字體：小 中 大 |
|
|
|
| 2026/02/13 12:14:09瀏覽215｜回應0｜推薦0 | |
Chapter Six: The Musicality of Modern Poetry (Part 3) Since the May Fourth Movement promoted vernacular poetry in China, the fluctuations between metrical poetry, prose poetry, and unrhymed poetry have been highly evident, and have gradually developed in the direction of prose poetry and unrhymed poetry. Due to the constraints of meter and form in classical Chinese poetry, the refinement and musical beauty formed over thousands of years have gradually been dissolved by free verse that follows the dictates of personal inclination. As the domain of prose continues to expand, the territory of modern poetry correspondingly contracts. From vernacular poetry through modern poetry and even into the postmodern phase, free verse has undergone continuous transformation. At this point, we must begin to reflect upon and reassess the aesthetic standards of “poetry” that have persisted for centuries, in order to respond to the inevitable phenomenon of “displacement” that arises in the evolution of literary genres. Musicality has traditionally been regarded as the “certificate of lineage” of poetry. After Chinese free verse, inspired by English and European free verse, broke free from the shackles of line count, tonal patterns, parallelism, and formal rhyme schemes, the question of how it can still maintain a meaningful distance from prose during this process of displacement becomes a critical issue for modern poets. The poetry theorist Zhu Mengshi (Guangqian) stated: “Prose tends toward narration and exposition, while poetry tends toward lyric expression and emotional release.” “Facts and reasoning can be grasped purely through the meanings of words, but emotional resonance must be experienced through the sounds of words.” By grasping these two premises, we may be able to develop aesthetic standards for musical beauty in modern poetry that reflect the emotional characteristics of modern individuals. When an author chooses poetry or prose as a medium for expressing thought and feeling, this choice is largely determined by contemporary literary fashion (the fashion). With respect to such literary fashion, we can only follow prevailing trends and are scarcely able to resist them. However, we cannot assert that “the boundary between poetry and prose is inevitably disappearing as a natural result of genre evolution.” If we still insist that poetry, as a literary form, occupies an irreplaceable position, and continue to believe that poetry possesses aesthetic qualities in lyrical expression that prose cannot achieve—namely concision, suggestiveness, and musical beauty—then we must actively attempt, through creative practice, to establish new aesthetic horizons for musicality in modern poetry. Section Two: The Developmental Trajectory of Musicality in Taiwanese Modern Poetry I. Historical Origins of Taiwanese Modern Poetry Free verse within China during the Nationalist period was inspired by European and American poetry, and initiated a sweeping liberation of poetic form beginning with the May Fourth Movement. From the experimental phase of short poems and vernacular poetry, to the flourishing of metrical forms (the metrical school and imitations of the sonnet), Symbolism, and Romanticism in the late 1930s, free verse eventually took shape as a mature poetic form. The torch of Chinese free verse followed the retreating Nationalist government to Taiwan, where mainland poets in exile merged with local modernist free-verse poets. With theoretical support from local poets such as Lin Hengtai and Yeh Weilian, Taiwanese modern poetry entered a new stage of development. Meanwhile, the direct genealogical source of Taiwanese free verse derived from Japanese modernist literature. The “Windmill Poetry Society,” founded in Taiwan in 1935, drew on both Japanese modernist poetic theory and works, as well as indirect translations of European and American literature through Japanese editions, gaining an initial understanding of literary movements such as Symbolism and Surrealism. Since early free verse on both the mainland and in Taiwan was inspired respectively by European-American and Japanese free verse and grounded in modernist literary theory, the modern poetry that later converged in Taiwan naturally inherited the central spirit of earlier free verse: formal liberation, and the broad adoption of creative concepts and techniques from European and American free verse, including Symbolism, Imagism, Surrealism, and their various schools. II. Clarifying Musicality in Free Verse The musicality of free verse encompasses three dimensions: melody, rhythm, and harmony. Melody itself further divides into rhyme and tonal movement. Throughout the history of poetic theory, from Zhu Guangqian to Qin Zihao and beyond, rhythm has often been narrowly equated with rhyme (end rhyme or assonance), while melodic rise and fall and tonal duration have been conflated with rhythmic variation in speed and intensity. Having immersed himself in Western music for several decades, the author contends that it is essential to clarify the musicality of textual syllables through music theory and semiotics. This is because both written characters and musical notes are fundamentally symbols representing sound. Written language functions as a triadic symbol integrating form, sound, and meaning, which also serves as evidence that painting, music, and poetry share a common origin—indeed, the bond between poetry and music is even closer than that between poetry and painting. With the