Those who are regular readers at Shaping Words will have noted that two of the syllabic forms of poetry that I post are Quatrains; that is to say they are four line poems. I want to take a few moments to post about the prosody, the structure, and source of these Quatrains.
My inspiration for the Quatrains is the Chinese poetic tradition. During the Tang Dynasty (618 to 907) there arose in China two forms of short verse. Both of them are Quatrains. One of them consists of four lines with five syllables to each line, for a total of twenty syllables. The other consists of four lines with seven syllables to each line, for a total of twenty-eight syllables.
Many of China’s greatest poets wrote in these forms, including Li Bo, Du Fu, Wang Wei and many others. Some of the most famous poems in Chinese history are in one or the other of these Quatrain forms.
I found these poems to be greatly inspiring. It was remarkable how much meaning was concentrated in these brief forms. I decided to see if I could adapt the Chinese Quatrain to an English language context. The chief means for such adaptation was mimicking; that is to say I sought to mimic as many aspects of the Chinese Quatrain in an English language context as possible.
At first this may seem an unlikely possibility because English and Chinese are so different. Chinese is monosyllabic and tonal, while English is polysyllabic and non-tonal. Yet there are also striking similarities. While it is true that English is polysyllabic, it is also true that English has a larger percentage of single syllable words than other European languages. This is because English has, for the most part, dropped inflected endings. Inflection increases the number of syllables for a given word. The absence of inflection in English means that, relatively speaking, it has a large pool of monosyllabic words and this tendency in English maps well onto the Chinese linguistic context.
A second similarity is that for both languages the position of a word in a sentence determines meaning in the sense of grammatical function. Not all languages are like that; highly inflected languages are loose regarding word order. Chinese is uninflected and English is largely uninflected, and so for both these languages word order takes on a significant role.
A third similarity is that for both poetic cultures rhyme is a central organizing principle. For both English language poetry and Chinese poetry end-rhyme in particular is a pervasive means for organizing poetic structures. For those who have read Chinese poetry in translation this is probably not clear. In fact many Americans think that Chinese poetry is almost equivalent to modern free verse. This has to do with decisions that translators have made in how to bring Chinese poetry into English and also the great difficulty a translator would have finding equivalent rhymes in English for the Chinese rhymes. It is almost impossible to do that, except on very rare occasions. Some volumes of Chinese poetry contain the Chinese characters of the poem along with the translation. However, this is not really helpful for the English speaking reader. What is needed is a transliteration of the Chinese poem so that the dedicated reader can get an idea of what the poem sounds like in Chinese. The Chinese characters do not represent sounds and because of this the English speaking reader has no opportunity to grasp the rhyme scheme of the original poem when looking at the Chinese characters. Only a transliteration offers that possibility and there are very few volumes of translations from the Chinese that do this. I think this is unfortunate because it hides the nature of Chinese poetry from the average reader. For these reasons many American continue to think that Chinese verse is unrhymed and unregulated when exactly the opposite is true.
Another similarity between Chinese and English poetry is that for the traditional poetry of both cultures the line is regulated by counting. That is to say the length of a line is determined by a particular count. For example, the English Sonnet has ten syllables, or five iambs, per line, while the Chinese Quatrain has either five or seven syllables per line. What is counted is somewhat different for the two poetic traditions. In traditional English poetry what is counted are the accents or stresses; that is to say a line of five stresses makes up a line of a Sonnet. Since the Sonnet typically is made up of iambs, that usually results in ten syllables; but other stress patterns are possible which result in slightly different syllable counts even though the stress count remains at five. In contrast, Chinese poetry is strictly syllabic. Only the number of syllables is counted (in this respect Chinese poetic culture is similar to Japanese and French poetry). I decided to map the Chinese approach onto English by confining the count to syllables rather than stresses. I did this because of my ongoing interest in the possibilities of syllabic verse in English. I have reached a point where I trust a syllabic approach to English verse because so much excellent syllabic poetry has been produced since the early twentieth century. I have come to admire the results of a strictly syllabic approach to English poetry as found in, for example, the Cinquain, the syllabic Haiku, the syllabic Sonnet, and many other examples. I therefore felt that adopting a syllabic approach could prove efficacious in the example of the Chinese Quatrain’s transmission to the English language.
