How to Read Chinese Poetry A Guided Anthology

m a jor a s P e C t s oF C H i ne s e P oe t ry 7

over, rhyme can be in level or oblique tone or in both (C12.2, C14.1, and C16.8,
respectively). All these rhyming features represent a radical break from the en-
trenched rhyming habit and may be attributed to the influence of new music from
Central Asia.
Chinese tonal meter operates through an ordered alternation of two broad tonal
categories—level and oblique tones—within lines of a prescribed number of syl-
lables or characters, and it is therefore regarded by some as “tonal-syllabic.” Level
tones include the first two tones of modern Chinese; the oblique tones consist
of the third and fourth tones of modern Chinese plus the entering tone of medi-
eval Chinese. The complex rules for tonal alternation in recent-style shi, ci, and qu
poetry are explained in detail in individual chapters (chaps. 8, 12, 13, and 16).
To take tonal meter as the defining feature of Chinese prosody, however, would
be a mistake. Tonally regulated poetry did not firmly establish itself until the Early
Tang, about a millennium after the Book of Poetry. And even as it gained prestige
and popularity in later dynasties, its predecessor, tonally unregulated ancient-style
poetry, continued to flourish. To talk about Chinese prosody merely in terms of
rhyme and tonal meter, then, would exclude the greater part of Chinese poetry.
For a complete picture of Chinese prosody, we need to consider what we may
call semantic rhythm, which is based on a pattern of predictable pauses between
syntactic units within a line of verse. Although English also alternates articula-
tion and silence, this alternation does not represent an established poetic rhythm
because English words are composed of a variable number of syllables, making
pauses between words unpredictable. In Chinese poetry, however, semantic
rhythm is of paramount importance. Chinese characters are all monosyllabic. In a
sentence, a character functions either independently as a simple word or as part of
a two-character compound, called a binome. Hence a typical Chinese poetic line
exhibits a predictable semantic rhythm, characterized by various possible combi-
nations of 1 and 2. Thanks to the consistent predictability of such syntactic breaks,
each major poetic genre and subgenre exhibits one or more established semantic
rhythms of its own. All these poetic rhythms are ingrained—probably more deeply
than any explicit prosodic rules—in the consciousness of poets and readers alike.
This makes possible not only an intensified experience of the sound, but also a
dynamic creation (re-creation) of the sense of the poetry. The pivotal importance
of semantic rhythm to the sound and sense of Chinese poetry will be discussed in
greater detail in the concluding chapter.

s t r uC t u r e

Reading through the 143 poems in this anthology reveals the two competing yet
complementary structural principles of Chinese poetry: the temporal-logical and
the analogical-associational. The temporal-logical structural principle is conspicu-
ously employed in the great odes and hymns of the Book of Poetry and is referred to
as the fu mode in traditional Chinese criticism. In the Book of Poetry, the fu mode
exhibits an extended narrative or descriptive continuum that spans large sections
of a poem, if not the whole. Accounts of events and things are quite neatly arranged