From the dawn of writing, people in China have recorded poems. Some have been popular ditties, some prayers or odes, some observations about nature or the human relationship to it. Some have expressed despair, love, or exhileration.

Poetry is above all the manipulation of language to overcome arbitrary constraints. In Chinese this can involve patterns of rhymes, rhythms, or tones, or parallelisms of syntax or of imagery of other content. Although there are exceptions, the most admired Chinese poems are brief, but intensely patterned. And a very great proportion were created in the Táng dynasty (618-907, period 12).

This heritage is most accessibly enshrined for nearly all Chinese today in a work called “Three Hundred Táng Dynasty Poems” (Táng Shī Sānbǎi Shǒu唐诗三百首), an anthology for students compiled about 1763 by a certain Sūn Zhū 孙洙 (1711-1778) and used in Chinese schools up to the present. With Sūn Zhū’s anthology, the technically ingenious creations of cerebral Táng intellectuals, tended to be memorized more than analyzed, becoming Qīng dynasty schoolboy ditties.

Chinese classical poems are appreciated today more because of their established fame than for any very profound understanding of their underlying structure. A Táng poem still can be understood and appreciated in Cantonese because of its relatively conservative phonology; but the same poem is unintelligible or at least limps badly when pronounced in modern standard Mandarin. (And it can become distinctly counter-aesthetic when accompanied, as it often is, by soppy music played on an electric synthesizer.)

Far less than appreciating structural ingenuity, both modern schoolchildren and modern Chinese admirers of the genre, like those who read the poems in translation, tend to focus on the imagery, especially the nature imagery, of these works.

This page is the index to a few examples, chosen more for sociological or linguistic interest than for literary merit. The page is still an ambition, so there is little here yet. A separate collection on this web site is called "Jingles & Ditties" and involves less serious verse link, but items that appeal to a social scientist for their reflections of late imperial popular culture.

Index

Number Name Topic
1 Four Ancient Chinese Songs
(Zhōu dynasty, period 4)
Four items from the Book of Songs
2 The Suffering of Farmers
(Táng dynasty, period 12)
Advice to city people.
3 After the Exam (Táng) A successful student’s relief.
4 Drinking Buddies (Táng) Reluctance to be apart.
5 A Love Song from Dūnhuáng (Táng) Promises on a pillow.


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