Part 1 Introduction
I believe that poetry has a similar definition as suggested by James Liu—that poetry is seen as a double exploration of worlds and of language. Chinese poetry, to me, could be defined as a series of words written in a very strict format and organizational structure that expresses thoughts, feelings, emotions, about the writer, often inspired by life and the events happening in the world around that writer.
Basically, the two elements of Chinese poetry are content and language. The content needs to be meaningful and it often has to resonant with the readers well in order for that particular poem to survive thousands of years and reach the hands of the modern Chinese. The language is often beautiful and very organized to suit the various rules for different kinds and genres of ancient Chinese poetry.
This paper will first explain the ideas presented by James Liu to introduce what Chinese poetry is. Then it will analyze two poems from the textbook— “Sky Clear Sand” by Ma Chih-yuan and a Seven-syllabic Regulated Verse by Li Shang-yin “With Title”.
Part 2 Poetry as a double exploration of worlds and languages
First, there are four groups of critics named the “moralists”, “individualists”, “technicians”, and “intuitionalists” and the author of the textbook analyzed each of them individually, providing his opinions.
Having summarized and analyzed the previous views, the author introduced his own opinions about Chinese poetry. He argued that Chinese poetry consisted of two elements, the world, and the language. The world element included emotions and scenes.
He argued that for Chinese poetry, there is often an actual scene and an imagery scene that can merge into each other. This characteristic is achieved by writing lines that are both expressive and descriptive. From there, he extended the idea of “world” and claimed that Chinese poetry is a synthesis of the external and the internal aspects of life. The external aspects include natural objects, events, and actions.
The internal aspects included thoughts, memory, fantasy, and of course, emotion. The external environment is reflected in the international elements and thoughts of poem writers to produce a masterpiece.
Apart from the content of poetry, the author also discussed the language aspect of ancient Chinese poetry. With strict structures, the words have to show a certain pattern and must have the right sound. Only when both of those two aspects are treated well can it be considered good Chinese poetry.
Part 3 Criteria for a good poem
3.1 Beautiful language
Most famous Chinese poems that were passed on from ancient times showed conformity to the rules of writing a certain structure of poetry with beautiful language. In addition to writing the designated number of words in each phrase, and choosing the words with the correct tones, the words themselves were beautiful and the structure of the entire poem is organized.
3.2 Rich emotions
Since “world” is defined as “emotion and scene” by Wang Kuo-Wei, then most famous poems certainly evoked the readers of some emotion and the readers could picture the scene in front of their eyes after reading about the poem. With those pictures, the readers can be evoked of some sort of emotion and the feelings of the writer and the reader can have some resonance.
Afterward, the reader can be able to infer from the poem other theories and aspects of life that are related to society, history, and etc. and the thoughts should not be confined to the poem itself.
Part 4 Analysis of sample poems
4.1 “Sky Clear Sand” by Ma Chih-yuan
This is a Dramatic Lyric written in the Yuan Dynasty. It is written from a song that has already existed and the writer inserts words into the already established pattern. The form of Dramatic Lyric is that there could be lines with unequal lengths and the number of syllables in each line is also different. The rhyme for every line is “a” and the tonal pattern is also presented in the book.
The poem is structured such that the first three lines all wrote three images or items in each line. The nine items listed are tree branches, ancient trees, crows, bridges, streams, houses, ancient roads, the wind, and horses. The second to last line described that the sun is setting down at the west. The last line described emotions and feelings. This is such a simple and straightforward poem, yet, the emotions expressed are very rich.
The imagery in this poem is very easy to be formed into a picture inside the readers’ minds. The six adjectives that appeared right in front of the six objects in the first line and the third line precisely depicted what the object is like. First, the tree branches are described as rotten.
If he just writes “tree branches”, then the readers may imagine the branches to be full of green leaves and a sense of liveliness. However, now that he added rotten, readers will soon picture the end of autumn, when green leaves all turned yellow and fell down from the branches.
Second, he used the word “ancient” to decorate the object “trees”. This further proved that the image is not lively; rather it is a tree that has been there for so many years. Third, “evening” is added before “crows” to invoke a sense of scariness and loneliness. It is turning dark, although not completely dark yet.
There is a tendency to turn darker and gloomier. Fourth, the word “ancient”, though he used a different word in Chinese, is added in front of “road” to depict a scene with a road that has already been there for many years. Old roads tend to be cracked and be full of dust because, in ancient China, it was mostly stone roads without the modern technology to build better roads. Fifth, “west” is used to describe the wind and indicated the direction in which the wind came from.
In China, there is actually a special meaning attached to the west wind that I