of the imagination is the venue for two other important themes: “Imagined Journey to the Celestial World” and “Remembrances.” Transcendental roaming (youxian), a theme first found in ancient shamanistic songs (C2.1–3), is of perennial interest to literati poets. It enables them to fantasize a solitary escape from the mundane world into a pure land of eternal bliss. It also furnishes them with an effective means of ridiculing all worldly attachments. Reflections on history (yongshi) also offer an imaginary flight of the mind, but one within the bounds of historical time and place. They often engender a somber brooding over an irrevocable loss—the death of a loved one, the destruction of a mighty army, the loss of an empire, to name just a few. They tend to end with a melancholy lamentation over the evanescence of all things, grand or small, and the ultimate futility of all human endeavors. Not all historical reflections, however, are negative and gloomy. By looking to the past, some poets, like Tao Qian, found spiritual companions and noble models for emulation in times of adversity.
All these literati-centered themes, once firmly established during the Six Dynasties, remained preeminent in the poetic canon until the twentieth century. After the Six Dynasties, the creative energy of Chinese poets seems to have been directed to broadening and deepening these themes rather than searching for new ones. Think, for instance, of the full flowering of landscape poetry and farmstead poetry during the Tang and Song. Consider, also, how the theme of “Hardship and Injustice” was brought to a new height by Bai Juyi (772–846) and Yuan Zhen (779–831), the leaders of the New Yuefu movement. In revisiting old themes, Tang and Song poets displayed extraordinary innovation and sophistication in blending culture, nature, and imagination. In the pentasyllabic regulated verses by Du Fu (712–770), for instance, the worlds of nature and man are deftly merged into a grand cosmic vision (C8.1). In the finest heptasyllabic regulated verses by Du Fu and Li Shangyin (813?–858), contemporary politics, dynastic history, legends, and personal experiences are seamlessly interwoven into a tapestry of exquisite beauty (C9.3, C9.6, and C18.1).
The dominance of literati themes inevitably led to a marginalization or even an exclusion of themes deemed irreconcilable with refined literati taste. For instance, most literati poets sought to sanitize erotic songs by means of allegory or aestheticization. Bawdy themes were thus suppressed, with no small loss to the Chinese poetic tradition. Hence, there is an absence of much-needed comic relief and the loss of an opportunity to turn comic ribaldry into an effective means of social and religious satire, as Geoffrey Chaucer did so admirably in The Canterbury Tales and John Donne in his metaphysical poetry. Not until the Yuan dynasty, when Chinese literati had become disenfranchised and had lost their role as defenders of mores and refined taste, did they begin to embrace bawdy themes in song poems and drama (zaju), two new genres of popular entertainment on which many of them depended for their livelihood (chap. 16). Besides comic relief, ribaldry allowed Yuan literati writers to mock their own shattered dreams of officialdom and thereby dissipate their despair under the oppressive Mongol rule. Indeed, a rambunctious love poem often belies the heartbreaking poignancy of such self-mockery.
Literati dominance also meant the virtual exclusion of women poets from the canon. Most major poetic anthologies feature only a tiny number of women poets, typically the wives, concubines, or courtesans of the imperial family and renowned literati figures. Relegated to the very end of those anthologies, these women poets became a mere appendage to the male literati poets. As I have noted, male poets even appropriated the voices of women. So when women poets sought to express themselves, they had to find ingenious ways to negotiate around those voices. Some talented women poets rose to this challenge and successfully created genuine, effective voices of their own. Li Qingzhao (1084–1151), for example, expressed her personal feelings in ci poems of the greatest lyric intensity and finest artistry, which earned her a prominent place in a Chinese poetic pantheon otherwise made up solely of men (C13.4).
GENRES AND SUBGENRES
On a more abstract plane, the history of Chinese poetry may be understood in terms of the evolution of its major genres and subgenres, which are extensively examined in this anthology. There are five major genres in Chinese poetry: shi, sao, fu, ci, and qu. Each has traditionally been labeled with a particular historical period in which it achieved dominance: Chu ci, Han fu, Tang shi, Song ci, and Yuan qu. Such labeling may give the wrong impression of a unilinear development of one genre supplanting another. In fact, all five genres continued to be used and even flourished well beyond the dynasties that witnessed their preeminence. With the exception of sao, they remained influential until the twentieth century.
