112 t He Han Dy na s t y
reverse is true in poem 17. There, all but two lines are devoted to the wife’s self-
scrutiny. With narrative elements kept to a minimum, the poet explores a much
richer world of feelings and thoughts, describing not only the husband’s profes-
sion of love but, more important, the wife’s complex response to it.
The shift of balance from the narrative to the lyrical in the “Nineteen Old
Poems” is likely the consequence of the disappearance of oral performance. With
oral performance gone or marginalized, the authors of the “Nineteen Old Poems”
no longer needed to assume the role of a storyteller. As they began to turn inward,
a scrutiny of their own emotional condition became the central concern of their
works. In exploring their own inner worlds, they were no longer bound by the tem-
poral sequence, as the yuefu composers had been when telling stories to a live audi-
ence. Very often they would survey their present condition in the first part of the
poem, drift back into memory in the second, and then leap into an imagined future
in the third. Indeed, following their reflective impulse, they could move among
these three temporal realms in any order they chose. Such complex time frames of
emotional response occur in as many as twelve poems in the collection.P o e t iC s t r uC t u r e : b i-x i n g a s g l o b a l s t r uC t u r e
The “Nineteen Old Poems” also introduces a binary structure markedly different
from the sequential structure of the Han yuefu. In this collection, the speakers
usually observe external situations in the first part of a poem and respond to them
emotionally in the second part. In poem 17, for instance, we can clearly perceive
this binary structure of external observation and inward reflection. The first half
of the poem depicts a desolate wintry scene through the eyes of a lonely woman.
The “north wind” stirs the sense of touch; the “stars” appeal to the sense of sight;
the “moon” and its mythical metaphor, “toad and hare,” evoke the extreme cold-
ness of the Cold Palace (another metaphor for the moon). The second half leads
us through a sustained process of self-reflection: the woman’s memory of her hus-
band’s first and only letter, her gratitude for his words of love, her pledge of loyalty
to him, and her fear of his failure to appreciate her fidelity and profound love.
This balanced combination of natural description and emotional response bears
the imprint of the bi-xing construction in the Book of Poetry, which has long been
regarded as the ultimate source for the “Nineteen Old Poems.” Originally a four-
line oral formula, the bi-xing construction is substantially expanded in the “Nine-
teen Old Poems” to become a distinctive global structure. We can locate a binary
structure of natural description and inward reflection in all but two of the nineteen
poems. A binary structure identical to that of poem 17 may be found in poem 2
(6:4; six lines of external observation and four lines of inward reflection), poem 4
(8:6), poem 5 (10:6), poem 6 (4:4), poem 7 (8:8), poem 9 (6:2), poem 11 (6:6),
poem 13 (10:8), poem 14 (6:4), poem 17 (8:6), poem 18 (6:4), and poem 19 (4:6).
In addition, we find a binary structure in reverse order—that is, inward reflection
preceding external observation—in poem 3 (8:8), and double binary structures in
poem 1 (4:2/6:4), poem 8 (6:2/4:2), poem 12 (6:4/6:4), and poem 16 (6:6/4:4).