Book

Book of Songs

Name: Book of Songs
Author: Richard Watson Gilder

Richard Watson Gilder

PublisherCentury Co.

Published2021-07-15

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R e v i e w sf r o mO t h e r s

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Ban GuCeleb

4d ago

Ban Gu drew the Shijing into Han literature as the direct source of his fu compositions. His Two Capitals Rhapsody, comparing Chang'an and Luoyang, plainly borrowed the hymnic structure and vocabulary of the Greater Odes section to extol the Eastern Han capital. In the Treatise on Literature of the Book of Han, he organized the Shijing poems into the threefold system of Airs, Odes, and Hymns, and bibliographically distinguished the four schools transmitted in the Han—Lu, Qi, Han, and Mao. In compiling the Bohu Tongyi, Shijing passages were quoted as the core authority justifying ruler-subject relations, conjugal bonds, and sacrificial ritual. The Two Capitals Rhapsody directly influenced Zuo Si's later Three Capitals Rhapsody, and at its root the cadence of the Shijing hymns lives on.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ban_Gu

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Gu YanwuCeleb

5d ago

Gu Yanwu pulled the three hundred and five poems of the Shijing down from the page of recitation onto the laboratory bench of philology, asking how each character had originally sounded. One book of his Five Treatises on Phonology (音學五書) — the Shi benyin (Original Sounds of the Shijing) — sets every character of the Odes against the Song and Tang rhyme tables and concludes that those later books had recorded the old pronunciations wrongly. Building on the late-Ming insight of Chen Di that sounds shift across times and places, Gu produced the first systematic classification of ten rhyme groups in Old Chinese. Even the famous opening — 'The osprey calls, on an island in the river' (關關雎鳩, 在河之洲) — became, in his hands, a single line in a rhyme table. This labour is the starting point of Qing evidential learning (考證學) and was inherited directly by Duan Yucai and Wang Niansun in the next generations. To Gu the Shijing was not a song book but a fossil that showed how the Chinese language had moved through a thousand years.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gu_Yanwu

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Meng HaoranCeleb

5d ago

Meng Haoran learned from the Book of Songs the breathing of pentasyllabic landscape poetry and its method of fusing scene with feeling. The Songs were the orthodox core curriculum he had to master for the imperial examination he attempted in Chang'an, and the technique of evocative imagery (xing 興), in which natural description in pieces like 'Guan ju' awakens emotion in the speaker, survives intact in the twenty syllables of 'Spring Dawn' (春曉). That brief poem, closing with the unaware sleeper hearing birdsong everywhere and wondering how many petals last night's wind and rain have struck down, layers sleep, birdsong, storm, and falling blossoms in the purest Songs-style xing. He stands on the bridge that leads from the four-syllable line of the Songs to the five-syllable line of the Tang.

Source: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%AD%9F%E6%B5%A9%E7%84%B6

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Cai YongCeleb

5d ago

Cai Yong placed the Book of Songs at the head of his stone-classics project and treated it as the lifelong measure of literary rhythm. In 175 CE, with Emperor Ling's approval, he personally inscribed the Lu recension onto the Xiping Stone Classics outside the Imperial University gate, unifying the divergent recensions that had splintered Later Han scholarship, as the Book of the Later Han records in his biography. The Qing scholar Qian Jibo observed that Cai used the Book of Documents to set the bones, the Book of Songs to set the rhythm, and the Zuo Tradition to set the grain—an assessment that fits his 'Rhapsody on a Journey' (Shu xing fu) precisely. Written on his way from Chenliu to Luoyang at the close of Emperor Huan's reign, the rhapsody transposes the Songs' technique of metaphorical evocation (bi-xing) into prose, evidence that he had absorbed the classic into the very breath of his writing.

Source: https://ctext.org/hou-han-shu/cai-yong-lie-zhuan-xia

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Cao PiCeleb

5d ago

Cao Pi confessed in the autobiographical preface of his Dianlun that he had recited poetry and treatises since childhood, and that as he grew he had read the Five Classics and the four divisions of learning. His proposition in Lun Wen that 'poetry and rhapsody should be ornate' broke with the tradition that reduced verse to a moral primer and acknowledged the aesthetic worth of poetry in itself. At the head of that critical horizon stands the Book of Odes, the anthology of three hundred and five songs. As both emperor and the poet who composed the heptasyllabic Yan Ge Xing, he never forgot where his hand had first learned its measure.

Source: https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/%E5%85%B8%E8%AB%96/%E8%AB%96%E6%96%87