c i P oe t ry : long s ong ly riC s 267the concluding segment (lines 17–18) opens with a multisyllabic leading phrase,
“How could she know.” These leading words not only mark the juncture points in
the development of the persona’s emotions and feelings, but, more significantly,
also point out or foretell the direction of his perceptions and thoughts: after what
happens in the first stanza, where the poet’s mood is affected by his multifaceted
experience of autumn, he looks (wang) afar and becomes homesick; he then re-
treats into himself, sighing (tan) over his situation. The longing and regret cause
his thoughts to again go out and into the far distance, and he imagines (xiang) that
his “fair one,” in another place and from another balcony, is at that moment look-
ing at the Yangtze and waiting for his return. Finally, he gives another spin to what
he sees in his mind’s eye, wondering how could she know (zheng zhi wo) (but she
should!) that exactly at that moment, from the balcony on his side, he is also facing
the same eastward-moving Yangtze and thinking about her.
Thanks to the colloquial tone of the leading words and the irregular beats they
add to the syntax, the flow of the poet’s thoughts is carried by a rhythmic and flex-
ible sound pattern. Leading words thus help give a material shape to the structure
and order of Liu Yong’s poetic presentation. One might feel that his leading words
function like stage directions and make the poetic acts and situations explicitly
clear, perhaps too clear. However, Liu seems to have found a way to make his
plainness sophisticated. In the poem, his presentation is linear yet by no means
flat. With the help of the leading words, it explores time and space, involves things
far and near, part and whole; it weaves what is outside with what is inside, and
even shifts between here and there, this and other. The reflective twist and turn in
the latter half of the second stanza is extremely clever: there is only one Yangtze
River, but there are two balconies.
In his studies of the contributions of the song lyric to the formal evolution of
Chinese poetry, Yu-kung Kao has highlighted some basic differences between the
generic formal features of the regulated verse and of the song lyric. According to
Kao, in the regulated verse, the poetic self is the source as well as the content of
the poetic process.2 The single vision of the “lyrical self ” at the “lyrical moment”
of here and now shapes the poetic act, which takes the form of a four-couplet
structure. A poet often uses the opening couplet to introduce the poetic situation,
the two couplets in the middle to present the direct and immediate impressions
from his observation of things and events, and the concluding couplet to reveal the
inner state of the lyrical self.
The case is different with the song lyric. The basic structural unit of the song
lyric, especially in its more sophisticated manci form, is not the couplet but the
strophe.3 What the strophe is to the song lyric is comparable to what the couplet
is to the regulated verse. A strophe consists of an indefinite number of lines that
share a center of focus.4 Such a strophic unit can therefore be called a concentric-
ity. As each line in this unit can describe things or narrate events “from a different
angle or at a different point in time, involving various kinds of mental activities
in addition to sense impressions, the structure can also be called one of ‘stratifica-
tion.’”5 This structure of concentricity and stratification works at more than one