The main forms of Classical Chinese Poetry

So, students, we have been talking about the 300 Tang Poems Anthology up till now, but I think it would have been better if I had started by explaining a few things about the types of poems, the types of poetry that you are going to encounter in this anthology that would probably be illustrative. So, better late than never, I'm going to make a little presentation about that topic today. So, the first thing that is interesting to mention about classical Chinese poetry, and by classical I mean the poetry that was written before 1911, before the end of the imperial period. So, one of the first surprising facts is that there isn't one common universal Chinese word for poetry. There are a few words for poetry which we're going to encounter in this presentation, but none of them covers the whole field. The most commonly used word, as we will see in a moment, is Shi, but Shi refers to a specific type of poetry, not all of it. Now, to understand the characteristics or some of the characteristics of Chinese poetry, it is interesting to know a few things about the language itself. Now, Chinese is generally a monosyllabic language, that is to say, each word generally corresponds to one syllable in Chinese. Not always, not exclusively, but in most cases. Other things that are interesting to poetry, and that we will probably comment when we talk about each poem separately, is that it's not typical, especially in classical Chinese, to mark subjects. Subject pronouns are hardly used anyway in ancient Chinese. Verbs don't generally indicate tense or number. So, it's a very vague, in some aspects, but in other aspects, evocative type of speech that is created by the Chinese classical language. So, this monosyllabic character of most words has a correlate in the writing system. So, the basic unit for writing is a character. Now, characters are usually words in themselves. Then, they're not always words, sometimes you need more than one character for a word, in fact, quite commonly, but there is a general correlation between the words of the language and the characters of the written language. So, characters, number of characters, we will be using it as a synonym in this presentation for number of syllables. So, when we're talking about pentasyllabic or heptasyllabic poems, we're also speaking of poems with five words or seven words per line. Now, all poetry is characterized by lines, the minimal, meaningful units of a poem. A poem is composed by a number of lines, which are arbitrary breaks of groups of words, which have a complicated and not a subordinate relationship with sentences in the spoken language, but they are more or less the equivalent of sentences in the spoken language. Now, it is frequent to say that in different languages, certain patterns of numbers of syllables sound more natural to the speakers or probably correlate with the speaking number of syllables in an average sentence. So, in Spanish, for example, octosyllabic, the octosyllabic meter is considered one of the most natural ones. As you know, most sentences, medium sentences in Spanish, would have double that number. They would have 16 syllables. In English, it is very typical to use the iambic pentameter in classical English poetry, and this reflects 10 syllables per average sentence. English is a bit more synthetic than Spanish. In Chinese, especially classical Chinese, because it is very synthetic, five words, seven words, will be the most common lines, poetic lines. Therefore, pentasyllabic or heptasyllabic meters. There will be a few others, but they are eccentric and unusual, and in this anthology, we're only going to encounter pentasyllabic and heptasyllabic lines. Now, a line is, you could say, one of the starting points, the atom of a poem, but in Chinese, lines do not function alone. Lines almost always function in couplets. That is, you have to interpret, read, and understand the verses in a poem in pairs of two. The couplet is the unit. The couplet generally transmits an idea or an image. So, that is why when we explain the poems in the videos, we focus on the couplet and on explaining poems and explaining groups of verses in pairs of two. Finally, one interesting aspect related to Chinese poetry is that Chinese is a tonal language. It has five tones. Tones don't exist in Western languages, at least not in a productive way, so it's very difficult to imagine them, but they basically relate to the intonation of the words, and the same word with a different intonation in Chinese would be a different word, just as in Galician, osso and osso, osso and osso, are different words because of the change in the vowel. Now, why do I mention this? Tones are completely lost in translation, but they're important when we're talking about the classical