No More Learning

English poetry has used chiefly rhyme, stress, and alliteration. It is
doubtful if tone has ever played a part; a conscious use has
sporadically been made of quantity. Poetry naturally utilizes the most
marked and definite characteristics of the language in which it is
written. Such characteristics are used consciously by the poet; but less
important elements also play their part, often only in a negative way.
Thus the Japanese actually avoid rhyme; the Greeks did not exploit it,
but seem to have tolerated it when it occurred accidentally.

The expedients consciously used by the Chinese before the sixth century
were rhyme and length of line. A third element, inherent in the
language, was not exploited before that date, but must always have been
a factor in instinctive considerations of euphony. This element was
"tone. "

Chinese prosody distinguishes between two tones, a "flat" and a
"deflected. " In the first the syllable is enunciated in a level manner:
the voice neither rises nor sinks. In the second, it (1) rises, (2)
sinks, (3) is abruptly arrested. These varieties make up the Four Tones
of Classical Chinese. [1]

[1] Not to be confused with the Four Tones of the Mandarin dialect, in
which the old names are used to describe quite different enunciations.

The "deflected" tones are distinctly more emphatic, and so have a faint
analogy to our stressed syllables. They are also, in an even more remote
way, analogous to the long vowels of Latin prosody.
A line ending with a
"level" has consequently to some extent the effect of a "feminine
ending. " Certain causes, which I need not specify here, led to an
increasing importance of "tone" in the Chinese language from the fifth
century onwards. It was natural that this change should be reflected in
Chinese prosody. A certain Sh? n Yo (A. D. 441-513) first propounded the
laws of tone-succession in poetry. From that time till the eighth
century the _Lu-shih_ or "strictly regulated poem" gradually evolved.
But poets continued (and continue till to-day), side by side with their
_lu-shih_, to write in the old metre which disregards tone, calling such
poems _Ku shih_, "old poems. " Previous European statements about
Chinese prosody should be accepted with great caution. Writers have
attempted to define the _lu-shih_ with far too great precision.

The Chinese themselves are apt to forget that T'ang poets seldom obeyed
the laws designed in later school-books as essential to classical
poetry; or, if they notice that a verse by Li Po does not conform, they
stigmatize it as "irregular and not to be imitated. "

The reader will infer that the distinction between "old poems" and
irregular _lu-shih_ is often arbitrary. This is certainly the case; I
have found the same poem classified differently in different native
books. But it is possible to enumerate certain characteristics which
distinguish the two kinds of verse. I will attempt to do so; but not
till I have discussed _rhyme_, the other main element in Chinese
prosody.