Chinese Poetic Writing

by Francois Cheng

  The final couplet brings the discourse back to an objective perspective. The image of the Son of Heaven echoes the initial question of the poem: is the speaker of this earth, or of the beyond? If happiness was indeed not to be realized on earth in this life, was it perhaps in a previous life (the young Lu and his loved one, Without Care, lived happily eight hundred years before, during the Han dynasty), or may it be in an afterlife to come?

  Ellipsis of Words of Comparison and of Verbs

  In lines that contain a comparison there is a notable absence not only of conjunctive words (such as, like) but also of verbs of resemblance (to resemble, to evoke) and of the copula. This process we will assimilate to the discussion of the process of omitting the main verb of the sentence.

  The omission of words of comparison is not due to a simple effort at economy: by permitting the “brutal” bringing together of two terms, it creates a rapprochement of tension and interaction between them. If, furthermore, in an existential or a comparative sentence, the poet uses inversion, it is often difficult to assign to either of the two terms the status of subject or object. Through the use of this procedure, which is in fact no more than a putting into equivalence, the poet “organically” ties together human deeds with those of nature. To illustrate this statement, here are two examples, one from Li Bai and the other from Du Fu.

  Floating cloud wanderer’s mood

  Setting sun heart of one left behind20

  These lines are taken from a poem describing a parting scene, in which, before the voyager mounts his horse, the two friends linger one moment more in a dusky landscape. Nature is not external decoration here, but rather a gripping part of the drama itself. In each line the absence of words of comparison puts the two terms in a reciprocal relationship. Thus the first line might just as well be read either as “The mood of the vagabond is like the floating cloud” or as “The floating cloud has the mood of a vagabond.” In the second interpretation, nature is not only a “supplier of metaphorical images,” it is implicated in the selfsame drama as man. The idea of a participating nature is reinforced by the fact that the two lines are parallel. The two elements of nature, floating cloud and setting sun, taken together, participate in a relationship of contiguity and of opposition. Both, in effect, float in an instant together, but while the one flies up to the sky, the other sinks, toward the earth. These two also know the pangs of separation. This “significant” relationship assures that they are not perceived as fortuitous elements of comparison. The four terms thus “joined together” in the two lines create links among themselves that are based in an internal necessity. The drama of man is inseparable from the drama of nature.

  Thus, it would appear that through the absence of predication the poet seeks to go beyond the metaphoric processes to introduce an order that can properly be called metonymic.

  Sun-moon birds in cage

  Sky-earth duckweed in water21

  In each of these two lines, the ellipsis of the word of comparison permits a double reading. In line 1, the first term of the comparison may be either sun-moon, or an understood “I.” The line can be translated as “The sun and the moon are themselves like birds in a cage” or as “In time, which passes (in Chinese, “sun-moon” may equal passing time), I am a prisoner like a bird in a cage.” Similarly, the second line can also be read in, two ways: “Between the heavens and the earth, I am like a duckweed on the water” or “The universe (in Chinese, “heaven-earth”) itself is as changeable, as uncertain, as duckweeds on water.”

  The omission of the verb in a sentence is clearly representative of this same sort of creative exploration of poetic means. Through this technique the poet seeks to emphasize certain elements, by providing them with a definite nuance, or by creating a state in which the elements may both coexist and imply each other.

  Emerald sea, azure sky, night-night heart22

  In this manner Li Shang-yin sings the fate of the goddess Chang-E, imprisoned in the moon. Between the heavens and the sea shines each night this loving, suffering heart. The line, in the original Chinese, has a strength of presence that is much more powerful than it could be were it to be accompanied by the indication of the verbs.

  This type of line, where the signs are related only by the rhythmic quality of the line, unaided by verbs or grammatical markers, is extremely difficult to carry off successfully. The following three examples are chosen from among the best known of this type.

  Cock crow thatched inn moon

  Footprints wood bridge frost23

  Star river autumn alone wild goose

  Linens beaten night a thousand homes24

  Five lakes three acres hut

  Ten thousand li one returning man25

  Use of Empty Words In Place of Verbs

  To this point, we have attempted to show the manner in which the poet creates, through the suppression of certain of the empty words, a sort of emptiness, a void, between the words. It is necessary to indicate now a particular procedure by which the poet intentionally replaces a full word (generally a verb) with an empty word, in order, again, to introduce that “void” into the line, this time by substitution rather than deletion. In the following examples, the empty words that exercise the functions of verbs are italicized.