development of free verse, the once-dominant function of rhyme gradually diminished, leaving melody and rhythm as the primary components of musicality in modern poetry. Regarding “rhythm,” various theorists have proposed differing systems of classification: Zhu Mengshi proposed: Guo Moruo proposed “rhythm of movement” and “rhythm of sound.” Bian Zhilin proposed “hummed rhythm” (intonational chanting) and “spoken rhythm” (recitative rhythm). Professor Chen Zhengzhi classified rhythm into internal musicality (internal rhythm) and external musicality (external rhythm). The author will selectively employ these concepts in subsequent discussion. To clarify the relationships among these classifications, the following schematic summary is provided: Rhythm System Physical rhythm → natural rhythm Musical rhythm (rhythmic sound) The musicality of free verse is determined by the external form of the poetic text and is conferred at the moment of textual inscription. The melodic aspect (the rise and fall and strength of tonal movement) is, unless marked by explicit notation, inherently variable and ultimately controlled by the reader, differing according to individual sensitivity and expressive habit. Rhythm, by contrast, is constrained by formal features of the poetic text, including stanzaic structure, line count, line length, enjambment, and punctuation. In other words, the tempo, intensity, and dynamic flow of poetic rhythm largely originate from the poet’s formal design. III. Musicality in Taiwanese Modern Poetry Free verse, having broken free from the constraints of formal structures, entered the period of modern poetry in Taiwan with a markedly broader space for creative expression than before. Poets of the “Blue Star” Poetry Society and the “Genesis” Poetry Society, as well as the slightly later poets of the “Li” Poetry Society, successively engaged in avant-garde experiments in language and form, producing poems of a wide variety of styles: (1) Surrealistic language and formal experimentation Such as Lo Fu’s “Death in the Stone Chamber” and Lo Men’s “Fort McKinley,” which explore surrealistic language and form; Lin Heng-tai’s “Landscape,” Guan Guan’s “Lotus” and “Wild Ginger Flower,” and Ya Xian’s “Andante Cantabile,” which, through rhetorical formal aesthetics such as parallel accumulation, parallelism, gradation, anadiplosis, interweaving, leaps, and palindromic structures, conduct formal design experiments; Zhan Bing and Fei Ma’s visual poetry experiments; and further, Bai Qiu’s “Wild Geese” and “The Wanderer,” which explore visual aesthetics. (2) Symbolically suggestive prose poems Such as the prose-poem experiments of Shang Qin’s “Giraffe,” Chen Qianwu’s “Wild Deer,” and Su Shaolian’s “Beast.” (3) Local realist Taiwanese-language poetry Including the Taiwanese poems of Lin Zongyuan, Zheng Jiongming, Xiang Yang, and Li Changqing, as well as Lu Hanshou’s Taiwanese song-poetry creations. Altogether, these diverse achievements produced a richly colorful report card, to a considerable extent combining poetry with the intercommunicable qualities of music and painting, expanding the territory of modern poetry and broadening poets’ horizons. Among them, aside from visual and concrete poetry, which emphasize the graphic aspect of poetic language, the rest are all closely related to musicality in poetry. Beyond these poets who boldly sought breakthroughs, there were also new poetic works of different styles: (4) Romantic lyrical poetry Such as Yang Mu’s “By the Water’s Edge” and “When the Wind Rises,” Zheng Chouyu’s “Skylight,” “Error,” and “The Mistress,” Zhang Cuo’s “Fourteen Sonnets of Error” and “Lament of the Twin Jade Rings,” and Luo Zhicheng’s “A Candle Falls Asleep Within Its Own Flame,” lyrical poems imbued with either Eastern or Western Romanticism. (5) A blending of neoclassical atmospheres and ballad forms Such as Yu Guangzhong’s “Fire Bath” and “Four Rhymes of Homesickness.” (6) Realist styles of social concern and humanitarian spirit Such as Ya Xian’s “The Madwoman,” “The Opera Actress,” and “Khrushchev”; Li Kuixian’s “Bottle Palm” and “Resident Bird”; Zheng Jiongming’s “Beggar” and “Sweet Potato”; Li Minyong’s “Prisoner of War,” “Landscape,” and “Darkroom”; and Xiang Yang’s “Standpoint” and “Beyond Chiayi Street,” which excel in irony and piercing political and social realism. Additionally, Wu Sheng’s “Impressions of My Homeland” and “I Do Not Speak with You,” as well as Lin Zongyuan’s “People Say You Are a Sweet Potato” and “A Little Worm in a Cabbage,” and other native-soil poems with intimate, warm, and touching tones—each establishes its own distinctive musicality and emotional atmosphere. Through the successive efforts of the postwar generation and the second and third generations of poets, Taiwanese modern poetry has come to resonate like an orchestra, producing richly layered polyphonic harmonies. Whether it is the adagio-like romantic lyricism and neoclassical poetry, the multi-tonal, winding and recurring modernist formal designs, the drum-and-bell-clashing political and social realist poems that shake the heart, or even the heavy resonance of gunfire and heartbeats within the dark stone chamber of “Death in the Stone Chamber,” all refresh the reader’s senses. From the founding of “Blue Star” in 1954, through the “Guan-Tang Incident” of 1972–73, to the publication of Introduction to Modern Poetry in 1979, a full twenty-six years—one quarter of a century—constituted a “boisterous era” of “gongs and drums, suona horns, saxophones, blues, and rock and roll.” IV. Melody