The two jueju quatrain forms, the pentasyllabic jueju (wujue) and the heptasyllabic
jueju (qijue), are the shortest and most focused forms generally used by the Tang
poets. Like the two “regulated verse” (lüshi) forms, which are exactly twice as long,
both wujue and qijue are in the tonally regulated “recent-style poetry” (jinti shi)
category. Brevity is both constraining and potentially liberating. It forces writers to
pare every topic down to a few essential images, and then to harmoniously arrange
them subordinate to a single controlling theme: “Jueju contain only four lines and
not much space, so every line and every character must have meaning and flavor.
Poems cannot bear even the least brushstroke of floating mist [words and phrases
not to the point] or wasted ink.”1 Brevity also encouraged the projection of mean-
ing beyond the literal text by the reliance on symbolic poetic language and the
development of artful structural techniques. Gao Buying (1875–1940) explained:
“The number of characters in jueju is not large, so if the meaning becomes ex-
hausted then the spirit will be withered; if the language is obvious then the flavor
will be short-lived. Only continual suggestiveness can make people lower their
heads and imagine endlessly. This is the Greater Vehicle.”2 Many traditional critics
thus considered the two jueju forms to be the most difficult. Tang poets reveled in
the challenge “to see big within small” (xiaozhong jianda) and so used jueju for the
weightiest of topics: presentations of philosophical or religious states, expressions
of fundamental emotions, reflections on history, descriptions of vast landscapes,
and so on. As with other Tang poetry, the general tendency was to merge themes
of the natural world with those of personal states of mind—often described as a
“fusion of feeling and scene” (qing jing jiao rong). Yet, when successful, jueju could
reach a level of intensity unparalleled by poems in longer forms. One might say
that the best jueju are short bursts of flame, as compared with the slow smolder of
longer poems.
The term jueju literally means “cut-off lines,” and it was believed by many critics
that this meant the wujue and qijue forms had originated as quatrain segments cut
from the eight-line lüshi forms. Adherents of this reductive view posited that the
truncation of lüshi yielded four structural possibilities for jueju:
1. Where neither couplet is parallel, the structure constitutes the two outer
couplets of lüshi.- Where both couplets are parallel, it constitutes the two middle couplets of
lüshi.
❀ 10 ❀
Recent-Style Shi Poetry
Quatrains (Jueju)