No More Learning

"

I have spoken hitherto only of poets. But the poetess occupies a place
of considerable importance in the first four centuries of our era,
though the classical period (T'ang and Sung) produced no great woman
writer. Her theme varies little; she is almost always a "rejected wife,"
cast adrift by her lord or sent back to her home. Probably her father
would be unable to buy her another husband and there was no place for
unmarried women in the Chinese social system. The moment, then, which
produced such poems was one of supreme tragedy in a woman's life.

Love-poetry addressed by a man to a woman ceases after the Han dynasty;
but a conventional type of love-poem, in which the poet (of either sex)
speaks in the person of a deserted wife or concubine, continues to be
popular. The theme appears to be almost an obsession with the T'ang and
Sung poets. In a vague way, such poems were felt to be allegorical. Just
as in the Confucian interpretation of the love-poems in the Odes (see
below) the woman typifies the Minister, and the lover the Prince, so in
those classical poems the poet in a veiled way laments the thwarting of
his own public ambitions. Such tortuous expression of emotion did not
lead to good poetry.

The "figures of speech," devices such as metaphor, simile, and play on
words, are used by the Chinese with much more restraint than by us.
"Metaphorical epithets" are occasionally to be met with; waves, for
example, might perhaps be called "angry. " But in general the adjective
does not bear the heavy burden which our poets have laid upon it. The
Chinese would call the sky "blue," "gray," or "cloudy," according to
circumstances; but never "triumphant" or "terror-scourged. "

The long Homeric simile, introduced for its own sake or to vary the
monotony of narrative, is unknown to Chinese poetry.
Shorter similes are
sometimes found, as when the half-Chinese poet Altun compares the sky
over the Mongolian steppe with the "walls of a tent"; but nothing could
be found analogous to Mr. T. S. Eliot's comparison of the sky to a
"patient etherized on a table. " Except in popular poetry, puns are rare;
but there are several characters which, owing to the wideness of their
import, are used in a way almost equivalent to play on words.

Classical allusion, always the vice of Chinese poetry, finally destroyed
it altogether. In the later periods (from the fourteenth century
onwards) the use of elegant synonyms also prevailed. I have before me a
"gradus" of the kind which the later poet used as an aid to composition.
The moon should be called the "Silver Dish," "Frozen Wheel," or "Golden
Ring. " Allusions may in this connection be made to Yu Liang, who rode to
heaven on the crescent moon; to the hermit T'ang, who controlled the
genius of the New Moon, and kept him in his house as a candle--or to any
other of some thirty stories which are given. The sun may be called "The
Lantern-Dragon," the "Crow in Flight," the "White Colt," etc.

Such were the artificialities of later Chinese poetry.


TECHNIQUE

Certain elements are found, but in varying degree, in all human speech.
It is difficult to conceive of a language in which rhyme, stress-accent,
and tone-accent would not to some extent occur. In all languages some
vowel-sounds are shorter than others and, in certain cases, two
consecutive words begin with the same sound. Other such characteristics
could be enumerated, but for the purposes of poetry it is these elements
which man has principally exploited.