and Rhythm in Taiwanese Modern Poetry To extract regularities of musicality from the wide range of themes and styles in Taiwanese modern poetry is a formidable task. Modern poetry is not bound by form; its melody and rhythm vary not only by subject matter and style but also from poet to poet. In terms of subject matter, lyrical poems—whether in monologue, epistolary form, narration, or dialogue—generally possess graceful melodies and gentle rhythms, expressing a romantic style and mostly belonging to the “chanting (humming) type” of rhythm. Additionally, some modern poems with strong ballad-like qualities and relatively neat formal structures have been set to music by composers and circulated widely, becoming known as “folk songs,” such as Yu Guangzhong’s “Four Rhymes of Homesickness,” Xi Murong’s “Song of the Frontier” and “Blue Day After Day,” and Chen Kehua’s “The Sky of Taipei” and “Butterfly Robe.” Political and social poems, by contrast, possess intense melodies with dramatic rises and falls, forceful and resonant rhythms, expressing a realist style and mostly belonging to the “spoken (recitative) type” of rhythm. As for experimental poetry, surrealist poetry, and prose poetry that proceed from formal design, they exhibit multi-tonal qualities, winding and recurring, uncontainable melodies, and orchestral-like rhythms each with distinct characteristics. 1. Resonant Political Poetry and Social Realist Poetry: Cadences of Blades, Guns, Blood, and Tears If lyrical poetry is the best female protagonist in the “expressive poetry” department—filled with sorrow and perfume—then undoubtedly political poetry and social realist poetry are the best male protagonists in the “realist poetry” department, brimming with sword aura, flashing blades, and bloody shadows. Poems grounded in realist creative principles often possess the following characteristics: (1) A macro-level perspective The scope of discourse expands to homeland, society, and nation; themes are diverse, encompassing political phenomena, social problems, folk customs, and even environmental issues. (2) An expressive stance of satire and critique Arising from dissatisfaction with present conditions and reflection on the past, these poems frequently express irony, mockery, denunciation, critical examination, and humanitarian compassion for the oppressed, embodying a broad-minded spirit of relief and aid. (3) An aesthetic of exposing ugliness and corruption Realist works often employ dark and ugly materials to reveal the darker sides of human nature and social injustice. After being processed through imagery, they present pathological and fragmented aesthetic experiences that paradoxically soothe the human heart. (4) Distinct cadenced intensity Though still employing spoken (recitative) rhythm, the lines usually consist of short and medium-length sentences with rapid tempo and strong tone, producing an upright, forceful, and resonant effect when read aloud. Among Taiwanese poets, those who most vividly embody realist spirit through realism and object-centered methods belong to the Li Poetry Society, a group primarily composed of native poets. Their works often carry pointed implications, using concrete imagery to express symbolic meanings—simple in language yet profound in implication—and they favor dark and gray materials, using words to conduct “silent indictments.” The author takes poems by Li Kuixian and by Lin Zongyuan—famous for Taiwanese-language poetry—as sample texts for analyzing the musicality of social realist and Taiwanese poetry: “Resident Bird” / Li Kuixian My friends are still in prison My friends are still in prison My friends are still in prison The poetic pen has once been called “a silent gun,” revealing the powerful impact of poetry. Through imagery, poetry highlights themes, which convey the author’s perceptions, thoughts, actions, and consciousness, often striking deeply into the reader’s heart. This poem “Resident Bird” takes “political prisoners” as its theme. In legal discourse, “political prisoners” are also known as “prisoners of conscience,” distinguishing them from ordinary “criminal offenders.” In modern states, the existence of political prisoners is an important indicator of a nation’s level of democratization. Using a first-person monologue perspective, the poet narrates to the reader about his group of friends who, due to “political errors,” are incarcerated in dark, sunless prisons. The poem portrays them as intellectuals with moral integrity and stubborn courage—men who would “rather cry out and die than live in silence.” Here, “Resident Bird” is not merely a theme but also a symbolic figure. The Li poet Huan Fu (Chen Qianwu) once said: “Once symbolism is discarded from poetry, poetry ceases to exist.” Li Kuixian repeatedly begins each stanza with the same line, clearly intending to remind readers of the ongoing seriousness of political imprisonment. Musically, through rhetorical formal design, the poem employs “stanzaic parallelism,” creating a song-like, winding and recurring melody. It adopts a “humming-type rhythm,” each stanza beginning with “My friends are still in prison” and ending with parallel phrases such as “feeding back the weakened homeland” and “chewing over the homeland’s frailty.” Though line lengths vary slightly, the form remains remarkably neat. This structural advantage grants the poem strong musicality, producing harmonious, metrical-like melodies and orderly humming rhythms. Through its plain and concise imagery, readers not only grasp the reality of political