How to Read Chinese Poetry A Guided Anthology

r e C e n t-s t y l e Sh i P oe t ry : P e n ta s y l l a biC r e gul at eD v e r s e 163

beacon fire span◦ three month 烽火連三月 (fēng huŏ lián sān yuè)
home letter equal◦ ten thousand gold tael 家書抵萬金 (jiā shū dĭ wàn jīn)
white head scratch◦ even shorter 白頭搔更短 (bái tóu sāo gèng duăn)
simply be about to not◦ able (to hold) hairpin 渾欲不勝簪 (hùn yù bú shèng zān)
[Tonal pattern I, see p. 171]

We are first struck by the extraordinary lexical economy: a total of only forty
words. Many literary critics and scholars contend that the lexical economy stems
from the noninflectional nature of the Chinese language. Inflection refers to the
variation in words used to delineate the relations of tense, voice, gender, number,
case, person, and so on in an alphabetic language like English. By contrast, in Chi-
nese these complex relations are expressed by means of a rather small number of
“empty words” (xuzi) with the aid of context and semantic rhythm (thematic table
of contents 3.3). Unencumbered by inflectional variations, Chinese is far more eco-
nomical than a Western language in its use of words. To attribute the lexical econ-
omy of Tang regulated poetry solely to the Chinese language itself, however, is not
entirely convincing. The rise of this condensed poetic form also has much to do
with the evolution of the Chinese poetic tradition. In a Tang regulated verse, forty
or fifty-six words could do so much only because most of those words had accrued
so much evocative power in the long poetic tradition before the Tang. Thanks to
their repeated and innovative use during the millennium preceding it, many words
and collocations had become imbued with various feelings and thoughts and could
evoke touching scenes of history or fiction in the mind of the informed reader.
There is no doubt that the increased efficacy of the poetic lexicon led to a steady
shortening of poem length toward the end of the Six Dynasties (C7.3, 7.4, and 7.6)
and to the eventual birth of the lüshi form in the Tang.
Imagistic appeal is another prominent feature revealed by the word-for-word
translation. The poem is made up overwhelmingly of “content words” (shizi),
words that have an actual and usually visualizable referent, thirty-six in all. Indeed,
these content words produce vivid images of the following kinds:

Tangible things: grass, wood, flower, tear, bird, beacon, fire, home, letter, gold

tael, head, hairpin

General scenes: country, mountain, river, city, spring

Concrete actions: shed, startle, scratch, hold

Mental conditions: feel, hate

Physical conditions: broken, remain, thick, separation, span, equal, white, able

Temporal conditions and quantities: time, three, month, ten thousand, shorter

Only the remaining four words (“even,” “simply,” “about to,” and “not”) are empty
words. Such a lopsided ratio between content and empty words is characteristic of
regulated verse in general and of High Tang regulated verse in particular. Having
only forty or fifty-six words to work with, a lüshi poet often sought to maximize the
use of imagistic content words while keeping empty words to a minimum.