14 Pr e - q i n t i m e s
Some of the prosody of these songs may have been the creation of these young
men and women themselves, perhaps in part determined by popular tunes asso-
ciated with certain affective images (xing); “on the mountains there is X,” for ex-
ample, was usually employed in songs about separation. But the standards in this
regard were no doubt established by the court musicians who helped shape these
songs before they took their final form in the late sixth century b.C.e. It is possible
that the three thousand poems Confucius was supposed to have examined before
selecting the three hundred for this class were largely different versions of the
same poems, distinguished by region or era.
The standards refined by the court musicians include a four-word line, the four-
line stanza, various formulae, a general 2 + 2 rhythm, rhymes on even lines, and
the use of various tropes, including metaphor, simile, synecdoche, puns, onomato-
poeia, rhyming and reduplicative compounds, alliteration, and puns. Parallelism,
especially in stock phrases such as “on the mountains there is X, / in the lowlands
there is Y,” is common (for this particular pattern, see Mao nos. 38, 84, 115, 132,
172, and 204). Although there are no fixed syntactic rules, the pattern of topic +
comment discerned by many in later Chinese verse is also evident in the Book of
Poetry: “Tao yao” (The Peach Tree Tender [Mao no. 6]) begins, “The peach tree
budding and tender,” and “Zai qu” (Driving the Carriage Horses) opens, “They
drove on the carriage horses, clippedly clop.” Finally, it has been argued that there
may originally have been some significance to the sequence of these three hun-
dred–plus poems. Whether such significance existed or can be seen in the extant
text is difficult to determine. Yet it is clear that reading one poem in the context of
another, often contiguous text proves useful.I present in this chapter examples from each of the three sections of the Book of
Poetry. Although lines from these poems were employed early on by speakers to
make a political point and this line of interpretation developed into an identifica-
tion between the poems and early historical contexts, for the most part I will focus
on literary interpretations.
These interpretations, although directed by commentators old and new and in-
formed by parallel poems in the Book of Poetry, represent only one of a number of
possible readings. Unlike early Greek verse genres, which were defined by musi-
cal accompaniment (lyric), subject matter (iambus), or meter (elegy), the “airs,”
“elegantiae,” and “hymns” are labels that are less definitive. Even the origins of
the poems in this anthology are still debated, with some scholars denying their
oral provenance. Much has been left to the imagination of the modern reader of
the Book of Poetry. Thus when we see a dance or a courtship rite in a particular
poem—reflecting an ongoing folk tradition with similarities to that which pro-
duced “mountain songs” (shan ge) in later eras—other modern readers may prefer
other readings. Such is part of the greatness of this collection.
Many of the texts, especially the love songs, need little interpretation. Yet through
centuries of oral and written transmission of these three hundred songs, lines and
even whole stanzas have been rearranged or lost. The situation admittedly is not❀