The Book of Songs by Confucius

First transcribed:Shi Jing, twelfth century b.c.e. (English translation, 1875)

Type of work: Poetry

The Work:

The earliest repository of Chinese verse, The Book of Songs, contains 305 poems of folk and court origins. The court poems are more or less ceremonial in character, designed to be sung at sacrifices, to accompany the dances and feasts in honor of dynastic ancestors, or to adorn such formal occasions as receptions, banquets, chases, and archery contests. The folk songs comprise love lyrics of various kinds, epithalamiums, complaints, satires, elegies, and georgics.

Almost all the poems in The Book of Songs were composed in the pre-Confucian period of the Chou Dynasty (c. 1122-222 b.c.e.). In the ceremonial odes the wisdom and prowess of its founders—the kings Wen and Wu and the duke of Chou—are frequently recalled, although a few pieces, hardly of greater antiquity, celebrate the splendid achievements of even earlier dynasties, the Hsia and the Shang. According to a now-discredited tradition, Confucius was the compiler of this anthology and rejected nine-tenths of the three thousand poems then extant; but the canon must have been well fixed by his time, and diplomats and scholars even then knew the poems by heart, quoting them on every conceivable occasion to display their literary attainment or political sagacity. It is easy to see why the court poetry—so vital to the discharge of religious and state functions—should have been saved, but the early preservation of so much folk poetry is a more curious matter. In the absence of better explanation, one must accept the tradition that the Chou kings made a point of collecting the popular ballads of their many vassal states and using them as a political barometer to gauge the happiness or discontent of the populace. All the poems in The Book of Songs were meant to be sung, but the tunes were already lost by the time of the Han Dynasty (206 b.c.e.-220 c.e.).

The anthology, as it exists today, is divided into four sections: kuo feng, the smaller ya, the greater ya, and sung. While kuo feng are the folk songs of the vassal states and both ya and sung may be indifferently translated as odes, the divisions are hardly clean-cut. Many of the poems in the category of the smaller ya are apparently folk songs, and some of the greater ya poems are little differentiated from the religious and dynastic odes of the sung section. As documents of ancient China, the folk songs and courtly odes are of great historical and anthropological interest. To these, scholars owe the first mention of the sage kings and mythical heroes, the coherent presentation of the animistic beliefs of the early Chinese regarding ancestor worship and the adaptation of human labor to the cyclic changes in nature, the precise details of many religious and state rituals, and the intimate evocation of the life of a simple people of great emotional integrity: their courtships and marriages, their work on the farm, and their much-detested military service. On the strength of the love poems alone, the French Sinologist Marcel Granet reconstructed a fascinating picture of mating customs and fertility rites in the dawn of Chinese history.

Historical considerations aside, The Book of Songs is primarily poetry and should be read as such. Confucius once told his disciples,

My children, why do you not study the Poetry? Poetry will stimulate your emotions, help you to be more observant, enlarge your sympathies, and moderate your resentment of injustice. It is useful at home in the service of one’s father, abroad in the service of one’s prince. Furthermore, it will widen your acquaintance with the names of birds, beasts, plants, and trees.

One is hardly surprised that Confucius attached great importance to The Book of Songs as a guide to good conduct and as a manual of useful information; in ancient Greece, the study of Homer was urged on similar grounds. The poetry, aside from its great social and ceremonial utility, also mentions by name about seventy kinds of plants, thirty kinds each of trees, beasts, and birds, ten kinds of fish, and twenty kinds of insects. The book is a virtual catalog of the more common flora and fauna of the Middle Kingdom. There are not many other sources for the study of ancient China in which such a variety of information is so readily available.

If one reads Confucius correctly, the key message in his little speech above attests his awareness of the humanizing influence of poetry, its power to regulate and refine emotions, to enlarge sympathy. To Confucius, li (ritual, etiquette), music, and poetry constitute an inseparable triad. While li is designed to bring out the best qualities of people in their everyday social intercourse as well as on the formal occasions of rejoicing and mourning, Confucius is also aware that there is an excess of emotion in people that cannot be rendered in terms of ritual or of etiquette. To him, therefore, li is the approximation of the ideal and poetry, the expression of the actual, although, as in much of The Book of Songs, poetry can be an integral part of a ritualistic occasion. Music is closely allied to ritual and poetry because it serves the dual function of supporting courteous behavior and facilitating the expression of one’s true feelings.