imprisonment but also feel the prisoners’ moral backbone and inner voice. The rhythm functions like a film theme song, leading readers to beat time and shed tears between the lines. “Bottle Palm” / Li Kuixian Unspeakable words Unspeakable love After the mouth is shut The self that refuses to grow Has the long gorge returned? From the 1950s to the 1990s—nearly forty years—Taiwan lived under “strongman politics” and “authoritarian rule.” The ruling class adhered to the despotic mindset that as long as people’s stomachs were filled, there was no need to grant much freedom. Hence the phrase “the sorrow of the Taiwanese people,” spoken by the first Taiwan-born president Lee Teng-hui, has deep historical roots. This object-centered poem employs “allegory through things,” linking the bottle palm’s appearance and plant characteristics to the lived reality of people under authoritarian rule who “dare to be angry but not to speak,” expressing the profound sorrow of suppressed speech. Like the “resident bird,” the bottle palm functions as a symbolic figure. The poet uses a third-person narrative voice, staying behind the scenes. Each stanza consists of three lines, resembling metrical poetry in form. Except for the final stanza’s classical syntax, the earlier sections use vernacular language, thus belonging to the “spoken rhythm” type. Linguistically, the poem exhibits code-mixing—for instance, the Taiwanese term “ru-xiang” (“like/as”) used as the metaphor marker. It also displays classical–vernacular blending, such as in “letting hair become strings” and “has the long gorge returned?” These factors make the melody somewhat awkward and the rhythm uneven, less fluid than “Resident Bird.” Fortunately, its clear imagery compensates for the musical shortcomings. Notably, the poem’s line breaks contain hidden ambiguity. The final stanza may be read in two ways:
Which better reflects the poet’s intent is left to the reader’s interpretive contemplation. “People Say You Are a Sweet Potato” / Lin Zongyuan People say you are a sweet potato. Your flesh is very sweet. People say you are a sweet potato. Are you a sweet potato? Go die. Lin Zongyuan’s Taiwanese-language poetry is highly distinctive among the poets of the “Li” Poetry Society. Taiwanese poetry is difficult to write because in many cases there are “sounds without characters.” Even when one forcibly searches for corresponding characters, many are archaic forms long fallen into disuse and no longer common, and thus not easily accepted. Whether using Romanization or borrowing homophonous Chinese characters, considerable reading barriers are created for non-native Taiwanese readers. This is precisely the urgent challenge faced by those who compose in Taiwanese and promote Taiwanese written expression. In this poem, apart from the phrase “can blossom and cluster while living in the soil,” in which the character jiu (meaning “to gather” or “to entangle”) is relatively rare and difficult to grasp semantically, most of the vocabulary is quite common. Taiwanese has eight tones and seven pitch contours, with a wide tonal range and rich timbre. According to phonological theory, its melody and rhythm should therefore be more pleasing than Mandarin, which has only four tones. This poem adopts the first-person voice and unfolds in a “letter form” addressed to a specific addressee. From the perspectives of form, rhythm, and meaning, the author finds that the poem can be divided into two parts: The first part comprises the first two stanzas; the second part includes the third through fifth stanzas. Both sections begin with the line “People say you are a sweet potato.” In the first part, the poet speaks in a reproachful tone: “You do not think of resisting / you only lament fate / shedding white tears,” which, in other words, criticizes Taiwanese people who would rather cling to survival under “authoritarian rule.” The third stanza clearly marks a semantic turning point. The poet then shifts sharply, posing a “hypothetical interrogation”: “If you could shed red blood / your flesh would also turn red / then you would blossom and bear your dreams / not fearing the sun nor loving the moon / daring to stand proudly on your land,” urging them to examine their conscience and take a stance. Yet this heartfelt appeal—like “I compare my heart to the bright moon”—is betrayed by the majority who seek only submissive survival. Thus in the final section, the poet unleashes the harshest curse, commanding these spineless, obedient Taiwanese people to “Go die / Go die,” revealing a heart torn between compassion and furious disappointment. Musically, the first half carries sorrow mixed with reproach; the second half surges with rage and condemnation. The tonal movement begins low and rises in waves, intensifying through the questioning lines “Is it really so?” and “Are you crying?” then accelerating through the hypothetical interrogation, finally erupting in the blunt curse at the end. The rhythm shifts from a gentle, mournful adagio to a moderate tempo at the turn, and finally to the strongest emotional force—producing a dramatic crescendo. After reading the poem, the author imagines many readers, like himself, feeling both blood boiling and faces flushed. 