330 t He y uan, m i ng, anD q i ng Dy na s t i e s
The pluralistic style and the wide range of subject matter of the song poem well
reflect the genre’s humble origins as well as the influences on the genre from the
powerful poetic tradition of Chinese high literature. At one end of the spectrum
are song poems dealing with the time-honored poetic topics so often found in the
shi and the ci, like meditations on the past, reflections on seasonal changes, or
celebration of the quiet life of a recluse; at the other are found witticisms, mock-
ery, lighthearted parodies, and nonsensical jokes. However, love songs of various
kinds, often cliché-ridden but sometimes enlivened by bold and witty expressions
and graphic descriptions, outnumber songs of other categories.m u s iC a nD P r o s oD y
The early song poems were really “song words” created to fit the music. As the
tunes themselves got lost with the passage of time, only the word or verse formu-
las—the tune patterns, as they are called—remained, and the practice of sanqu
writing became a matter of composing verses to fit the existing tune patterns. Each
tune pattern belongs to a certain musical mode. The mode differs from the tune
in that the latter can be defined as the metrical pattern informed with the melodic
spirit of the music, whereas the former is the key or the tonality of the music, re-
flecting such values as the pitch and color of notes as well as their interval patterns,
all of which were believed to have had a significant impact on the tone and mood of
song poems in the early days of the genre, when they were meant to be sung. The
extant corpus of the nondramatic song poems includes more than two hundred
tune patterns but only nine musical modes in common use. A considerable num-
ber of the tune patterns used in the composition of song poems are also found in
the arias in the Yuan variety plays.
There are two forms of sanqu: the single song poem (xiaoling) and the song suite
(santao). The single song could be expanded by a reprise or combined with one or
two other single songs of different tunes to form a bigger unit. It was also a com-
mon practice for songwriters to compose several single songs to the same tune
but with different titles and put them together in a loosely connected sequence. A
song suite consisted of the integration under one title of a group of single songs
in the same mode and with the same rhyme. The number of songs included in a
song suite could be as few as a couple or as many as two to three dozen. Each song
suite is usually introduced by a “head” composed of one or two short stanzas and
concludes with a coda.
To better understand sanqu prosody, let us look at two song poems and exam-
ine their metrical patterns and rhyme schemes. The first is “Fat Couple,” by Wang
Heqing (fl. 1246):C 1 6. 1
To the Tune “The Unbreakable String” [shuangdiao key]: Fat CoupleA rather obese Master Shuang
2 Bore off an overweight Miss Su-niang