To the modern reader, the more vital portion of The Book of Songs is surely the folk songs—160 kuo feng poems plus many others—because they speak the universal language of one’s true feelings. These songs are quite simple in structure, a series of short rhymed stanzas. The basic unit is the four-word line, and the closing line of each stanza is usually a refrain. Within the simple structure of each poem, however, a little drama unfolds. As in all ballad poetry, the poet seldom speaks in person: The speaker may be a woman awaiting her lover by a ford (the wading of a creek or shallow river by a couple may be a symbol of marital engagement), or detaining her lover in bed while the dawn is breaking, or telling her story of woe after her husband has been pressed into military service or has deserted her. The speaker may be the lover who tosses and turns all night in bed thinking of his girl, who takes a walk by the eastern gate and sees women shining like clouds but still prefers his own choice, a modest woman of “plain cloth and gray kerchief.” In other poems the speaker is the soldier who climbs a barren hill and acutely misses his kinsfolk; the exile who, seeing the yellow birds pecking in the fields, is seized with the sudden impulse to return home; the farmer who thinks of migrating to another state because the large rats in his fields remind him of the greater rapacity of the officials. This dramatic quality is one reason why the folk songs have a universal appeal and a perennial charm about them.

Another source of poetic appeal is the language. The diction of The Book of Songs has an archaic flavor that adds immeasurably to the meaning of the poems. The folk songs, especially, have retained a pristine quality because the simple emotions that they embody are clothed in a language beyond the contamination of modern idiom, beyond the corrosion of time. The language has another strength that is characteristic of Chinese poetry in general: its elliptical density. In a four-word line there is absolutely no room for decoration or for syntactical connectives; each word must have a maximal poetic weight and suggestiveness to merit inclusion.

To a student of English poetry long accustomed to its roses and nightingales, The Book of Songs, with its duckweed and dolichos, mulberry and date trees, magpies and orioles, cicadas and locusts, presents a distinctively new landscape. In almost every folk song, nature is an integral part of the human situation: The mulberry tree is shedding its leaves upon the ground and the woman thinks of her state of desertion; ripe plums are dropping from the tree and presently there will be only three left on the boughs, and the woman wonders if she will ever have a lover, because she, too, is ripe for love. The lovers, farmers, and soldiers in the folk songs are so physically close to nature, there is seldom any need to resort to simile or explicit metaphor. The strategy of correspondence, or objective correlative, is characteristic of The Book of Songs.

In view of the later development of Chinese poetry, the love songs and complaints appear especially important. Such conventional themes as the separation of husband and wife, the poverty of peasants, the evils of officialdom and war, and the appropriate moods induced by seasonal changes were all first embodied in The Book of Songs. The work has remained unsurpassed in its depiction of love. Whereas the later poets, with the exception of an exquisite few, adopt the mask of the forsaken or forlorn woman more or less as a literary convention, the Chinese women in The Book of Songs speak out unafraid in the spontaneity of the natural, unashamed womanhood. By contrast, Chinese women of subsequent history, confined in the home and disallowed the privilege of free social intercourse with men, appear sad and dull indeed.

Bibliography

Confucius. The Book of Songs: The Ancient Classic of Poetry. Translated by Arthur Waley, edited with additional translations by Joseph R. Allen. New York: Grove Press, 1996. Waley, a preeminent translator of East Asian literature, first translated The Book of Songs in 1937. This updated edition includes fifteen poems that were not included in the initial translation and restores the poems to their original order. It also contains a foreword in which Stephen Owens discusses the significance of the poems and a postface providing a literary history of the work.

Dobson, W. A. C. H. The Language of “The Book of Songs.” Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press, 1968. A grammar of the language of The Book of Songs, with useful discussions of the linguistic characteristics of each of its four divisions. Dobson argues that the poems derive from different periods.

Legge, James. The She King. Volume 4 of The Chinese Classics. Reprint. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961. Provides a rich source of materials for the critical reader who can excuse Christian interpretations for Chinese ideas and who can enjoy stories without needing strictly factual scholarship. Includes translation, notes, and history of the text.

Van Zoeren, Steven. Poetry and Personality: Reading, Exegesis, and Hermeneutics in Traditional China. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991. Chronicles the principles for interpreting the text as they have changed over two thousand years, with a focus on the Mao school and the codes by which the text may have been written and read.

Yeh, Shan. The Bell and the Drum: Shih Ching as Formulaic Poetry in an Oral Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. Includes an index to references to the 305 poems. Argues that the work is poetry not because of originality but because of the totality of its cultural associations, which are contained in Chinese oral tradition and formulaic stock phrases.

Yu, Pauline. “The Book of Songs.” In Masterworks of Asian Literature in Comparative Perspective, edited by Barbara Miller. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1994. One of the best and simplest short discussions of the work. Includes topics for discussion and a view of translations of the text.