The evolution of poetry in China

A simplified historical outline will be needed by most non-oriental readers. Since Han China, where the Imperial Academy was founded in 124 B.C., five Classics have been recognized as essential texts for Confucian teaching. They are: (a) The Spring and Autumn Annals (Ch'un-ch'iu); (b) The Book of Odes (or of Poetry) (Shih-ching); (c) The Book of Documents (Shu- ching); (d) The Record (or Book) of Rites (Li-ching); (e) The Book of Changes (I-ching). These texts were older than Confucianism but were taken into it as expressions of the six fundamental disciplines, music alone not being the subject of a surviving classic.

In Sung China (11-12th centuries) the rise of a more dogmatic form of Confucianism meant that these canonical texts were supplemented, or even superseded, by the previously obscure Confucian "Four Books" (ssu-shu) or "Four Classics" that were at the heart of much of later Confucianism: (a) The Analects (Lun-yu); (b) The Great Learning (Ta-hsueh); (c) The Doctrine of the Mean (Chung-yung); (d) Mencius (Meng-tzu). All these works taken together make up the Nine Classics.

Outside of them, but also of immense influence, are the classics of Taoism, of which the Tao te ching attributed to Lao- tzu is the most remarkable, and the immensities of the Buddhist scriptures, a literary, philosophical, and visionary world on a scale which it is virtually impossible to come to terms with, compared to which the Bible and the Greek and Roman classics look like short stories for children.

Of the Five Classics, the Book of Odes, or of Songs, also called the Classic of Poetry, is the one that must interest us most. It contains 305 lyrics probably mostly written between 1000 and 600 BC.. Traditionally it was compiled by Confucius (died in 497 B.C.) from earlier collections of poetic texts, although this may not be a reliable tradition. It was the fundamental poetic text studied in schools in China and Korea, it came equipped with prefaces and commentaries in which the poems were given political and moralistic interpretations they perhaps did not originally have. For example:

Locusts, winged tribes,
How you cluster together!
It is only right that your descendants
Should be in swarms!

This is part of a poem in praise of fertile grasshoppers that the commentators say, with the utmost seriousness, was written to praise the attitude of the wife of King Wan, who showed no jealousy at the fruitfulness of the concubines in the king's harem.

Even more extreme is the case of a poem spoken by a bird whose young have been devoured by an owl that threatens now to destroy the nest itself:

Owl, owl, you have taken my young;
Do not destroy my nest as well.
I nourished them with love
And toil. I am to be pitied.

The commentary says that the poem was written by the Duke of Chow to defend himself after two of his brothers had joined a rebellion. He killed one brother and punished the other, but is now pleading to the king not to believe a slander involving him in the rebellion. The nest is his family's future fortunes, threatened with destruction if the king decides to punish him.

Not all the poems are interpreted by the commentators in this metaphorical way, and nothing in the poetic texts themselves indicates a difference between straight narrative poems and symbolic ones.

Most interesting for us is the general theory of poetry found at the beginning of the entire collection:

Poetry is the product of earnest thought. Thought cherished in the mind becomes earnest; exhibited in words, it becomes poetry.

The feelings move inwardly and are embodied in words. When words are insufficient for them, recourse is had to sighs and exclamations. When those are insufficient, recourse is had to the prologed utterances of song. When that is insufficient, unconsciously the hands begin to move and the feet to dance.

The feelings issue in sounds. When those sounds are artistically combined, we have what is called musical pieces. The style of such pieces in an age of good order is quiet, inclined to be joyful; the government is then a harmony. Their style in an age of disorder is resentful, inclined to the expression of anger; the government is then a discord. Their style, when the state is going to ruin, is mournful, with the expression of retrospective thought; the people are then in distress.

Therefore, correctly to set forth the successes and failures (of government)... there is no readier instrument than poetry.

The former kings by this regulated the duties of husband and wife, effectually inculcated filial obedience and reverence, secured attention to all the relations of society, adorned the transforming influence of instruction, and transformed manners and customs....

(on the various types of poetry...)