2. Native-Soil Poetry Attentive to the Land: Expressing Deep Local Affection and Concern Taiwanese poetry and native-soil poetry are “of the same lineage.” Around the time of the 1977 Native Literature Debate, Lin Zongyuan, Wu Sheng, and Xiang Yang successively published Taiwanese poems, and Taiwanese poetry emerged almost simultaneously with native-soil poetry. Poet Yu Guangzhong once remarked: “Only when writers like Wu Sheng appear does native-soil poetry finally acquire a clear face.” The author regards Wu Sheng as the initiator of “postwar native-soil poetry,” carrying forward the torch of native poetry from the Japanese colonial period’s New Literature Movement. After nearly thirty years of interruption, native poetry once again stepped onto the literary stage. “Sweet Potato Map” / Wu Sheng Father from Grandfather’s rough hands, Father from Grandfather’s stone-like shoulders, Father from Grandfather’s taciturn mouth, Although some people refuse to mention it, Poet Xiao Xiao once described the shared characteristics of native-soil poetry as follows: “Native-soil poetry uses native language to write about native people, events, and things, expressing deep local emotion.” He further explained its layered meaning as: “Native-soil poetry should include three levels: the beauty of the homeland, reflection on the homeland, and defense of the homeland.” In fact, using “native-soil poetry” to encompass “Taiwanese poetry” may reflect the observation that early Taiwanese poems largely remained within native subject matter. From literary theory, native-soil poetry is a classification based on subject matter, whereas Taiwanese poetry concerns the linguistic medium itself. From a synchronic linguistic perspective, Mandarin and Taiwanese are independent yet interacting language systems—both local dialect systems. Thus Taiwanese poetry should be viewed under the broader framework of linguistic systems in literary language, not conflated with the subject-based category of native-soil poetry. Indeed, in the 1970s, poets such as Lin Zongyuan of the “Li” Poetry Society and Xiang Yang of Poetry Line Quarterly already produced early forms of political and social poetry in Taiwanese, demonstrating that Taiwanese poetry is a superordinate category encompassing native, political, and social themes. Wu Sheng’s native poetry is not written to admire rural beauty but from a critical stance, contrasting the countryside with forces beyond it to reflect rural transformation amid rapid political and economic change. His language is not rhetorically refined poetic diction but plain everyday speech. He depicts rural people and life directly, with rural language, rural subjects, and rural emotion forming the core of his style. As Lin Mingde observed in “Taiwanese Images in Modern Poetry”: “Although many poets depict Taiwan, political taboos often allow only fleeting glimpses. Deep content and strong native consciousness are rare. Yet in Wu Sheng’s poetry, the quarter-century from 1960 to 1984 appears vividly before our eyes.” Wu Sheng’s poems clearly sketch traditional rural Taiwan and faithfully reflect the struggles of working classes in historical development. In “Sweet Potato Map,” the first three stanzas adopt a neat structure through parallelism, presenting sequential imagery of the same scope and nature. Parallelism is a common structural device in songs, allowing similar lyrics to be sung repeatedly to the same melody and rhythm. In poetic theory, parallelism embodies both “unity within diversity” and “differentiation within commonality”: multiple images arise in ordered succession, unified by a shared thematic source while simultaneously unfolding through rhythmic variation. The syntactic similarity of parallel lines reveals shared principles; the repetition of words reveals shared elements—forming a built-in musical performance structure. As seen in metrical and ballad-like poems such as Xu Zhimo’s “Saying Goodbye to Cambridge Again” and Yu Guangzhong’s “Four Rhymes of Homesickness,” as well as Wu Sheng’s “Sweet Potato Map,” the parallel structure itself generates song-like repetition through common melody and rhythm. “Soil” / Wu Sheng Day after day, from sunrise to sunset, The irrigation ditch is my bathroom. A mother with no weekends, no holidays, Day after day, from sunrise to sunset, The refreshing wind is the best electric fan. Not caring how the civilization of distant cities The poem “Soil” was once selected for the nationally compiled junior high school textbooks. Though it employs a plain realist technique, it is deeply moving. “Code-mixing of languages” seems to be an unavoidable choice by the poet, and at the same time reveals that although Wu Sheng’s schooling was conducted in “Beiping speech” (Mandarin), he never forgot his mother tongue. The “dual sound-track” of Mandarin and Taiwanese has almost become the common mode of linguistic expression for all generations educated after the war. This poem is performed in a first-person monologue form, with the first and third stanzas sharing the same structure. In the first stanza, lines three to five: “The irrigation ditch is my bathroom / insert Taiwanese rural vernacular directly into the poem, fully adopting the voice of a village farm woman. The language is plain and natural, forming a contrast with the Mandarin used by the poet in the second stanza. Likewise, in the third stanza, lines three to five: “The refreshing wind is the best electric fan / employ the same expressive method. Although this poem contains “mixed languages,” it does not hinder the reader’s comprehension of the imagery, because the poet presents it naturally. Taiwanese spoken from the mother’s role is acceptable, since she is a rural farm woman who has lived with the land for many years. 