Finally, I was intrigued by the idea of a syllabic form where the lines were all of a uniform length. In the syllabic verse I had previously dealt with the syllable count varied from line to line. In the syllabic Haiku the count is 5-7-5. In the syllabic Tanka it is 5-7-5-7-7, for the Cinquain it is 2-4-6-8-2, for the Tetractys 1-2-3-4-10, etc. It seems to be the case that when English language poets write syllabically they tend to write in structures with changing line lengths. I’m not sure why that is the case, but it seems to be consistent. The Chinese poetic culture tended strongly towards uniform line lengths; I’m not aware of a Chinese form that is not of uniform line length. This contrasts with Japan where the poetic forms have varied line lengths. The Chinese forms have a certain steadiness. They remind me of going on a walk on a trail, keeping up a steady pace, not to fast, not too slow, just walking forward. There is a feel about the uniform line length which I found attractive. I also found it familiar. Most English language poetry (leaving aside free verse) also has uniform line lengths. From Elizabethan poetry to Robert Frost and Millay, a uniform line length has been a standard feature of English language poetry. In this both Chinese and English poetry are similar and I thought that resemblance might prove fruitful.
I was aware, of course, that some aspects of Chinese cannot be mimicked in English. In Chinese poetry regulation of tone is an aspect of their prosody. Since English is non-tonal such regulation is not applicable and cannot be transferred from Chinese to English. My quest was to discover how much of the prosody of the Chinese Quatrain could be mimicked in English and then to see the results.
I started out with what I gleaned to be the basic structure which is as follows:
1. The quatrain has four lines.
2. The quatrain has a title.
3. Each line has the same number of syllables; either five or seven.
4. The Quatrain has the following end-rhyme scheme: A, B, C, B.
Based on this I proceeded to attempt writing these Quatrains in English. Here are two early examples:
On a Clear Night When the Full Moon Was Very Bright
Moonlight on my bed
Wakes me from my dream
Memories of you
The sound of a stream
Found in a Closet
Fossils from a mountain top
Signs of life from ages past
The first gift you gave to me
When I thought our love would last
There is much more to Quatrain prosody, but this was my starting point. I’ll write more about other aspects of the Strict Quatrain form in Part 2.
P.S. A note on terminology. The Chinese word translated as “Quatrain” is “jueju”. In Chinese this word designates a four-line poem. In English poetry “Quatrain” can refer to a poem of any length as long as it is organized into four-line groups. So Robert Frost’s famous “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is a Quatrain containing four groups of four-lines, a total of sixteen lines.
The jueju are subdivided into two types, depending on line length. The five syllable jueju is called “wujue”. The seven syllable jueju is called “qijue”. I developed a nomenclature to describe these two forms as follows: I refer to the “wujue” as the “Five-Four Quatrain”. I refer to the qijue as the “Seven-Four Quatrain”. “Five-Four” means “five syllables per line, four lines”. “Seven-Four” means “seven syllables per line, four lines.”
Here’s a guide for the terminology:
Chinese: Jueju
English: Strict Quatrain, or Quatrain
Chinese: Wujue
English: Five-Four Strict Quatrain, or Five-Four Quatrain
Chinese: Qijue
English: Seven-Four Strict Quatrain, or Seven-Four Quatrain
For the purposes of this essay “Quatrain” will refer to a poem of only four lines. If the possibility of confusion arises, I will refer to the adaptation of the Chinese Quatrain into English as the “Strict Quatrain”, meaning only four lines; and I will refer to the English usage as the “Open Quatrain”, meaning open as to the total number of lines. In most cases the context will be clear and I will simply refer to “Quatrain”.
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