How to Read Chinese Poetry A Guided Anthology

r Hy tHm, s y n taX , anD v ision oF C H i ne s e P oe t ry 381

of an agent (subject) and the agent’s state or action (predicate) that may or may
not involve a recipient (object). A complete subject + predicate construction en-
acts or implies a temporal-causal sequence from an agent to its action and to the
action’s recipient. In English and other Western languages, this construction is
the primary framework for both poetic and common speech. But in Chinese, this
construction is far less important or pervasive than in English. In poetry in par-
ticular, it is merely one—sometimes the lesser—of the two ways that words are
organized.
It should be noted that a typical Chinese subject + predicate construction is far
less restrictive than its English counterpart. Neither subject nor predicate is fixed
in time and space, as they are in Western languages by inflectional tags for tense,
case, number, gender, and other aspects. Thus the reader has to contextualize,
with or without the aid of grammatical function words. This process of contex-
tualization compels the Chinese reader to intensely engage with depicted reali-
ties and feel as though they were really unfolding right before his eyes. This rich
poetic potential of Chinese subject + predicate construction, made possible by the
absence of inflection, has not gone unnoticed by Western critics. It was singled
out by two prominent American critics, Ernest Fenollosa (1853–1908) and Ezra
Pound (1885–1972), to support their assertions about the superiority of Chinese as
a medium for poetry.5
The other syntactic construction is called topic + comment by scholars of Chi-
nese language.6 Instead of an active agent responsible for an action or a condition,
the “topic” refers to an object, a scene, or an event “passively” being observed. The
“comment” refers to an implied observer’s response to the topic. As a rule, the
response tells us more about the observer’s state of mind than about the topic.
The absence of a predicative verb between the topic and the comment aptly under-
scores their relationship as noncontiguous and noncausal. The noncontiguous
topic and comment are yoked together by the implied observer through analogy
or association, in a moment of intense observation. The result is quite different
from that of a temporal cognitive process. Topic + comment tends to reactivate the
vortex of images and feelings, previously experienced by the observer, in the mind
of the reader. Given its extraordinary evocative power, it is no surprise that this
construction has been preferred for lyrical expression since the time of the Shijing
(The Book of Poetry).

t h e e v o l u t i o n oF C h i n e s e P o e t iC r h y t h m s a nD s y n ta x

As shown in the preceding seventeen chapters, the birth of each major poetic
genre or subgenre was marked by the formation of one or more distinctive se-
mantic rhythms. The emergence of new semantic rhythms, in turn, led to a recon-
figuration of both subject + predicate and topic + comment constructions. What
follows is a brief outline of the most important reconfigurations of these two con-
structions over the millennia.