3. Romantic-Rhythm Lyric Poetry: Love Songs with Gentle Melody and Romantic Mood In Taiwanese modern poetry, lyric poems often present wave-like melodic rises and falls, emphasizing emotional resonance between beginnings, endings, and stanzas. Among these, Zheng Chouyu, Yang Mu, Zhang Cuo, and Luo Zhicheng are particularly noted for stylistic distinctiveness and musical beauty. The author selects examples from three poets below. “By the Water’s Edge” / Yang Mu I have already sat here for four afternoons. (Within solitude —) Foxtail grass has grown from my trousers up to my shoulders, Twenty meters to the south, a laughter-loving dandelion. Let the water sounds of four afternoons be likened to four afternoons of footsteps. The poet employs a first-person monologue form, through quietly sitting on a bridge for four afternoons and listening to the murmuring stream, narrating what has occurred and the feelings within, creating a poem with lingering melody and emotional resonance. This poem mainly uses long lines, interwoven with short lines to introduce rhythmic variation. Long lines contain more syllables, usually four or more, thus producing a flowing, gentle rhythm. Moreover, the poet frequently uses sentence-ending particles such as “le,” “a,” and “ba.” These unstressed particles naturally extend sound duration, making line endings more rounded and melodic. For example: “The water sounds of four afternoons / be likened to / four afternoons of footsteps” The first line has five rhythmic units; the second has four. Such long lines in lyric poetry create prolonged tone and relaxed tempo. Alternating with short lines enriches rhythmic variation. This poem consistently employs the previously mentioned “speech-type rhythm,” allowing readers to feel natural intimacy similar to everyday speech. “The wind-pollinated flowers drift pollen onto my bamboo hat” describes motion and thus belongs to “action rhythm,” while “the murmuring water sound” produces both motion and sound effects, combining “action rhythm” and “sound rhythm.” “Parting Gift” / Zheng Chouyu This time I leave you — it is wind, it is rain, it is night. Thinking at this moment you have already returned to your riverside home, The mountains retreat far away, the plains stretch even wider. —————————— The kite has gone, leaving a line of broken mistake. —————————— This time I leave you, and no longer wish to see you again. [Author’s note: only the opening, ending, and a brief middle section are excerpted.] This is a typical love poem, deeply emotional, infused with sorrowful melancholy, plaintive and poignant, profoundly moving. The poet adopts a first-person “epistolary” narrative mode, pouring out heartfelt emotions toward a specific addressee — a form of “speech-type rhythm.” The author, having written modern poetry for over twenty years, believes that if a poet can compose even a few widely cherished poems in a lifetime, it is already a life well spent. Zheng Chouyu’s achievements are self-evident. His works such as “Mistake,” “The Mistress,” “Letters Beyond the Mountains,” “Skylight,” “Border Hotel,” “Journey,” and this poem “Parting Gift” are all widely circulated, earning him the praise: “Wherever there are hoofbeats, there is Zheng Chouyu.” In “Parting Gift,” the first sentence of both opening and closing stanzas repeats “This time I leave you,” creating a structural echo. In Western free verse, this is called “initial rhyme,” differing from “end rhyme.” From a rhetorical perspective, this is termed a “refrain with separation.” The poem likewise employs colloquial “speech-type rhythm,” simultaneously addressing the beloved “you” in intimate confession and narrating a love story to readers with a complete narrative structure. Through “imaginative visualization,” two locations at the same moment are interwoven, producing imagery similar to cinematic “double exposure.” The rhythm of “Parting Gift” is extremely gentle and slow, with frequent use of elongating sound particles such as “le” and “de.” Moreover, the poet connects short lines with medium and long lines within the same verse, extending rhythmic wavelengths and generating echo-like overlapping resonance. This produces a profoundly lingering, sorrowfully beautiful musicality — as if listening to a male singer’s deep, husky baritone, magnetic and emotionally rich, leaving the listener absorbed and reflective long after. “Willow-Leaf Twin Sabers” ∕ Chang Tso In the winter of the Year of Guihai, I happened by chance to acquire a pair of ancient willow-leaf sabers at a western “gun show.” I was overjoyed beyond measure and could not put them down. Having wandered in foreign lands for many years, these sabers and I seemed to recognize each other at first sight, as though old friends reunited, clasping hands and sighing in mutual sympathy. Though I was a frequent visitor to “gun shows,” the chance of obtaining such blades was truly something that could be encountered but not sought. On a cold, rainy night, beneath a solitary lamp, I caressed the blades—and thus this poem was born. Tonight, how shall we trace each other’s past lives? Then tell me— “Since you departed, my lord, The years wound us as they pass; seasons change again and again. Most heartbreaking of all— Chang Tso’s lyric poetry carries both the sentiments of the overseas wanderer and the passionate grievances of the jianghu world. Poems such as “Error Sonnets XIV,” “Lament of the Twin Jade Rings,” “The Drifter,” “Silent Spring Night,” and “Fine Snow,” among others, combine beauty with sorrow. This romantic lyrical style is not one that ordinary young poets can easily imitate. Chang