114 t He Han Dy na s t y
depends greatly on the use of repetition as his aide-mémoire and his cue for the
continuation of his presentation. “Mulberry Along the Lane” (C4.8) provides a
good example of two common aides-mémoires: thimble phrasing (interlocking
repetitions) and incremental repetition, a device extensively used in the Book of
Poetry (C1.4) and evident in other ancient or living oral traditions outside China.
In nonperformed poetry, the importance of the contiguous relationship of
words decreases while their noncontiguous relationship strengthens. This change
has much to do with the different dynamics of written communication. Writing
and reading are not as immediate and instantaneous a form of communication as
speaking (or other means of oral delivery) and listening. In most circumstances,
when two parties are in each other’s presence, they will choose to address each
other orally. Only when one party is separated from the other, or when he is not
sure how to best express his thoughts impromptu, or when he wants to convey
thoughts too awkward or too embarrassing to say out loud, or when he wants to
say something that he thinks the other party will need time to think about before
responding, will he decide to write to the other party. Judging by these common
circumstances for the use of writing, we can see that writing, as compared with
speaking, is a delayed (often purposely) form of communication. In most cases,
the writer and the reader are not compelled to respond to each other within a cer-
tain time. Consequently, a writer may pause as many times as he wants to think
about how to better put his thoughts into words. By the same token, a reader may
freely go over the words of a writer again and again before deciding what they
mean.
As written communication allows ample time for the coding or decoding of mes-
sages, neither the writer nor the reader need depend on word-for-word repetitions
to maintain a smooth temporal flow of words. Hence the various aides-mémoires
of earlier poems have disappeared in the “Nineteen Old Poems.” Written com-
munication also allows the writer and the reader to explore the noncontiguous
relationship of words for the purpose of enhancing an emotive impact. As a writer
pauses to review what he has written and makes revisions in the light of what he
intends to write next, he naturally builds a system of textual resonance among
words placed in different parts of a poem. In fact, this is exactly what the authors
of the “Nineteen Old Poems” sought to accomplish in their works.
In describing a natural scene in the first part of a poem, the poets already antici-
pated the subsequent feelings and thoughts to be expressed and therefore delib-
erately blended into the scene some words suggestive of the emotive tenor of the
second part. Known as shiyan (literally, verse eyes) in traditional Chinese criticism,
these words, mostly verbs or adjectives, serve to animate descriptions of nature and
prefigure the emotions to be subsequently expressed (thematic table of contents
4.2). In poems 1, 4, 7, 8, 11, 12, 14, 16, 17, and 19, such animating words vividly
reveal the speaker’s emotional involvement in the external scene. For instance, in
the famous lines “The Tartar horse leans into the north wind, / The Yue bird nests
among southern branches” (poem 1, lines 7–8), the words “leans” and “nests” un-