Classic of Poetry - Style

Style

Whatever the origin of the various Shijing poems as folk songs or not, they "all seem to have passed through the hands of men of letters at the royal Zhou court". In other words, they show an overall literary polish together with some general stylistic consistency. About 95% of songs in the Poetry are written in a meter of a four-character line, with a slight caesura between the second and third words. Lines tend to be syntactically related couplets, with occasional parallelism; and, longer poems generally are divided into similarly structured stanzas. This style later became known as the "Poetry" style for much of Chinese history.

One of the characteristics of the poems in the Classic of Poetry is that they tend to possess "elements of repetition and variation". This results in an "alteration of similarities and differences in the formal structure: in successive stanzas, some lines and phrases are repeated verbatim, while others vary from stanza to stanza". Characteristically, the parallel or syntactically matched lines within a specific poem share the same, identical words (or characters) to a large degree, as opposed to confining the parallelism between lines to using grammatical category matching of the words in one line with the other word in the same position in the corresponding line; but, not by using the same, identical word(s). Disallowing verbal repetition within a poem would by the time of Tang poetry be one of the rules to distinguish the old style poetry from the new, regulated style.

The works in the Classic of Poetry vary in their lyrical qualities, which relates to the musical accompaniment with which they were in their early days performed. The songs from the "Hymns" and "Eulogies", which are the oldest material in the Poetry, were performed to slow, heavy accompaniment from bells, drums, and stone chimes. However, these and the later actual musical scores or choreography which accompanied the Shijing poems have been lost.

Nearly all of the songs in the Poetry are rhyming, with end rhyme, as well as frequent internal rhyming. While some of these verses still rhyme in modern varieties of Chinese, others had ceased to rhyme by the Middle Chinese period. For example, the eighth song (芣苢 Fú Yǐ) has a tightly constrained structure implying a rhyme between the indicated words of each line:

采采芣苢、薄言采之。 Cǎi cǎi fú yǐ, báo yán cǎi zhī.
采采芣苢、薄言有之。 Cǎi cǎi fú yǐ, báo yán yǒu zhī.

采采芣苢、薄言掇之。 Cǎi cǎi fú yǐ, báo yán duó zhī.
采采芣苢、薄言捋之。 Cǎi cǎi fú yǐ, báo yán luó zhī.

采采芣苢、薄言袺之。 Cǎi cǎi fú yǐ, báo yán jié zhī.
采采芣苢、薄言襭之。 Cǎi cǎi fú yǐ, báo yán xié zhī.

The second and third stanzas still rhyme in Standard Chinese, with the rhyme words even having the same tone, but the first stanza does not rhyme in Middle Chinese or any modern variety. This was attributed to lax rhyming practice until the late-Ming dynasty scholar Chen Di argued that the original rhymes had been obscured by sound change. Since Chen, scholars have analyzed the rhyming patterns of the Poetry as crucial evidence for the reconstruction of Old Chinese phonology.

Traditional scholarship of the Poetry identified three major literary devices employed in the songs: straightforward narrative (fù 賦), explicit comparisons (bǐ 比) and implied comparisons (xìng 興). The poems of the Classic of Poetry tend to have certain typical patterns in both rhyme and rhythm, to make much use of imagery, often derived from nature.