Page:A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (1919).djvu/31

 century critic, only thirty-four rhymes were used. They were, indeed, assonances of the roughest kind.

[b] "Deflected" words are used for rhyming as freely as "flat" words.

[c] Tone-arrangement. The tones were disregarded. [Lines can be found in pre-T'ang poems in which five deflected tones occur in succession, an arrangement which would have been painful to the ear of a T'ang writer and would probably have been avoided by classical poets even when using the old style.]

Lü-shih [New Style].

[a] The rhymes used are the "106" of modern dictionaries [not those of the Odes, as Giles states]. Rhymes in the flat tone are preferred. In a quatrain the lines which do not rhyme must end on the opposite tone to that of the rhyme. This law is absolute in Lü-shih and a tendency in this direction is found even in Ku-shih.

[b] There is a tendency to antithetical arrangement of tones in the two lines of a couplet, especially in the last part of the lines.

[c] A tendency for the tones to go in pairs, e.g. [A=flat, B=deflected]: AA BBA or ABB AA, rather than in threes. Three like tones only come together when divided by a "cesura," e.g., the line BB/AAA would be avoided, but not the line BBAA/ABB.

[d] Verbal parallelism in the couplet, e.g.:

After long illness one first realizes that seeking medicines is a mistake; In one's decaying years one begins to repent that one’s study of books was deferred. [ 25 ]