The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry (7 page)

On the surface, the first two stanzas are structured exactly the same as those of the earlier example: two characters form one beat and two beats a line. But they present variations in the relationship between lines. In the first stanza the lines are paired, but each can stand on its own as an independent sentence. The stanza's rhyme scheme is also different, with the rhyme falling on the first and third lines, while the same character repeats in the second and fourth lines. In the second stanza the line relationship is even more complicated, with the first three lines forming a sense group and the last line all on its own. The same rhyme falls on each of the four lines. In the last stanza the diction shifts to direct speech written in five-character lines.
²

As illustrated by the above poems, we can detect two major Chinese poetic traditions: literati and folk. The literati is characterized by yin-yang symmetry and uniformity while folk songs are generally more spontaneous and less refined. In the evolution of Chinese
poetry, new poetic forms not deriving directly from music would preserve the yin-yang gestalt as a structural backbone in literati poetry, but if music played a major role in the form (as in songs from the Han Dynasty Music Bureau, Song Dynasty Lyrics, and Yuan Dynasty Tunes), the symmetry in paired lines would often dissolve. While in the above folk songs we can find markings of the compilers who tampered with their spontaneity to give a uniform look to the poems in the
Book of Songs
, that spontaneity remains in the structural irregularities noted in the above discussion of “In the Wilds Is a Dead River-Deer.”

The next high wave of poetry, the
Verses of Chu
—also known as the
Songs of the South
—came toward the end of the Warring States Period (475–221 bce) in the south, forming a sharp contrast with the northern tradition as reflected in the
Book of Songs.
Qu Yuan, the most important poet from the South, had a vast vocabulary and a passionate imagination. His works, with the exception of those used in religious rituals, were not set to music. Absorbing influences from prose as well as folk tradition in the Chu state, Qu Yuan had the genius to break with the dominant four-character line tradition without losing a strong sense of yin-yang symmetry. Maintaining two beats in paired lines, Qu Yuan had a free hand in diversifying numbers of characters used in each beat. He employed different characters as beat markers (
xi
,
er
,
yi
,
zhi
, and
yu
xi
can be placed either within or between lines while the others can be used only within lines) and achieved changes in tempo depending on the placement of the marker—when it is placed right in the middle of the line, both the line itself and the pair become perfectly symmetrical, and the tempo is comparatively slow; when it is placed between two lines, symmetry is established between the paired lines, speeding up the tempo. Sometimes Qu Yuan placed the marker at an unbalanced location within a line to break the monotony of perfect symmetry.

Qu Yuan not only diversified the symmetrical rhythmic patterns of Chinese poetry but also steered the literati in a new direction. His
major contribution was a conscious construction of parallelism in paired lines, which is found throughout his writing; this would become the model for the creation of a multidimensional yin-yang symmetry in regulated verse. For example, in Qu Yuan's major work,
Encountering Sorrow (lisao)
, we can find lines like “
” (“Mornings I gathered mountain magnolia,/evenings I picked winter grasses on the shoals”) and “
” (“Mornings I drink the dew that drips from the magnolias,/evenings feed on fallen petals of autumn chrysanthemums”). Though these lines are not perfect according to later standards for parallel couplets (for they contain repeated characters and a beat marker between two lines), they do signal an important new dimension. He has made the yin-yang symmetry conceptual as well as rhythmic.

For a long time in the Han dynasty, the period almost immediately after Qu Yuan, Chinese literati were fascinated by Qu Yuan's experiment with language. They directed their creative energy toward the
fu
form (a kind of crossbreed between poem and prose, often translated as “prose poem,” “rhyme prose,” or “rhymed prose”), inspired by Qu Yuan's new patterns of rhythm combined with parallelism. In our collection, Jia Yi's “The Owl” is a work in this category. In translating it we maintained the rhymes in English. This was not always possible, or even desirable, and so in translating Lu Ji's
Art of Writing
, a very well-known piece of rhymed prose, we rendered it in free verse form, determining that the poem read better as English-language poetry in that format.

While the Han dynasty literati were obsessed with symmetry, the folk tradition during this period was a wide-open field. People tried different line lengths, not only from one poem to the next but also within poems, as in the anonymous poem “The East Gate,” presented in this volume as one of the Music Bureau poems. In this time the newly developed five-character poem had become an established form. It represents a key step in the evolution of Chinese verse. One can find five-character lines in both the
Book of Songs
and the
Verses of Chu
, but not really as a sustained form. During the Han dynasty one of the most mature works composed in five-character form was the “Nineteen Ancient Poems,” written by scholars who were familiar with the life of the lower classes and
who chose to remain anonymous. The Han dynasty also saw a change in the rhythmic pattern of the five-character lines. The old pattern for the division of the two beats, exemplified by the poems in the
Verses of Chu
, was typically three characters/caesura/two characters; it was replaced by two characters/caesura/three characters. This would remain the standard pattern in later periods.