Each of the five genres has a unique pedigree of subgenres. The pedigree of the shi subgenre is the most complex of all. Owing to an almost uninterrupted development of about two and a half millennia, it had an ever-expanding corpus that continually needed to be reorganized. Tetrasyllabic shi poetry, represented by the Book of Poetry, is the oldest shi subgenre. The Book of Poetry is divided by provenance and function into three groups: airs (feng), odes (ya), and hymns (song) (chap. 1). During the Han, tetrasyllabic shi poetry experienced a radical decline and gradually became a niche subgenre of court eulogies and hymns (C4.1–3). This made room for the meteoric rise of pentasyllabic shi poetry. This new shi subgenre emerged toward the end of the Han (chaps. 4 and 5) and quickly achieved dominance in the Six Dynasties period (chaps. 6 and 7). By the sixth century, the shi corpus had become so large that Xiao Tong (501–531), Crown Prince Zhaoming of Liang, undertook to divide it almost entirely by theme into twenty-four subgenres. This new thematic scheme, however, did not catch on. The Early Tang witnessed the rise and explosive growth of tonally regulated shi poetry. It was not long before regulated shi poetry came to rival its old unregulated brethren in importance, if not in sheer volume. This gave rise to a broad bipartite division: “ancient-style shi poetry” (gushi, guti shi) and “recent-style shi poetry” (jinti shi). The former includes all earlier tonally unregulated shi poetry: pentasyllabic poems, irregular-line yuefu poems, and others. The latter encompasses two subgenres: regulated verse (lüshi [chaps. 8, 9, 15, and 17]) and quatrains (jueju [chaps. 10, 15, and 17]). These two new subgenres are, in turn, divided by per-line syllabic count into pentasyllabic and heptasyllabic. This complex multilevel scheme of classification was extensively employed in Ming and Qing anthologies of shi poetry.
The pedigrees of the other four genres are much more straightforward. Strictly speaking, sao poetry (chap. 2) has no subgenres: most sao poems of later times are closely modeled after the original Chuci style, marked by extensive use of its signature pause-indicating word xi.1 The fu genre is often divided by length and subject matter into the large fu (chap. 3), known for its encyclopedic depiction of Han imperial grandeur, and the small fu, known for its shorter length and its lyrical intensity, even though other, more elaborate schemes of division have been devised to accommodate the rich variety of fu poems composed after the Han. The ci genre is usually divided by length into short song lyrics (xiaoling [chap. 12]) and long song lyrics (manic [chaps. 13 and 14]). The qu genre is usually divided and categorized according to its association with dramatic conventions of different times and locales. Yuan song poems (sanqu [chap. 16]) are one of the best known qu subgenres.
ORAL AND LITERATI TRADITIONS
The evolution of the major poetic genres and subgenres is an intriguing tale of sustained interaction between the oral folk tradition and the literati tradition, or, in the parlance of modern literary criticism, between orality and literacy. We can speak of at least four major oralities: in the shi and sao poetry of pre-Han times, in Han yuefu poetry, in the ci poetry of the Late Tang and the early Song, and in Yuan qu poetry. Each of these four oralities is marked by a new genre or subgenre of oral folk origins having taken center stage in the established literary arena. In each case, literati poets enthusiastically collected, preserved, and polished folk songs, often having them performed at the court or in literati gatherings. At the same time, the literati spared no effort in imitating these songs—both their unadorned language and their music-based meters—in their own works. Often, they vied with one another in adapting music-based meters or in refashioning existent semantic rhythms to fit musical tunes. It is from this deep, wholehearted engagement with oral folk tradition that the five major genres of Chinese poetry were born.