Superiors, by the Fung (Lessons of manners) transformed their inferiors, and inferiors, by them, satirized their superiors. The principle thing in them was their style, and reproof was cunningly insinuated. They might be spoken without giving offence, and the hearing of them was sufficient to make men careful of their conduct.... (trans. J. Legge with some adjustment)

It would have been valuable to have had such a precise and carefully thought out text from Greece or Rome, or even the renaissance. Aristotle's Poetics comes to mind but in its present form there is no discussion of the social function of the lyric at such a fundamental level. There is no way of dating this remarkable text precisely but it is clearly far more recent than the poems it claims to be prefacing. It may date from the beginning of our Common Era, about two thousand years ago. Modern scholarship naturally stresses the distance between its theories and the reality of the poems:


"...folk songs... poems designed to accompany the rituals and entertainments of the aristocracy or ... recitals of dynastic legends.... We see people farming, hunting, gathering food plants, building, courting, feasting, performing sacrifices, going off to war. The imagery is that naturally associated with such activities, concrete and commonsensical. There is no imagery that appears to be designedly exotic, and no interest in the beauties of nature for their own sake. The poems concentrate on youth, beauty, and vigor, with considerable attention to the misfortunes that trouble the young. Little mention is made of sickness, old age, or death..." (Burton Watson ed., The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry. Columbia University Press. 1984. Page 15)

In the preface, though, a certain view of society and of social utility dominates in the reading, and by transfer in the imagined writing, of these poems and of all poetry. It was this preface that gave the later scholar-administrators of China and Korea their theoretical framework, when they felt the need to justify their reading and writing of poetry. They memorized its main ideas in childhood, it formed a fundamental reference for them as they read and wrote. The one thing that poetry cannot be, by this text, is private and individual. The demands of social morality can never be forgotten, public virtue is always being taught or defended, even by antiquated folksongs.

The main concern of the Confucian scholar, in reading poetry and in studying history, was "acquisition of moral knowledge through the careful study of the classics and the scrutiny of the principles behind history and daily life" (Kwang-Ching Liu, 1990, quoted on page 101 of John King Fairbanks, China: A New History Belknap, Harvard. 1992). The ethical and the practical, not the private and aesthetic, predominates in this vision of poetry and reading.

In ancient China, poetry was not restricted to the Book of Odes, which originated in the North. In the South there was another tradition, that of the state of Chu, represented by the Chu ci (Songs of the South) anthology from the second century A.D. which were translated and annotated by David Hawkes in a marvellous Penguin Classics edition in 1985. Here, more than in the Book of Odes, we find poems on the themes of separation and exile, familiar from translations of Chinese poems by Arthur Waley and Ezra Pound:

My heart is clouded over with melancholy thoughts.
Long and alone I sigh, but the pain grows only greater.
My thoughts are ravelled in a skein that cannot be disentangled;
And when it comes to the night, the time drags endlessly....

I would like to rise up and fly to him unbidden,
But seeing how others have fared, I restrain myself,
And instead I have set out my secret thoughts
and put them into verse,
And offer them up to lay before the Fair One....

For anyone familiar with Wyatt and the Petrarchan poets in the Tudor court, with their concern to negociate indirectly with power through imagery drawn from earlier love poetry, it comes as something of a shock to read the translator's introductory comment:

The poetic convention whereby the relationship between a man and a woman could be made to symbolize the quite different relationship between a courtier and his prince was already an ancient one when these poems were written.... In the shamanistic religion of Chu the worshipper approached his god as a lover; so kings, who are earthly gods, were naturally approached in the same way and with the same endearments ('the Fair One', 'the Fragrant One').... Much of this poem reads like a passionate love- letter, and only the occasional line reminds us that this is an exile's poem addressed by a banished courtier to his fickle king.

After these two collections of archaic Chinese poetry, mostly written in lines containing four characters, styles continued to develop with longer lines and more complexity in the technique of rhymes, until a summit was reached in the eighth century A.D. with the poems of the later T'ang dynasty, above all those of Li Po (A.D. 701-762) and Tu Fu (712-770) (Penguin Classics translation by Arthur Cooper, 1973). Here the art of veiled references and indirect allusion reaches its zenith, aided perhaps by the lack of personal pronouns, articles, or tenses in Chinese.

The poems of the T'ang and later eras, familiar to China's and Korea's ruling elites, suggest a more private poetic world, one where individuals elegantly hint at their situations or those of others. These two poets offer differing images of the poet: Li Po the itinerant wanderer and habitual drunkard, Tu Fu the common man, in good humour despite hardships. This poetic tradition has less didacticism and more entertainment value. Yet the risk of life close to centres of power remains a major theme:

On Marble Stairs
Still grows the white dew
That has all night
soaked her silk slippers,

But she lets down
her crystal blind now
And sees through glaze
the moon of autumn.

It is only after reading a very long foot-note that we see behind these words the figure of a girl recruited as an Imperial Concubine but now growing old, lonely and out of favour but unable to leave the palace or find another partner, while the poet echoes disapproving murmurs from high officials who consider that a wise Emperor would not make his subjects suffer in this way, endangering the state by lack of virtue. Where an ordinary western reader finds perhaps nothing more than stylized posturing, the Chinese reader senses an intense challenge addressed to the powers-that-be in a veiled satire.