The earliest Chinese poetry begins
with the Shih Ching, a collection of 305 poems of varying length,
drawn from all ranks of Chinese society. The title Shih Ching is
usually translated in English as The Book of Songs or sometimes
as The Odes. Shih means
"song-words." Ching can mean "classic" or
"traditional" or in the context of literature, it means
"writings" or "scripture."
Some of these poems may date back to
1000 BCE. The oldest poem in this collection that can be pinpointed precisely
dates back to 621 BCE, the date of the death of Duke Mu of the state of Ch'in.
The various poems probably were compiled over several centuries, most of them
during the Zhou (also spelled Chou) period around 600 BCE. This treasury of
traditional songs is the oldest collection of poems in world literature, and it
became one of the Five Confucian Classics.
In spite of the many centuries that
the Shih Ching embraces, there are several traits prevalent in
the poems that later became traits of Chinese poetry generally.
Traits of Classical Chinese poetry:
(1) Usually, the Chinese poem is
fairly simple on the surface.
Western culture, which was influenced by Shakespeare, Milton, and the Romantic
poets, had a pronounced tendency to think of poems as ornate, elaborate
creations made by a few men of genius. Chinese culture, influenced by the
anonymity of the Shih Ching, had a tendency to think of poems as
something written by common humanity for the eyes of other humans.
(2) Usually the poem deals with either agrarian
imagery, courtship and marriage, or dynastic concerns. The Zhou (or Chou)
dynasty was agrarian in its roots, and for its people, "their sense of
beauty and order is closely related to the cycles and abundance of the
agricultural year," as Stephen Owen suggests (xx). Likewise, the poems
often revolve around the sorrows and joys of romance, or dealt with the heroic
and legendary exploits of rulers and kings. Other poems, which probably
originated in folk-songs, deal with the everyday trials and tribulations of
love, life, and the family.
(3) Each poem is usually composed of
lines of four syllables, usually
with rhymed endings in the original Chinese. Often these four syllables appear
as four pictograms. The normal form of the courtship and marriage songs is
three verses of four lines each. Only a single non-fragmentary poem consists of
a single quatrain, the form that later became popular in modern Chinese poetry.
(4) The poetic principle organizing the poem is often
one of contrast. Often Chinese poetry will juxtapose a natural scene with a
social or personal situation. The reader of the poem sees the similarity in the
natural description and the human condition, and comes to a new awareness of
each by this contrast. In Chinese, this idea is embodied in the terms fu, bi,
and xing (pronounced "shing"). Fu refers
to a straightforward narrative with a beginning, middle, and conclusion, that
stands by itself. Bi, literally "against," implies a
comparison or contrast, placing two things side by side. When one takes two
different fu, and places them together, the two create a bi.
This results in xing, a mental stimulation or "lightning"
that pervades the mind of the reader, bringing new insight or awareness into
the nature of the individual fu that compose the poem.
Confucius stated that this xing is the purpose of poetry, that
the point of a poem was to make the mind contemplate its subject deeply.
Like European poetry, Chinese poetry often
relies on alliteration, repetition, and onomatopoeia to create its effects.
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