Chinese Poetry

As we will note when we reach Confucius and The Analects, poetry has enormous influence in Chinese culture: particularly, a body of work known as The Classic of Chinese Poetry.

This is a collection of about 300 poems traditionally put together by Confucius himself at the end of the Zhou Dynasty, consisting of three types of poems: Airs, Hymns, and Odes.

The “airs” are folk songs or lyrics, which – like most lyrics – deal with love, courtship, daily life, and other personal matters.  The Hymns and odes deal with ritual and (occasionally) with religious or mythic matters.

Chinese poetry gets it structure from three basic sources – tone, rhyme, and rhetorical devices. 

The tone is difficult for us to understand, since English is not a tonal language – we use meter, instead. But we do use rhyme.

The rhetorical devices used in Chinese poetry are three:

·        incremental repetition or enumeration

·        comparison

·        evocative image

Incremantal repetition/ enumeration is when something is listed over and over and changed slightly each time (as in the poem on page 760 “Plums Are Falling,” when the number of the plums and what happens to them is changed slightly in each verse).

Comparison works in Chinese poetry when two things are juxtaposed in a poem, causing them to be compared to one another – a maiden to a dead roe deer, for instance, in the poem on page 761.

And evocative image is Chinese poetry’s most striking tool: the perfect image is brought forth with the perfect set of words; and this causes the reader to make the comparison, to see that comparison.

Poetry and Morality

From Confucius’ standpoint, and from the point of view of most of Chinese history, both the reading and writing of poetry – just the sheer act of writing out poetry; but also the composing of poetry – are connected to morality.

This is a little hard for those of us raised in the American Worldview to grasp.  For us, poetry is kind of a silly, goofy, useless thing, read by dopes and written by losers.  (I am not saying I agree with this.  I’m saying it’s the general American worldview.)  What could poetry possibly have to do with morality?

For the Chinese people, poetry and the study of poetry – reading it, creating it, writing it clearly and correctly – teaches us to see the world clearly, precisely, and correctly. 

It teaches us to speak precisely and correctly; to observe correctly.  It teaches the precision of ritual as well (we’ll discuss how important Li, ritual, is to Confucianism when we reach the Analects).  And the humanism in poetry transmitted Ren, another important component of Confucian morality.

This is to say that, far from being silly or useless, poetry focuses precisely on those things which are essential to human morality, and by focusing on them, teaches us to focus on them: by learning poetry, we learn to be better (more) moral humans.

Chinese poems were an art form

The calligraphy itself could be the art