t e t ra s y l l a biC Sh i P oe t ry : The B o ok of P oeT ry 33Although not a highly literary piece, this long poem evinces careful attention to
sound patterns. Almost every line is rhymed. The third through fifth stanzas, lines
that could be considered an account of the preparations for the building of Dan
Fu’s new capital, are joined by words that all rhyme to the same rhyme category.
The rhyme words in the sixth stanza, in which the sounds of construction rever-
berate, were also skillfully chosen, each ending in the sonorous nasal -ng.
In the final stanza, the focus suddenly switches from Dan Fu to his grandson,
King Wen. This section could be a later interpolation designed to help fit “Mian”
into the epiclike account of King Wen that dominates most “Da ya” poems.
This selection of poems should provide a good introduction to this classical an-
thology and to its prosody. Its various themes and even the language helped shape
countless later works while providing a source for allusion down to modern times.
Many of the poems in the Book of Poetry remain paradoxically alive for the mod-
ern reader because of the simple beauty of their imagery juxtaposed to the com-
plexity—often the obscurity—of their messages.
The tetrasyllabic line that the poets of early Zhou times found so natural may
represent speech or musical patterns of that era. This meter declined from the
sixth century b.C.e. on. By the Han dynasty, when the new pentasyllabic line had
become increasingly popular (chap. 5), tetrasyllabic verse had taken on an archaic
tone. From the Han on, it was used mainly for hymns and state pieces.
Finally, it must be noted that, although the interpretative approach in this chap-
ter is similar to that promulgated by most modern scholars, in attempting to read
these poems as folk songs that have been reworked by court singers, the tradi-
tional interpretation of the Book of Poetry as a collection of allegorical works is
belied. The reading of these poems as allegories, or the attempts to contextualize
them in the complex history of pre-Qin China, dominated the understanding of
all three hundred of the poems from the time the poems were first written down
in the middle of the first millennium b.C.e. through the early Song dynasty (mid-
eleventh century). These traditional interpretations were often quite explicit. The
“Xiao xu” (Little Preface) of the Han dynasty, for example, read “I Beg of You,
Zhong Zi” not as a love poem (as I did earlier) but as a criticism of the failure by
Duke Zhuang of Zheng (r. 743–701 b.C.e.) to restrain his mother. If this correla-
tion seems forced to us moderns, it was nevertheless accepted by most traditional
readers until the Song dynasty scholars of the eleventh century began to argue
for more literal interpretations of these songs. Nevertheless, some readers con-
tinued to understand the three hundred poems in the Book of Poetry as political
poems into modern times. Moreover, the millenary acceptance of reading the Book
of Poetry’s love poems as politically motivated verse influenced many readers (and
writers) of traditional poetry in all genres over many centuries, as will be seen in
the following chapters.
William H. Nienhauser Jr.
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