As a rule, the development of a Chinese poetic genre consisted of a long process of imitating, assimilating, and eventually transforming an oral tradition into a purely literary one by the literati. This steady movement from orality to literacy was marked by the gradual disappearance of oral performance, the allegorical appropriation of folk themes, the abandonment of simple language for elegant diction, and the excessive use of allusion. If we trace the development from Han yuefu (chap. 4) to Late Tang regulated verse (chap. 9), or from the early short ci (chap. 12) to the late long ci poems on objects (chap. 15), we can perceive a clear intra-generic trajectory from orality to literacy. Interestingly, an obsessive pursuit of textuality (diction) and intertextuality (allusions) often marks the last great glory of a thoroughly “literatified” (wenren hua) genre and heralds the rapid ascendancy of a new genre of oral folk origin. The blossoming of ci poetry in the Song and qu poetry in the Yuan epitomizes such an inter-generic shift from literacy to orality.
We may conceive of orality and literacy as opposing yet complementary poles of Chinese poetic creativity. The sustained interaction between the two acted like a yin-yang dynamic. While orality is a fount of creative energy to be tapped again and again, literacy is what brings the rich potential of orality to its fullest realization. The waxing and waning of orality and literacy is not a nonprogressive cycle but a dynamic forward movement. Given the pivotal importance of orality in renewing Chinese poetic traditions, it is not surprising that some advocates of a radical cultural revolution in the early twentieth century turned to oral traditions—from the airs of the Book of Poetry to the living oral traditions of Chinese ethnic minorities—to find inspiration for their poetical revolution.
PROSODY
Listening to the sound recording of selected poems, we shall take note of a few prominent features of Chinese prosody. First of all, Chinese rhyme is simpler than English rhyme. Whereas English rhyme requires a matching of vowels and succeeding consonants of accented syllables (for example, “pan” and “can”), Chinese rhyme often involves the matching of vowels only. There are far fewer ending consonants in Chinese than in English: n and ng in Chinese of all periods and unaspirated p, t, and k for entering tones in ancient and medieval Chinese. Rhyme in Chinese does not necessarily require the matching of identical vowels; sometimes vowels of similar phonetic value suffice.
End rhyme is the most important rhyme in Chinese poetry, as in English poetry. The rhyming scheme varies considerably from genre to genre. Shi, sao, and fu poems usually rhyme on even-number lines, and often the same rhyme is employed for most, if not all, of a poem (probably owing to an abundance of homonyms). In tonally regulated shi poetry, rhyme does not change and is required to be in level tone. In the ci and qu genres, however, rhyme sometimes changes two or more times in a poem (C12.7) and occurs with less predictable frequency—sometimes in almost every line (C12.6), other times at extended intervals (C14.3). Moreover, rhyme can be in level or oblique tone or in both (C12.2, C14.1, and C16.8, respectively). All these rhyming features represent a radical break from the entrenched rhyming habit and may be attributed to the influence of new music from Central Asia.
Chinese tonal meter operates through an ordered alternation of two broad tonal categories—level and oblique tones—within lines of a prescribed number of syllables or characters, and it is therefore regarded by some as “tonal-syllabic.” Level tones include the first two tones of modern Chinese; the oblique tones consist of the third and fourth tones of modern Chinese plus the entering tone of medieval Chinese. The complex rules for tonal alternation in recent-style shi, ci, and qu poetry are explained in detail in individual chapters (chaps. 8, 12, 13, and 16).
To take tonal meter as the defining feature of Chinese prosody, however, would be a mistake. Tonally regulated poetry did not firmly establish itself until the Early Tang, about a millennium after the Book of Poetry. And even as it gained prestige and popularity in later dynasties, its predecessor, tonally unregulated ancient-style poetry, continued to flourish. To talk about Chinese prosody merely in terms of rhyme and tonal meter, then, would exclude the greater part of Chinese poetry.
For a complete picture of Chinese prosody, we need to consider what we may call semantic rhythm, which is based on a pattern of predictable pauses between syntactic units within a line of verse. Although English also alternates articulation and silence, this alternation does not represent an established poetic rhythm because English words are composed of a variable number of syllables, making pauses between words unpredictable. In Chinese poetry, however, semantic rhythm is of paramount importance. Chinese characters are all monosyllabic. In a sentence, a character functions either independently as a simple word or as part of a two-character compound, called a binome. Hence a typical Chinese poetic line exhibits a predictable semantic rhythm, characterized by various possible combinations of 1 and 2. Thanks to the consistent predictability of such syntactic breaks, each major poetic genre and subgenre exhibits one or more established semantic rhythms of its own. All these poetic rhythms are ingrained—probably more deeply than any explicit prosodic rules—in the consciousness of poets and readers alike. This makes possible not only an intensified experience of the sound, but also a dynamic creation (re-creation) of the sense of the poetry. The pivotal importance of semantic rhythm to the sound and sense of Chinese poetry will be discussed in greater detail in the concluding chapter.