  Old age often route-path

  Late day once more mountain-river26

  Yellow leaves always wind-rain

  Green pavilion in itself flute-strings27

  Devastated countries alone snake-boar

  Heaven-earth again tiger-wolf28

  In face of the lived life what shameful face

  At the depths of sorrow in addition end of year29

  Fragile clouds sky with faraway

  Long night moon together solitude30

  Ancient wood without trace path

  Deep mountain what place bell31

  Once leave Purple Terrace directly Northern Desert

  Alone remain Blue Tomb towards yellow dusk32

  The most immediate consequence of these ellipses is the relaxing of syntactic constraints: these are reduced to a few minimal rules. If the lines of the longest meters are quite close to wen-yan (classical prose) in their grammatical structures, the short, pentasyllabic lines actually observe only two constant rules: in a syntagma, the determinant precedes the determined; in a sentence the predicate of which has a transitive verb the form S + V + O is respected. It would be well to indicate here the primordial role played by the rhythm, as it marks the regrouping of words. Among the words, the substantives and verbs (verbs of action and of quality) acquire a great combinatory mobility. The pentasyllabic lines, on the basis of their extreme concision, come across at times as “oscillations” between the nominal state and the verbal. (Certain combinations are predictable: before the caesura, NN, NV, VV, VN; after the caesura, NVN, NNV, VNV, VNN.) This sort of oscillation is, in many cases, also to be noted in the very interior of the words themselves. The written characters being invariable, the nature of the word (which may in any case consist of more than one character) is not indicated by morphology, although in ordinary language usage assigns each a definite class. In sentence construction the nature of a word is determined by the elements that surround it (prepositions, conjunctions, particles, etc.), and the absence of these elements often makes its identification more difficult. This difficulty of identification serves the purpose of the poet very well. In his eyes the nominal and the verbal are two states that are both theoretically potentially present in the full word. And it is precisely for this reason that the words, though by nature ambivalent, give the line a future and a powerful emotional charge when they are put into direct contact.

  —

  Taking into account all of the facts introduced in the course of this chapter, it can be seen that the Chinese poet seeks, through the process of reduction, not just to simplify the language to the extreme, but rather to multiply the nominal-verbal play, and to introduce to the language an implied dimension, that of the void. On the paradigmatic a
xis and on the syntagmatic axis, the void (created by the omission of personal pronouns, of empty words, and even of verbs, and by the reuse of certain of these empty words in place of the verbs) engenders complex relationships of substitution () and of combination () that are represented by the following figure.

  The ordered, and apparently static, aspect of this representation ought not to be allowed to obscure the fact that it deals with a dynamic language whose components imply each other. It is a language broken free, which puts back into play the relationship between the said and the not-said, action and non-action, and, when all is considered, the subject and the object. For the poet it is only this sort of language, animated as it is by the void, which is capable of engendering words through which the “breath” circulates, and thus of truly transcribing the inexpressible. Here it is essential once more to recall the importance of the void in Chinese aesthetic thought. The man who possesses the dimension of the void does away with the distance between things; the secret relationship that he finds among things is the same relationship he himself has with things. Rather than using a descriptive language, he proceeds by “internal representation,” letting words fully play their “games.” In discourse, by grace of the void, the signs, disengaged (to a certain degree) from the rigid and unidimensional syntactic restraint, rediscover their essential nature as both particular existences and essences of being. Implicated in the process of time, they are nonetheless as if beyond time. When the poet names a tree, it is as much the tree he has in sight as it is the Tree in its essence. Moreover, signs become multidirectional in their relations with other signs; and it is through these relationships that the subject appears, at the same time both absent and “profoundly present.”

  Thus, objective discourse and personal discourse come to coincide, forming the outside and the inside of the same discourse. The result is a mobile language, moved completely by rhythm, which plays the same role as the qi-yun (rhythmic breath) in painting. It is a rhythm that is not limited to the phonic level, but that orders nature and the sense of words. Entering into a total celebration, where dance and music make their immemorial secrets live again, the signs are liberated from their codified relationships to discover a free communion among themselves. It is an unchained speech, one that allows “circulation,” and on every hand new perspectives appear. Without falling into mere play, the poets composed very beautiful poems in a form called hui-wen-shi, “poems with turned-back readings,” palindromes in which different readings are possible starting from different points. The simplest of these is a type of poem that can be read in the normal manner and then in exactly the reverse, as in the following quatrain, which is made of two lines followed by their own mirror images.

  Perfumed lotus emerald water moving wind fresh

  Water moving wind fresh summer day long

  Long day summer fresh wind moving water

  Fresh wind moving water emerald lotus perfumed

  This type of poem was made possible precisely by the reduction of syntactic rules and the absence of empty words. The words reveal their true nature only by the place that they occupy in the sentence; they acquire their function according to their order, and when this order is reversed they take on a different function. In the poem cited above, a very precise reading can be drawn from the words placed one after another, one that differs markedly from normal to reverse order.

  perfumed lotus = aromatic lotus

  lotus perfumed = the lotuses are aromatic

  wind fresh = fresh (cool) wind

  fresh wind = the wind is fresh (cool)

  water moving = the water is moving

  wind moving water = the wind is moving the water

  And the lines may be translated as follows: “On the emerald water, among the aromatic lotuses, a fresh breeze rises / The water is churned, the wind brings freshness, the summer day is long / Long day, the summer is cool, the wind churns the water / A fresh breeze stirs up the water, the green lotuses send their perfumes.”