forms, because in some of them, the tones are part of the structure of the poem, just as in a sonnet in Spanish. You have to take into account number of lines, number of syllables per line, which lines rhyme with which lines. In some classical Chinese poems, you have to check for the alternation of tones from one line to the other. So, let's start talking about the different genres. The first most important genre, as we said, is the Xi. Xi is, in fact, the most generic word for poetry in Chinese. The first poems that we find in the Chinese language are Xi. The oldest ones are collected in an anthology. We don't know exactly the date of the anthology, but most of its poems were probably composed between the years 1,000 and 600 before the Common Era. This anthology is called the Xi Jing, which is generally translated as the Classic of Odes, and it's one of the sacred texts of the Confucian tradition, and one of the texts that the scholar-officials in China had to memorise and study for the official examinations. Now, the Xi Jing is very, very old poetry, even as early as the beginning of the imperial period. The language of this anthology was difficult to understand for most of its readers, and they are tetrasyllabic poems. So, each line has four words, and it gets even more synthetic than that, because it's very frequent for the beginning words of a poem of the Xi Jing to be read duplicative. That is, they repeat the same word. Things like bright, bright sun, sky, for example. Very bright, the sun in the sky. Things like that. So, the Xi Jing is the oldest tradition. It synthesises and anthologises the poetic traditions of the Western Zhou dynasty, and of the Eastern Zhou dynasty. So, covering the period from, as I said, about 1000 BC, to about 200 BC. And after that, even though some poems were written in the tetrasyllabic mode, this was clearly an archaic, an archaicising tendency. So, this type of Xi was read and respected, but it wasn't really imitated or continued in the imperial period. So, the first imperial dynasty that lasts long is the Han dynasty. It covers the years. It has two periods, the Western Han and the Eastern Han, and it goes from 200 BC to 200 AC. And here is when we get the next important development in the Xi form, with poems that will appear in that format in the anthology that we're talking about. So, this will be what are called the Gu Xi, or old style poems. These poems started to be created at the end of the Eastern Han dynasty, as far as we know of. So, around the year 150 to 200 of the Common Era. The oldest of these old type poems are the so-called 19 old poems. This is a very small anthology of 19 poems that would become a model in form and in subject matter for the Gu Xi tradition. They are the quintessential old style poems, and they would be imitated in all the periods after them, as I say, in both form and subject matter. They were pentasyllabic for the most part, but we will soon also see heptasyllabic Gu Xi. The Gu Xi was cultivated during a long period of time. As I said, it appeared in the very late Han dynasty, and it flourished in the period of disunion, which goes from 200 to about 600 of the Common Era. In the beginning of this period, in the Jiangnan era, many poets started writing pentasyllabic poems. They polished the form, and they made it acceptable for the scholar officials. But all through this 400-year period that goes from 200 to 600, many poets wrote in this style, and it became the most common and most prestigious type of poetry. Now, after the 600s, when the Tang dynasty comes to the fore, Xi continues to be cultivated, but a new type of Xi appears, which we'll talk about later. Gu Xi continues to be practiced, but Gu Xi remains as a simpler style. It has less regulations than the new type of Xi that the Tang dynasty implements. So people that tend to write Gu Xi in the Tang dynasty are writing it because they like the freer, less restrained, less constrained formally type of poetry writing, and they also like to evoke and imitate poems and poetry styles of the past. So writing a Gu Xi generally implies both things, that you are admiring the past and imitating the past, and that you are free and unrestrained. You don't like to use the straitjacket of the new regulated poetry of the Tang. One of the most representative poets who wrote in the Gu Xi style was Li Bai in the Tang dynasty. The new type of poetry, of Xi poetry, created in the Tang is called the Jin Ti Xi, which means literally new poetry. Now, although there have been some experimentations with tones and with strict meters in the period of disunion, they would become codified and, you could say, canonized and massively cultivated during the Tang dynasty, which goes from approximately 600 to 900 of the common era. Now, how