Free-verse poems in fixed forms: tracing the "silhouette" of Zheng Chouyu's early poems.

Foreword

The development of Chinese poetry from ancient days to modern times, as modern Chinese poet Zheng Chouyu ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] b. 1933) observes, consists mainly of a change in the sense of rhythm (Zhang, 153). Such an observation naturally reminds us of modern-Chinese-poetry founder Hu Shi [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] and of his theory about "shiti de da jiefang" [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] [the great liberation of poetic form]. Hu sees the "liberation" not only in the transition from the "Old Poetry" to the "New Poetry," but also in the whole history of development of Chinese poetic forms--the gradual evolution from the restriction of uniform lines of four, five, or seven characters, to the flexibility of the alternation between long and short lines, and finally to the complete freedom to shape the form in accordance with the content (Hu, 166).

The short history of modern Chinese poetry is marked by the quest for a way to embrace such "complete" freedom in poetic expression. When Zheng Chouyu embarked on his poetic career, modern Chinese poetry had seen the theory and practice of Hu Shi's "ziran yinjie" [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] [natural tune and rhythm], (1) of the Crescent Moon School's [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] new regular verse, and of the early Symbolist-Modernist free verse. Hu's proposal of "natural sound and rhythm," as Chen Benyi [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] points out, was important in setting the theoretical foundation for the burgeoning "New Poetry" while also running the risk of turning poetry into prose (Chen, 383-87). In response to such a risk, the Crescent Moon School strove to develop a new regular verse by adapting Western metrical forms and concepts, the most notable effort being Wen Yiduo's [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] use of the English concept of "foot" in modern Chinese prosody to create for each poem a highly uniform meter by regulating the number of pauses in the line in addition to the overall length of a line. (2) Many of Crescent Moon poets' works also show the use of an imported or self-created rhyme scheme. Subsequently, Dai Wangshu [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], in his effort to establish a Modernist free-verse form in Chinese poetry, put forth his theory of "wu yinyue chengfen" [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] [no musical components]: poetry should be rid of musical features. The rhythm of a poem lies not in the rise and fall of tones or the leashing and unleashing of sounds, but in the ebb and flow of feelings and thoughts in the poem (Dai, 143-44).

Written between the 1950s and 1970s, Zheng's poetic works, while justifiably classified as free verse, show mostly a creative adaptation of certain elements of regular verse. With reference to setting the musical features of Zheng's poem "Fu bie" [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] [A Farewell Song] against those of Xu Zhimo's [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] "Zai bie kang qiao" [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] [A Second Valediction to Cambridge] in the 1970s, Yang Mu states: "instead of seeking irregularity within the confines of the regular, Zheng creates regularity in the freedom of the irregular" (Yang, 26). In fact, even general readers (who probably do not bother to make any prosodic analysis) will respond to Zheng's music--in addition to his fresh imagery--which makes his poems, unlike some modern Chinese poems, pleasant to the ear and easy to commit to memory. This musical quality may partly explain the popularity of Zheng's poems and the general association of his works with classical Chinese poetry. It is also part of what sets him apart from his fellow Modernist poets in the 1950s and 1960s.

In his critical discussion "Meili de cuowei: Zheng Chouyu lun" [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] [Beautiful Mis-place: On Zheng Chouyu], mainland-Chinese poet Shen Qi [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], while noting Zheng as a core member of Taiwan's Modernist Poetic School, dissociates Zheng from other poets of the local "Modernist Movement" (Shen, 242-66). Other Modernist poets inclined toward a modern sensibility, Zheng toward a classical sensibility; other Modernist poets in their rhythms inclined toward no order, Zheng toward order; other Modernist poets in their aesthetic inclined toward the intellectual, the morbid, and the depraved, Zheng toward the lyrical and the beautiful. Shen writes:

 
  Modern [Chinese] poetry, having come to the present stage of 
  development, has shown at least three major defects which are 
  widely acknowledged among critics: 1) most modern Chinese poems 
  read too much like prose, discarding totally the beauty of rhyme 
  and rhythm; 2) the language is too much Westernized, and many poems 
  have lost all the beauty of classical Chinese poetic language; and 
  3) too much "intellectual" contrivance results in the dehydration 
  and suffocation of the poetic "elves." Checking Zheng's poetry for 
  these three major defects, we may notice that not only has Zheng 
  avoided stepping into these pitfalls, he has also--by rejuvenating 
  traditional elements and by re-creating classical beauty--filled 
  them up. (250) 

This paper seeks to explore one of the elements of "order" in Zheng's early free-verse poems which give them an unmistakable mark of poetry instead of prose. In so doing, I do not intend to disregard the success of other free-verse poems of which the power lies in some underlying harmony--of thoughts and feelings conveyed in the poem--rather than some verbal music that is obvious to the ear. As Chen Benyi observes, with reference to Dai's theory of "no musical components," in practice, modern free-verse poems fall into two categories: those that incorporate musical components and those that do not (Chen, 432). On the one end, there are prose-poems in which too much music may indeed "distort" (to borrow Dai's word), if not distract one from the meaning conveyed in the poem; on the other end, there are richly musical poems like Zheng's free verse in which the music is part of the meaning.