sfharper

Learning from Poetry
2012-09-16 22:21:01 (UTC)

Examining the Difference Between Song Dynasty Poetry and Tang Dynasty Poetry

When looking back to my trip to China, I found "Selected Poems and Pictures of the Tang Dynasty" and "Selected Poems and Pictures of the Song Dynasty" on my bookshelf. I noticed the Tang Dynasty Poems (618-907) had much more variety of form than the Song Dynasty (960-1279) and wondered what had caused the change. The two periods were separated by 54 years of the Five Dynasty Period in which China had been divided up and chaotic. The return to strict convention and form seems to be a result of the desire for serenity more than anything.

In my own poems, I noticed that I gradually altered my viewpoint from strictly personal poems that related to my own experience and emotional outlook. In some ways personal poems seem to have an undeniable truth. I am the one that says this because I have been there and experienced it.

On the alternative, a poem without pronouns or in the third person, he, she, we, tend to invite others into a poem and say "this is something we all share" i.e. the universal truth.

Do forms add truth? Or is it just the acknowledgement that to work a poem into a shape or form means that more thought has been put into it?

When I look carefully at form I tend to be more precise. I tend to eliminate words and phrases because they don't fit. I do know that by adding more specificity I tend to step into a more thoughtful method of writing poems.

Looking at poems from the Song Dynasty, titled "Buddhist Dancers", I notice the ending line:

My homeless grief won't cease; the wind slants our white hoods.

What is noticeable is a personal statement about the poet, Su Xiang's,
experience of white shapes bent over and tying it to her feelings of absence from home. Her images are quite startling and only the white hoods ties me into the fact that this might be Buddhist traveling attire.

In the Tang Dynasty collection, Li Bai's poem "Heart's Sorrow" starts with the rolling up of the pearl screen in the morning. And the poet notices her tear stains, then makes the comment at the end:

The man she hates no one knows who should be.

This poem could belong to any woman unhappy in a marriage at any occasion, only the first line ties it to a different world than mine. It is eternal.

So despite the apparent dissimilarity between the two collections in terms of content and poems, I find more cultural cues that tie them together--specific details of place, titles, connection between emotion and setting.

Well, this is why I am writing a diary and not an article, too few examples to make anything really sharp and clear, but thoughts about what I have read. I personally like using unusual details to capture a moment and unusual situations in nature to inspire me.




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