Poetry and Song 2

During the Tang Dynasty in China, (618 to 907 C.E.) Chinese poetry reached unprecedented heights of beauty and expression. During this period their emerged two short forms of verse. Both of them were Quatrains (four line poems), or Jueju. One consisted of five characters per line, wujue, for a total of twenty characters; and since the characters in Chinese are one syllable long, twenty characters also means twenty syllables. The other Quatrain form consisted of seven characters/syllables per line, qijue, for a total of twenty-eight characters/syllables. (For the sake of simplicity I will refer to the “wujue” form as the “Five-Four” form and the “qijue” form as the “Seven-Four” form.) These taught, concise, structures became the vehicles for some of the most famous poems in Chinese history. Such poetic luminaries as Wang Wei, Li Bai, and Du Fu, along with many others, poured their considerable talents into these highly restricted forms.

Chinese poetry in general is rooted in song. The oldest surviving collection of Chinese poetry, put together by Confucius, is often title the “Book of Songs” or “Book of Odes”. That is because in many cases what we are reading are song lyrics; some of them from folk sources, others from more aristocratic origins.

The Tang Dynasty continued that association. I don’t mean to say that Chinese poets were writing songs in the Tang Dynasty; rather I am suggesting that the pulse of song, and I suspect specific melodies, underlay, or permeated, the poetic landscape so that the connection between poetry and song was never really broken. The two categories, “poetry” and “song”, remained porous to each other.

In the book How to Read Chinese Poetry, by Zong-Qi Cai, there is confirmation of this in the following quote:

“The rhythm of the heptasyllabic (seven-syllable) line . . . differs from that of the petnasyllabic (five-syllable) line, which has implications for how poets approached it. When pentasyllabic poetry is chanted, it rather naturally falls into eight beats per line:

tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, (rest, rest, rest);
tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, (rest, rest, rest).

The length of the silent rests gives the overall rhythm a slow and stately quality, which implicitly suggests that the content is weighty and important. When heptasyllabic poetry is chanted, it also naturally falls into eight beats per line:

tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, (rest);
tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, (rest),

. . . [T]he single beat of rest at the end of the heptasyllable gives the impression that each line rushes into the next. Thus heptasyllabic poetry has a distinctive flow, continuity, and lightness. The best poets of qijue (quatrains consisting of seven syllable lines) carefully crafted the sound quality of the syllable combinations, employing alliterations, internal rhymes, and reduplication more frequently than in the pentasyllabic line.”

(How to Read Chinese Poetry: A Guided Anthology, by Zong-Qi Cai, page 223, Columbia University Press, New York, 2008)

The author implies rests at the end of the poetic lines, but it is also possible that the last syllable of each line was held, lengthened, to fill in the eight beats. In this case the last syllable of the seven syllable line would be held for two beats, while the last syllable of the five syllable line would be held for four beats. This would replicate what was described in Part 1 of this series on Poetry and Song; that is to say the way that the rhythm of five syllable and seven syllable lines are handled is the same for Chinese Quatrains and for Japanese Tanka.

The convergence between the two cultures in the handling of the rhythm for the two types of lines even extends to the meaning given to these two. Takashi Kojima refers to the seven syllable line of a Tanka as “breezy”, while Cai refers to the seven syllable line as having “lightness” as compared to the five syllable line.

This can’t be coincidence; Chinese poetry had a huge influence on Japanese poetry. I wish I knew more about the specifics of the historical interaction of these two poetic cultures, but these hints are sufficient to suggest a connection. The differences are also striking. Japanese Tanka uses both five and seven syllables lines in its Tanka. Chinese Quatrains use either five syllable lines or seven syllable lines, but not both. Thus the Chinese Quatrains have four lines of repeated rhythm, while the Japanese Tanka has alternating rhythm, concluding with two seven line rhythmic units. Try chanting out these rhythms yourself, just to get a feel for how they differ.