No More Learning

(_d_) Verbal parallelism in the couplet, _e. g. _:

After long illness one first realizes that seeking medicines is
a mistake;
In one's decaying years one begins to repent that one's study of
books was deferred.

This device, used with some discretion in T'ang, becomes an irritating
trick in the hands of the Sung poets.


THE RISE AND PROGRESS OF CHINESE POETRY

_The Odes. _--From the songs current in his day Confucius (551-479 B. C. )
chose about three hundred which he regarded as suitable texts for his
ethical and social teaching. Many of them are eulogies of good rulers or
criticisms of bad ones. Out of the three hundred and five still extant
only about thirty are likely to interest the modern reader. Of these
half deal with war and half with love. Many translations exist, the best
being those of Legge in English and of Couvreur in French. There is
still room for an English translation displaying more sensitivity to
word-rhythm than that of Legge. It should not, I think, include more
than fifty poems. But the Odes are essentially _lyric_ poetry, and their
beauty lies in effects which cannot be reproduced in English.
For that
reason I have excluded them from this book; nor shall I discuss them
further here, for full information will be found in the works of Legge
or Couvreur.

_Elegies of the Land of Ch'u. _--We come next to Ch'u Yuan (third century
B. C. ) whose famous poem "Li Sao," or "Falling into Trouble," has also
been translated by Legge. It deals, under a love-allegory, with the
relation between the writer and his king. In this poem, sex and politics
are curiously interwoven, as we need not doubt they were in Chu Yuan's
own mind. He affords a striking example of the way in which abnormal
mentality imposes itself. We find his followers unsuccessfully
attempting to use the same imagery and rhapsodical verbiage, not
realizing that these were, as De Goncourt would say, the product of
their master's _propre nevrosite_.

"The Battle," his one thoroughly intelligible poem, has hitherto been
only very imperfectly translated. A literal version will be found on p.
23.

His nephew Sung Yu was no servile imitator. In addition to "elegies" in
the style of the Li Sao, he was the author of many "Fu" or descriptive
prose-poems, unrhymed but more or less metrical.

_The Han Dynasty. _--Most of the Han poems in this book were intended to
be sung.