Tso excels at incorporating classical allusions into poetry, endowing his works with historical depth and cultural resonance. His sentence structures appear prose-like, yet at moments of stanzaic transition he tightens the imagery to force forth poetic atmosphere: “you silently bare yourself to reveal It is precisely within such historical and cultural reflection that the poem’s depth and vision naturally expand. A fondness for connective words and transitional phrases constitutes a grammatical hallmark of Chang Tso’s poetry. Naturally, such usage dilutes density and loosens structure, elongating lines and producing a relaxed rhythm resembling prose poetry. Hence Chang Tso strategically inserts classical Chinese lines to recalibrate the rhythm, resulting in a mixture of classical and vernacular language—creating a kind of classical-modern “audiovisual illusion.” This poem adopts a “first-person dialogic performance” and employs a “speech-like rhythm,” drawing readers directly into the poetic scene. The interwoven classical phrasing further saturates the atmosphere with martial romance and jianghu passion. 4. The Structurally Balanced Modern Yuefu: Folk Songs with Beautiful Melodies in Modern Poetry Poetry and music were originally one. Though new poetry has progressed toward “unrhymed verse,” modern songs still preserve the ancient form of “poetry sung with music.” They emphasize structural regularities such as parallelism in melody, repeated chanting that forms harmonic coordination, and continued use of rhyme to maintain sonic resonance across stanzas. If such formal constraints are likened to “shackles and handcuffs,” then the overwhelming majority of modern lyrics written within metrical systems demonstrate that such “constraints” have not hindered creators—on the contrary, they delight in dancing while wearing them. The abandonment of metrical form in new poetry has in fact narrowed its expressive modes, gradually reducing it to a self-indulgent plaything for a small elite. Thus, as poets confront the reality of rapidly declining readership, they must reflect: why do metrical forms in modern lyrics continue to gain such widespread affection and identification? Reuniting new poetry with music would surely reclaim part of the audience. If every lyricist had received poetic training, or possessed rhetorical mastery of new poetry; or if every poet had fundamental musical literacy, new poetry could step out of the ivory tower and return to the ears and eyes of the public. In Taiwan’s poetic history, new poetry has indeed entered the musical stage and achieved great popularity: “Four Rhymes of Nostalgia” ∕ Yu Kwang-chung Give me a ladle of Yangtze water—ah, Yangtze water, Give me a palmful of crabapple red—ah, crabapple red, Give me a flake of snow-white—ah, snow-white, Give me a blossom of wintersweet fragrance—ah, wintersweet fragrance, In the early 1980s, the rise of “campus folk songs” refreshed listeners with their clean, youthful spirit. Songs such as “Returning to the Sandy City,” “Visiting Spring,” “Descendants of the Dragon,” “Song of the Drifter,” “Olive Tree,” and “Fisherman’s Chant” captured countless youthful hearts. “Four Rhymes of Nostalgia” followed naturally—its light melody infused with national longing and intense homesickness. Structured in four stanzas with parallel design and recurring rhymes, each stanza maintains internal rhyme, making it a quintessential “ballad-style poem.” “Living Parting” ∕ Hsi Mu-jung Please look once more— Please engrave this moment Sorrow beyond sorrow—living parting; “Frontier Song” ∕ Hsi Mu-jung Please sing for me a frontier song, That fragrance found only beyond the Great Wall— And we must always sing again and again, Hsi Mu-jung’s prose and poetry, beloved by young readers, created a lasting “Hsi Mu-jung phenomenon.” Youth, time, nostalgia, dreams, and love form her signature themes. Her delicate lyricism carries beautiful sorrow, excelling especially in emotional subjects. Compared with avant-garde poets such as Hsia Yu and Yen Ai-lin, her style appears traditional or even conservative—but “conservative,” in structure and rhetoric, often signifies maturity and steadiness. Fundamentally a lyrical poet, Hsi Mu-jung belongs to what Wang Guowei termed the “subjective poet”: “Subjective poets need not experience much of the world. The less they experience, the more genuine their temperament.” During her transition toward intellectual poetry, critics observed moments of excessive didacticism or conceptual looseness. Shen Qi commented: “Hsi Mu-jung’s fundamental weakness lies in her failure to penetrate deeply into the artistic realm of modern poetry at the linguistic level…” Following her 1989 journey to the Mongolian Plateau, cultural and historical themes expanded her poetic scope—though with mixed success. Nevertheless, critics affirm her consistent elegance, craftsmanship, and emotional clarity. Both “Living Parting” and “Frontier Song” were later set to music—performed by Pan Yueyun and Tsai Chin respectively—opening a new mode of integration between modern poetry and song beyond traditional ballad forms. Concluding Technical Observations (translated faithfully)
