Page:A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (1919).djvu/29

. These varieties make up the Four Tones of Classical Chinese.

The "deflected" tones are distinctly more emphatic, and so have a faint analogy to our stressed syllables. They are also, in an even more remote way, analogous to the long vowels of Latin prosody. A line ending with a "level" has consequently to some extent the effect of a "feminine ending." Certain causes, which I need not specify here, led to an increasing importance of "tone" in the Chinese language from the fifth century onwards. It was natural that this change should be reflected in Chinese prosody. A certain Shēn Yo [A. D. 441–513] first propounded the laws of tone-succession in poetry. From that time till the eighth century the Lü-shih or "strictly regulated poem" gradually evolved. But poets continued [and continue till to-day], side by side with their lü-shih, to write in the old metre which disregards tone, calling such poems Ku shih, "old poems." Previous European statements about Chinese prosody should be accepted with great caution. Writers have attempted to define the lü-shih with far too great precision.

The Chinese themselves are apt to forget that T'ang poets seldom obeyed the laws designed in later school-books as essential to classical poetry; or, if they notice that a verse by Li Po does not conform, they stigmatize it as "irregular and not to be imitated."

The reader will infer that the distinction between "old poems" and irregular lü-shih is often arbitrary. This is certainly the case; I have found the same poem classified [ 23 ]