View Shopping Cart Your Famous Chinese Account Shopping Help Famous Chinese Homepage China Chinese Chinese Culture Chinese Restaurant & Chinese Food Travel to China Chinese Economy & Chinese Trade Chinese Medicine & Chinese Herb Chinese Art
logo
Search
March 8, 2014
Table of Contents
1 Introduction
Shi (poetry)

Wikipedia

 
Shi (詩) is the Chinese language|Chinese word for "poem"; it can also be used to mean Chinese poetry other than lyrics, or (most commonly) the classical form of poetry developed in the late Han dynasty and which reached its zenith in the Tang dynasty.




From the 2nd century AD, the yue fu began to develop into shi - the form which was to dominate Chinese poetry until the modern era. The writers of these poems took the five Chinese character|character line of the yue fu and used it to express more complex ideas. The shi poem was generally an expression of the poet's own persona rather than the adopted characters of the yue fu; many were romantic nature poems heavily influenced by Taoism. A later variant, the seven-character line, expanded the possibilities of the form yet further. In each case, there is a caesura before the last three characters of each line, producing groupings of two and three or four and three characters respectively.




The term gushi ("old poems") can refer either to the first, mostly anonymous shi poems, or more generally to the poems written in the same form by later poets. Gushi in this latter sense are defined essentially by what they are not: i.e., they are not jintishi (regulated verse). The writer of gushi was under no formal constraints other than line length and rhyme (in every second line). The form was therefore favoured for narrative works and by writers seeking a relaxed or imaginative style; Li Bai is the most prominent of these, but most major poets wrote significant gushi.




Jintishi, or Constrained_writing|regulated verse, developed from the 5th century onwards. By the Tang dynasty, a series of set Tonal language|tonal patterns had been developed, which were intended to ensure a balance between the four tones of classical Chinese spoken language|Chinese in each couplet: the level tone, and the three deflected tones (rising, falling and entering). The Tang dynasty was the high point of the jintishi. Wang Wei and Cui Hao were notable pioneers of the form, while Du Fu was its most accomplished exponent.

The basic form of jintishi was the l?shi (律詩), with eight lines. In addition to the tonal constraints, this form required parallelism between the lines in the second and third couplets. The lines in these couplets had to contain contrasting content, with the words in each line in the same grammatical relationship.

Another form was the jueju or quatrain (絕詩), which followed the tonal pattern of the first four lines of the l?shi. This form did not require parallelism.

The last form was pail? (排律), which extended lǜshi to unlimited length by repeating the tonal pattern and the required parallelism of the second and third couplets. Parallelism was not required for the first and the last couplets.

All forms of jintishi could be written in five or seven character lines. The rules on tones and parallelism were not strictly followed in all cases: when classifying poems as gushi or jintishi, commentators traditionally placed greater emphasis on following the tonal rules than on parallelism.

Category:Poetic form
pl:Shi
zh:诗歌

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Shi (poetry)".


Last Modified:   2005-04-13


Search
All informatin on the site is © FamousChinese.com 2002-2005. Last revised: January 2, 2004
Are you interested in our site or/and want to use our information? please read how to contact us and our copyrights.
To post your business in our web site? please click here. To send any comments to us, please use the Feedback.
To let us provide you with high quality information, you can help us by making a more or less donation: