By the end of the Northern Song (960–1127), the ci, or song lyric, had evolved from
its origin as a popular song in the ninth century to an established genre for literati
poets, one fully accepted into the mainstream of the Chinese literary tradition,
which viewed poetry essentially as a medium of self-expression. In contrast with
shi poetry, whose lines are usually of uniform length, the song lyric is usually com-
posed of lines of varying lengths. This irregular shape allows poets to depict the
natural and spontaneous processes of human feeling more effectively. Thus since
Northern Song times, poets have been using the song lyric to express the more
tender and subtle states of feeling and awareness.
The song lyric continued to evolve in significant ways during the Southern Song
(1127–1279). The Qing poet and scholar of the song lyric Zhu Yizun (1629–1709)
once noted that “whenever people talk about the song lyric, they always hold in
esteem that of the Northern Song. But only in the Southern Song did it attain
[technical] perfection, and only at the end of the Song did it reach the full extent
of its transformations. [The song lyrics by] Jiang Kui were most extraordinary [in
this evolution].”1 Like much of traditional Chinese poetry criticism, this comment
is cryptic and without detail. Zhu Yizun made an insightful observation on the
development of the song lyric during the Southern Song. Whether we agree with
his assertion that Jiang Kui (ca. 1155–1221) was the most extraordinary ci writer,
Zhu Yizun pinpointed him as a poet whose works exemplified the refinement for
which the song lyric of the Southern Song became justly famous.
There are many aspects of the late Song poets’ development of the song lyric,
but two are especially important: the creation of what may be called a spatial de-
sign in the poems and the transformation of the direct self-expressive mode here-
tofore dominant in traditional Chinese poetry. As Kao Yu-kung has pointed out,
“In its perfect manifestation, a ‘long song lyric’ (manci or changdiao ci) uses the
language of symbolization to depict the complex inner state of the poet, and this
manifestation was first seen in the Southern Song period.”2 He contrasts the spa-
tial design—spreading many ideas and emotions across a page “plane”—with the
“temporal rhythm” commonly found in shi poetry as well as in xiaoling and many
examples of manci.3 While the temporal rhythm relies on a linear, sequential order
of time, the spatial design depends on the principles of parallelism, juxtaposition,
and correspondence. The transformation of the self-expressive mode took place in
the experimentation by a number of poets after Jiang Kui with a subgenre of the
❀ 14 ❀
Ci Poetry
Long Song Lyrics on Objects (Yongwu Ci)