are the Jin Ti Xi to be characterized? Well, metrically, like the Gu Xi, they tend to be pentasyllabic and heptasyllabic, but the level of formality and regulation is very strict. Rhyme patterns are established, and they're very strict. Generally, you have to use the same rhyme pattern for each poem, whereas with the Gu Xi you could alternate rhyme patterns between different poems. A certain number of lines is fixed as well. Tones are regulated, and parallelism, which has been practiced since the beginning in Chinese poetry, now becomes strictly codified as to what type of parallelism has to be used in the poem and where and in the poem it has to be present. So this is very formal and very demanding. It requires a great deal of craftsmanship. And the greatest representative of the Jin Ti Xi style is Du Fu, who manages to make it a living art form, and in spite of its tendency as a genre of becoming artificial and stilted, Du Fu makes Jin Ti Xi that are alive. So what types of Jin Ti Xi are there? There are basically three types. The most common one is the Liu Xi, or regulated poem. So this is the most common one, and you have an example there on the right. The Jin Ti Xi consists of eight lines. Each line can be pentasyllabic or heptasyllabic. All the poem has to be either pentasyllabic or heptasyllabic. And the lines that rhyme are the ones. And there is a very strong parallelism in the two central couplets. So parallelism is optional in the first and in the last couplet. There are four couplets, as you can see, because it's eight lines. But the two middle couplets have to have a very, very strict parallelism, in which each character is parallel to the character in the next line in both concepts. So for example, a noun with a noun or a verb with a verb, but also in types of words, they have to be parallel as well. And of course, there is tonal alternation, but we aren't going to enter into that because it doesn't affect us. This creates a very square and very symmetrical poem. And as an example of this type of parallelism, you have those two lines that I've put up on top. Clouds, mists, go out, see dawn. Plums, willows, across river spring. You see, there is a strict parallelism. Clouds, plums, mists, willows, the verb go out, the verb go across, sea and river, so two aspects of water, dawn, spring, two aspects of time. Other types of Shi in the Jinti Shi, in the new poetry tradition that are not Liu Shi, are six character lines. We won't encounter any in this anthology, they're quite rare. There is the Quatrain, the Zui Zhu, that is just two couplets. It's four lines, two couplets. We have an example there by Li Bai. So they're very synthetic and usually both couplets have parallelism. And finally, we will encounter Zui Zhu, we will encounter quatrains in this anthology. We won't encounter the last one, Pai Lu. Pai Lu is an indeterminate number of lines, more than eight. Generally in couplets, it has to be an even number of lines, but Pai Lu can go on from as little as 10 lines to as much as hundreds of them. Okay, so this is the first great genre or type of Chinese poetry, the Shi. Now, there is another one that also appears a lot in this anthology. They're the two that appear in this anthology, really, which is the Zui Zhu. Now, the Zui Zhu appeared during the Han dynasty, so it's more recent than the Shi, although you could say that it is contemporaneous with the old type Shi, the Gu Shi. So the Zui Zhu appear in the Han dynasty approximately about the year 150-140 BC, and they are a very popular genre during the Han, during all the Han dynasty, and they continue being quite popular during the period of disunion. The name of this type of poetry, Zui Zhu, comes from an institution. Zui Zhu means literally the music bureau, because around the year 140 before Christ, Emperor Han Wudi created this institution. He created a bureau for collecting poems and composing poems and music for the imperial ceremonies and rituals. So a lot of the Zui Zhu poems, especially the oldest ones from the Western Han dynasty, are ritualistic poems that were meant to be accompanied with music for great state ceremonies, rituals, sacrifices to the gods, and so on and so forth. But they are not the most representative. Most of the poems that the Zui Zhu collected were popular poems, they were ballads, because in traditional Chinese culture it was accepted that popular poetry represented, was a way of statistical survey, in that it represented what the people thought of the government, so the government felt the obligation to collect poetry. So a lot of these poems that were collected were folk songs, ballads, and when we speak of Zui Zhu, we're thinking of this type of poetry, of ballads, of folk songs. That is what we could mostly translate Zui Zhu for. Most of the