“If you do not love to hear it, it is because the song holds none of your longing”— Poetry that moves readers, the author concludes, lies not in verbal ornamentation or deliberate mystification. Poetry of the Han dynasties’ Yuefu as well as Tang poetry and Song lyrics, because of their formally well-structured poetic forms, could all be “set to music and sung with instrumental accompaniment.” Poetry and song were thus combined, enabling them to circulate widely among the people and become popular literature. This advantage is something that “formally free” modern poetry finds difficult to rival. Modern poetry has declined into a small-circle, minority literature. This indeed reflects the reality that in an industrial and commercial society, modern people generally do not place much importance on literary cultivation. However, many modern poets who advocate Surrealism and Postmodernism deliberately write poems with bizarre forms and tortuous, obscure content, making readers either fearful at first sight or able only to guess at meanings from the surface of the words—as if their sole purpose were to drive away the few remaining readers of modern poetry. Such a mentality is truly unworthy of admiration. If modern poetry wishes to once again enter popular society, apart from the path of “combining poetry with song”—for example, Yu Guangzhong’s folk-song-flavored Nostalgia in Four Rhymes, Xi Murong’s Ballad of Going Beyond the Pass, Chen Kehua’s modern lyrical poems such as Butterfly Garment and Taipei’s Sky, as well as Lu Hansleeve’s Taiwanese love poems—there currently seems to be no better method of promotion. I have been writing modern poetry for twenty years, and I deeply feel that modern poets have always hidden in ivory towers, able only to admire themselves in isolation and lament their own frustrations. When poetry cannot reach the outside world, it is the sorrow of poets—and also the sorrow of Taiwanese society as a whole. Is it really necessary for modern poetry to completely abandon the parallelism and antithetical structures of regulated verse, as well as harmony and rhythm, in order to express modern people’s imagistic thinking and inner emotions? This still seems open to debate. After all, besides the obscurity and difficulty of its imagery, another major reason modern poetry is not accepted by most literary readers is that it has gradually lost its musical beauty, becoming no different from prose. Therefore, it is necessary for us to re-examine contemporary modern poetry, and to work seriously and practically on two fronts at once: recovering poetic rhythm in modern poetry and constructing a new musicality within free verse. Conclusion: The rhythm and tempo of modern poetry together constitute its musicality. The two complement each other, yet should not be confused with one another. Just as imagistic thinking together forms imagery, abstract ideas and concrete objects, though mutually interrelated, should not be conflated. Notes:
“Golden Section” — a rule that can automatically generate a pleasing visual sensation — was firmly believed by the ancient Greeks to symbolize the most beautiful and mysterious proportion. Its basic method is to divide a line into two unequal parts so that the ratio of the shorter segment to the longer segment equals the ratio of the longer segment to the entire length of the line. Assuming the longer segment is b and the shorter segment is a, its abstract algebraic form is: a : b = b : (a + b) Using geometric methods, one can easily obtain approximate values of the golden ratio: 1 : 1.618, 2 : 3, 3 : 5, 5 : 8, 8 : 13, 13 : 21 …
“Rhythm is regular syllabic sound; syllables are the rhythmic units of sound.” Also see Xiang Ming, Fifty Questions on Modern Poetry (Part One), “Question Twenty-Four: Rhythm and Tempo,” p.96: “Tempo refers to the rises and falls between sentences, also called beat; rhythm refers to rhyme at the ends of lines, also called harmonic sound.” Taipei, Erya Publishing House, first edition February 1997.
“The rhythm of poetry is both musical and linguistic. The proportion of these two kinds of rhythm varies according to the nature of the poem: pure lyric poetry is closer to song, where musical rhythm often outweighs linguistic rhythm; dramatic and narrative poetry are closer to speech, where linguistic rhythm often outweighs musical rhythm.”
“What we can perceive with our eyes is called ‘rhythm of movement’; what we can hear with our ears is called ‘rhythm of sound.’” Author’s note: the former is like “Bright moon shines among pine trees,” while the latter is like “Clear spring flows over stones.”
“Modern poetry as we now see it can be analyzed according to whether each line ends mainly with two-beat pauses or three-beat pauses, forming two basic tonal tendencies. If a poem is dominated by two-beat endings, its tone tends toward a speaking style (equivalent to the traditional ‘recited tone’); if dominated by three-beat endings, its tone tends toward a singing style (equivalent to the traditional ‘chanted tone’).” Guangzhou, Huacheng Publishing House, third printing April 1991.
Professor Chen Zhengzhi divides musicality into: (1) Internal musicality (internal rhythm) and The former is further divided into: The latter is further divided into: Professor Chen’s classification is logically clear and highly valuable for reference.
Using two or more regional languages simultaneously (such as Beijing Mandarin and Taiwanese) is merely a case of language mixing. Although this may create some difficulty in reading for those without bilingual ability, in terms of a poem’s melody and rhythm, it is generally better than classical-vernacular mixing—especially when the poet chooses to use vernacular speech rather than classical language. This is because vernacular tends toward a speaking-style rhythm, whereas classical language tends toward a humming-style rhythm.
References:
|
|
| ( 創作｜文學賞析 ) |
