The Reciprocal Origins of Pentasyllabic Verse and of Imitation Poetry

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50 Chapter 2

Chapter 2 The Reciprocal Origins of Pentasyllabic Verse and of Imitation Poetry

Blue dye derives from the indigo plant but is bluer than the plant itself; ice is formed by water but is colder than water itself. Xunzi1 ⸪ The fact that most Six Dynasties ni poems were composed in pentasyllabic meter reflects a profound relationship between imitation poems and the origins of pentasyllabic verse. Elite pentasyllabic verse originated as kind of refined or formalized version of more fluid songs; imitations of pentasyllabic verse were in turn more refined or standardized versions of earlier poems. Some of the earliest surviving examples of pentasyllabic verse originated as adaptations of other poems, or recastings of songs in a more permanent written form. Indeed, one reason so few examples of pentasyllabic verse survive from this early period is that the form began as a kind of song that was transmitted orally and not written down. Later, some of these poems were identified as yuefu 樂府, “Music Bureau” songs, but Han texts like Lady Ban’s fan poem were classified both as shi and yuefu.2 Conversely, imitation poems were often a kind of refinement or crystallization of preexisting songs or poems. The earliest examples of each form are not necessarily even distinguished, but “original poems,” “imitation poems,” and “songs” are overlapping categories. An examination of imitation poetry is itself a route to understanding the early development of pentasyllabic verse. From the third century on, however, “imitation poems” began to sharpen the distinctions among these categories. Yuefu is in one sense the opposite ex- treme on the spectrum of authorial intent from ni poetry: while yuefu often employs a generalized and typecast narrator, such as an abandoned woman or

1 Quoted from Xunzi jijie 1.1, but similar proverbs are preserved in other early texts. The form of the proverb in Xunzi is a refinement and perfection of previously transmitted sayings. 2 This distinction has never been sorted out properly, though. The title of the great Song com- pilation of yuefu, “Yuefu shiji,” itself fails to distinguish yuefu and shi. On the overall development of yuefu, see Masuda, Gafu no rekishiteki kenkyū.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004282452_004 The Reciprocal Origins Of Pentasyllabic Verse 51 a soldier, imitation poems can actually have two author/speakers, the original poet and the one imitated. If imitation poetry exhibits the double voice of poetry, yuefu is the zero voice, the author or speaker rarely identified. Of course, in practice, simply looking at the texts of the poems without their titles, these distinctions are not always so clear, but the titles and genres suggest divergent reading practices.3 Already by the third century with Fu Xuan, discussed in this chapter, yuefu was becoming a distinct genre mostly separate from that of imitation poetry, as is suggested by Jiang Yan’s relatively scant production of yuefu.4 This chapter compares two of the earliest extant pentasyllabic poems with some of the earliest imitation poems. Some of these Han poems likely date to the very end of the Han dynasty, the Jian’an period (196–220), only half a century before the first imitations in the Western Jin (265–317).5 The first imitation poems were imitations of Han poetry, not just because the earliest examples of pentasyllabic verse dated to the Han, but also because the self- definition of imitation poetry arose in response to the dynamics of Han pentasyllabic verse. Early pentasyllabic poems attributed to the Han relied on the adaptation and rewriting of earlier work, but also employed a rhetoric of imitation, borrowing the voices of earlier poets to present new laments. Although standard chronology places the earliest pentasyllabic poems several centuries earlier than the earliest imitation poems, to a large extent these source poems were themselves fundamentally imitative, and the development of imitation poems proper was a new realization of tendencies already inherent in early pentasyllabic verse. While examining the pentasyllabic verse of the Han, whose dating and origins are often unclear, it is important to remember that we also have many works of Han poetry that can be confidently attributed to historical authors. Some of these poems will indeed be mentioned in the discussion to follow, but they are not central to this story because they were written in other meters

3 As well as performance practices; this issue is not particularly germane to the interpretation and study of imitation poems, but Charles Egan’s proposal that various early yuefu texts are often simply performance variants is plausible. See Egan, “Reconsidering the Role of Folk Songs in Pre-T’ang Yüeh-Fu Development.” 4 Jiang Yan has a few pieces of court music, which are a separate matter altogether, and one song in the Yuefu shiji, “Picking Water Caltrops” 采菱曲 (Yuefu shiji 51.740). 5 Owen’s The Making of Early Classical Chinese Poetry is illuminating on this issue. He empha- sizes the role of later anthologies, from the Wen xuan to the Yuefu shiji, in establishing poetic canons and chronologies.