  Other poems, more elaborate, constitute a veritable labyrinth of signs within which, starting from any point, the reader is engaged in a different journey, one likely to provide surprising discoveries. We shall be content simply to reproduce an example of this type here: let the reader lose himself, and find himself, there, if he chooses.

  2. The Active Procedures

  The processes that will be studied in this chapter are described as active because they involve the prosodic forms and rules that were sought out and defined by the poets. These forms and rules will not merely be described: an attempt will be made to grasp all of their implications as well. It must be self-evident that these active processes do not function independently of the passive procedures described in chapter 1; the two depend upon each other in the constitution of a properly poetic language.

  Chinese poetry knew an uninterrupted development of forms. The initial epoch is marked by two collections of songs, which represent two genres, the Shi Jing (“Canon of Poetry”) and the Chu Ci (“Songs of the State of Chu”). The Shi Jing, which dates from the first half of the first millennium before our era, is composed of ritual chants and popular songs that sprang from the womb of an agricultural society. The constant themes of these songs are the labor of the fields, the pains and joys of love, the seasonal feasts, and the rites of sacrifice. All of the songs are striking for their sober and regular rhythm, the lines dominated by the quaternary meter.

  The Chu Ci appears later, toward the fourth century before our era, in the Period of the Warring States, in the region of the Blue River, an area that was at that time on the outer edge of Chinese civilization. This poetry contrasts with that of the Shi Jing as much in the nature of its content as in its form. Of shamanic inspiration and incantatory style, it possesses a great abundance of floral and vegetal symbolism that has both magical and erotic implications. The lines of the form are of unequal length, generally two lines of six feet, joined together by a syllable of measure, xi. It was primarily this genre that later inspired the poets to express the phantasms of the imagination.

  Under the Han (206 B.C.–A.D. 219) the continuation of the tradition of the Shi Jing was no longer assured. The poet-erudites gave themselves to the composition of fu (rhythmic prose), while contemporary popular songs were returned to prominence by the Music Bureau (yue-fu), a government bureau instituted by Emperor Wu around 120 B.C., and charged with the collection of folk songs. These songs, marked by a spontaneous lyricism and a greater formal freedom, in turn exercised considerable influence on the poets. From the late Han to the epoch of Tang two parallel genres developed, a popular and a learned poetry, both dominated by the pentasyllabic meter. During the Three Kingdoms (220–265/70), the Jin (265–419), and the Northern and Southern Dynasties (420–589), following the Han, a vigorous popular poetry flourished, while generations of poets concurrently produced works of great literary value, preparing the way for the poetry of the Tang. In the course of this long period new forms, including quatrains, heptasyllabic poems, and long narrative poems, were developed.

  At the beginning of the Tang all these new genres in use were catalogued and codified, partly because formal research had by that time achieved a high degree of refinement, and moreover to meet the needs of the imperial civil service examinations. This fixing of forms in synchrony is an important fact. In the awareness of the Tang poet, the ensemble of these forms constitutes a coherent system, one in which the relationship among the forms is clearly defined, and one that provides vehicles for the multiple registers of the poet’s sensitivity.

  The first distinction made is between jin-ti-shi, “modern-style poetry,” governed by strict rules of prosody, and gu-ti-shi, “ancient-style poetry,” which is distinguished by the absence of constraints, or more often by the intentional deformation of these same rules. Within the gu-ti-shi two currents, the popular yue-fu and the learned gu-feng, were both widely practiced. In modern-style poetry, the most important form is the lü-shi (regulated eight-line poem)
; it is in relation to this form that the jue-ju (quatrain), considered to be a “cut off” lü-shi, is defined, as is the case with the chang-lü (“long lü-shi“), which is, as the name implies, a prolonged lü-shi, with multiple strophes. In addition, it may be appropriate to mention a form of song-poetry, intimately tied to music, called the ci, which developed toward the end of the Tang, and had its vogue during the following dynasty, the Song.

  In this network of forms, the lü-shi (regulated eight-line poem) is the reference point from which all of the others are defined. This form, which is the culmination of many centuries of aesthetic exploration and research, in addition to putting the specific traits of the language to the best possible use, represents, as well, a certain philosophical conception essential to the Chinese. It is a system whose different levels are composed of elements in internal opposition, and whose progression obeys a fundamental dialectical law. Viewed from this perspective, the analysis of the lü-shi offers, among other things, an opportunity to observe the process by which a form may engender meaning.

  The lü-shi

  First of all, the lü-shi is striking by virtue of its “economic” aspect. It constitutes, in the eyes of the Chinese poet, a sort of “complete minimum.” A lü-shi is composed of two quatrains, and each quatrain of two couplets. The couplet is, then, the basic unit. Of the four couplets that compose a lü-shi, the second and the third are obligatorily formed of parallel lines; the first and the last, of nonparallel lines. The contrast between the parallel and the nonparallel lines is characteristic of the lü-shi, a system formed of oppositional elements on all levels (phonic, lexical, syntactic, symbolic, etc.). A network of correspondences between these levels allows them to mutually support and imply each other.