STRUCTURE
Reading through the 143 poems in this anthology reveals the two competing yet complementary structural principles of Chinese poetry: the temporal-logical and the analogical-associational. The temporal-logical structural principle is conspicuously employed in the great odes and hymns of the Book of Poetry and is referred to as the fu mode in traditional Chinese criticism. In the Book of Poetry, the fu mode exhibits an extended narrative or descriptive continuum that spans large sections of a poem, if not the whole. Accounts of events and things are quite neatly arranged in such a narrative or descriptive continuum (C1.14). So it is no accident that fu later became the name of a new poetic genre—rhapsodies—particularly known for its grandiose narrative/descriptive scheme. Rhapsodic structure tends to be temporal-logical where events are recounted and spatiotemporal-logical where objects and places are exhaustively described (C3.1). The vigorous operation of fu as a principle of global structuring not only is conspicuous in the genre that bears its name, but also is clearly visible in yuefu poetry, fu’s immediate descendant, and in ci poetry, arguably its distant descendant. Many of the yuefu and ci poems in this anthology (chaps. 4, 13, and 14) exhibit a sustained temporal-logical fu structure.
The analogical-associational structural principle figures even more prominently in the Book of Poetry, especially in its airs. Frequently in this collection, we come across a bipartite structural block: two lines of natural description and two or more lines of emotional expression, brought together purely on an analogical-associational basis. In traditional Chinese literary criticism, this bipartite combination of line clusters is called bi-xing or sometimes bi (analogical mode) and xing (associational mode) separately. Unlike its companion term fu, bi-xing did not evolve into the name of a genre, nor was it broadened to denote a principle of global structuring. When traditional Chinese critics employ this term, they are merely thinking of a bipartite combination of disparate line clusters.
In my view, the term bi-xing can be fruitfully reconceptualized to describe the customary bipartite combination of natural scenes (jing) and emotional expressions (qing) in Chinese poetry. A survey of the 143 poems reveals more often than not such a bipartite nature–emotion combination. In shi poems, the two parts are usually quite balanced in length and intended to enhance each other as analogues or correlatives. Such a bipartite structure seems to be modeled on the old bi-xing formula, even though the two parts are less forcibly yoked together. In any event, this bipartite structure signifies a transformation of bi-xing into a global structural principle (C5.6). In ci and qu poems, the nature–emotion combination is often radically reconfigured. A shi-like balance in some poems contrasts with a deliberate, dramatic dissymmetry between the two aspects in others. In one poem, we might see natural description kept to a minimum, while emotional expression fills out the remainder of the poem (C13.4). In another, we might observe a preponderance of natural images, with emotional expression reduced to one or two lines (C16.3). Such an asymmetrical combination of natural images and emotions may nonetheless be characterized as a bi-xing structure, although a much mutated one.
If we plot the fu and bi-xing structures on two perpendicular axes, we shall find that relatively few poems in this anthology are strictly aligned with a single axis. The majority can be seen to lie somewhere between the two. As a rule, poems of a global fu structure also tend to contain analogical-associational blocks within them. This is especially true of works composed by lyrically inclined poets. Qu Yuan’s “On Encountering Trouble” (C2.3) is perhaps the earliest famous example of this kind of admixture. Conversely, a poem of a global bi-xing structure usually features mini-sequences of narration or description, sometimes smoothly blended together and sometimes with abrupt breaks between them (C5.1–7).
Having highlighted the major aspects of Chinese poetry, I shall stop here and let readers begin their own journey of discovery in the great world of Chinese poetry.
Zong-qi Cai
NOTE
1. Sao-style poems composed after the Han are more often than not subsumed under the fu genre and given the name sao-style fu (sao ti fu).