poems in this tradition are going to be ballads. What does this imply? Well, it means that they are simpler in language, more straightforward, and more colloquial than the Shi. The language is easier and simpler, and the literary artifices that are employed in the poems are more subdued. And the subject matter is also very specific. So the Zui Zhu have a very varied subject matter, and the subject matter diversifies with time. But most of the poems are about the people's complaints. They're poems about people from the lower classes, soldiers, farmers, women, and they give voice to their complaints. So they're basically used as complaint poetry. Zui Zhu are more, how could I say it? I wouldn't say they're more strict than the Shi. But for example, the Zui Zhu in the beginning were accompanied with music, which has been lost, and they are accompanied always with a title. So there is, I imagine, a catalogue of Zui Zhu old-style poems with their titles. And when new Zui Zhu were made during the period of disunion, later in the Han, these new Zui Zhu generally took the same title and the same general metrical form as the original poem they were imitating. Things change with time. In the beginning, so in the first Zui Zhu from the fragmentation period, the title, the poem that is imitated, is imitated in both title, form, and subject matter. Later on in the later dynasties, the subject matter is sometimes different from the title and from the original poem. Just the spirit, the tone of the original poem is recreated. Now by the time of the Han dynasty, the Zui Zhu were in decline as a genre, but in the middle years of the Tang dynasty, they experienced a revival, mainly in the hands of Neo-Confucian poets like the one pictured here, which is Bai Yuji. And he and other poets like Yuan Chen created a new type of Zui Zhu, which they called the New Zui Zhu, and which were poems basically of social criticism, criticising the abuses of the public servants and of the army. Now to conclude, the 300-Tang poems anthology basically has poems of the types we've mentioned, that is, Xi, whether it be old style Xi or new style Xi, and Zui Fu. By the way, we didn't mention that Zui Fu can have any number of lines, so this depends. They're generally also pentasyllabic and heptasyllabic. Now other types of poems, and we conclude with this, that are not represented in this anthology, but which influence it in some way or other, in a lot of cases. The first is the Cao. Now the Cao, also called Laments or Elegies, were a type of poetry from the late Warring States and early Western Han period, and represented by an anthology especially, the Zui Zhu, the Songs of the South. Now, as I say, no poems of the Cao type are included. They were already an archaeological relic at the time of the Tang dynasty, but there are poems that are influenced by Cao poems, by the imagery, by the topics of Cao poetry. For example, some of the first poems in the anthology by a southerner, by one of the southern poets. I'm trying to remember the name but I can't remember now. Some of those poems, especially any poem that refers to the south or that refers to probably imitates the topics and the imagery of Cao poetry. Fu poetry was also popular in the Han dynasty. Fu poetry is a type of very long descriptive type of prose poetry, which generally makes long descriptions and catalogues of animals and plants. Very popular in the Han and in the period of fragmentation by the Tang, it had become an obsolete genre, although it was still written from time to time. It might influence some of the poems in this anthology, especially the most descriptive ones. Zhu are called lyrics. They were a type of poetry that appeared in the very late Tang and which flourished in the Song dynasty, the one that succeeded the Tang from about 960, 70 to 1230, 1240 of our era. And although there are no Zhu poems in our anthology, there are poets who wrote, Tang poets who wrote Zhu poems. Wei Ting Jung is one of them. And a lot of the subject matter of his poems in the Xi form will be replicated in the Zhu poems. If regulated poems seem to you difficult, Zhu poems are even worse because they have a fixed number of syllables in each line but it alternates between lines. So you can have a first line with 5s, then one with 7, then one with 3, then one with 10. And you have a very strict regulation of the tones also of the syllables in each line. So it's even more difficult than the regulated poem. And finally, there are the operatic arias that came from the Yuan dynasty. That is the time of Kubla Khan in the middle of the 13th century and the beginning of the 14th. These were operas with lots of imagery and in this case they don't influence the 300 Tang poems, but they are the last important genre of classical Chinese poetry.