Midnight Songs poetry

Midnight Songs poetry (Chinese: 子夜歌; pinyin: zǐ​yè gē​), also Tzu-yeh Songs^[1], refers both to a genre of poetry as well as to specifically collected poems under the same name, during the Fourth Century CE. This is of major significance within the Classical Chinese poetry tradition, finding such practitioners of the genre as Li Bai (also known as Li Bo or Li Po)^[2]; as well as importantly influencing world poetry through translations, such as by David Hinton. The Midnight Songs have been much used as inspiration for later poetry.

Poet(s)

Although, traditionally the original set of poems was considered to be an eponymously named woman ("Lady Midnight")^[3] living during the Jin Dynasty, in modern Jiangnan, it is more likely that the Midnight Songs are actually a collection of poems by various poets, or from the folk tradition.

Poems

The poems are arranged into four sections for the four seasons: spring, summer, winter, and autumn. Thematically, they thus represent four views of the seasons. According to one count, there are 117 of the poems in the traditional collection.^[4] They are all considered to be in the yuefu form; however, they are also all five-character per line quatrains, similar to the jueju form of later popularity.

See also

Poetry portal

• Six dynasties poetry
• Classical Chinese poetry
• Classical Chinese poetry genres

Notes

1. ^ See, for instance, Watson
2. ^ See for example, "子夜四時歌", in 唐詩三百首
3. ^ Hinton's term
4. ^ Hinton, 73

References

• Hinton, David (2008). Classical Chinese Poetry: An Anthology. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux. ISBN 0374105367 / ISBN 9780374105365.
• Watson, Burton (1971). CHINESE LYRICISM: Shih Poetry from the Second to the Twelfth Century. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-03464-4

External links

• John Thompson Website on an adaptation of one of Li Bai's Midnight Songs poetry style poems to the guqin music.

This article incorporates information from this version of the equivalent article on the Chinese Wikipedia.