pronoun (often omitted in Classical Chinese); the number of words
vary irregularly in each line; the use of modern punctuation; the
typography; and the French word in the title and the text of the poem.
Combined, these registers create a rhythm that is also clearly modern
despite the structural regularity in the two stanzas and the use of end
rhymes in the last two lines of each stanza that may be reminiscent of
Classical Poetry.
The use of line breaks in the poem conveys a sense of halting,
physical as well as emotional. The breaks are especially dramatic in
the shortest lines in each stanza: surrounded by disproportionately
large blank spaces, these fragments suggest a sense of isolation and
desolation. It may be said that for the first time in Chinese poetry,
typography (which hardly exists in Classical Poetry), including blank
spaces, becomes a semantically significant component. Similarly, the
seemingly superfluous commas in lines 5–6 in each stanza, which
depart from standard grammar, create pauses in the word flow.
Modern punctuation (based on Western punctuation) was adopted in
China in 1918–20. Here we see how it also can serve poetic purposes.
Besides the commas, the ellipses indicating an unfinished or
unspeakable thought in line 7 and the exclamatory mark in the last
line in each stanza are important; they help to intensify the feeling of
uncertainty and dejection that the poem tries to convey. Finally, all of
the above devices slow down the tempo of the whole piece and
intimate the speaker’s state of mind. The slow tempo allows readers to
fully appreciate the word “lengjing” jkin the penultimate line in
each stanza. If “lengjing” is a common word meaning calm or
composed, here the two characters that make up the word, leng-jing,
function independently to suggest the scene: for the solitary wanderer,
the streets in the dark are both “cold” and “quiet.”
If Wang draws on several “foreign” resources in the above, the next
poem illustrates how classical resources can be equally effective in
Modern Poetry. Written in March 1937, Dai Wangshu’s “I Think”
我reads:I think, therefore I am a butterfly 我, 故我c蝴蝶。
Ten millennia from now a tiny 的
flower’s gentle call 無夢無醒的霧,
Will penetrate the clouds of no P我斑斕的。
dreams and no awakenings
To flutter my splendid
colored wings
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