Regulated Verse Is Dead

Today is Frost's Descent, and a sudden feeling moved me to write a poem. To make it conform as closely as possible to the rules of meter, I spent a long time studying them and weighing every word. After half a day, I finally wrote:

Thoughts on Frost's Descent

Studying things, cultivating myself, I temper my spirit; / I have read through countless books and have not squandered my days.

With steadfast purpose I listen to the rain in Shu; / Seeking the Way through the vast unknown, I sing the songs of Yan.

With rank and fame cut off, there is nothing more to do; / With lofty ambitions fading, what course remains?

I know that Frost's Descent always brings regrets; / In twenty-four years, there have been far too many!

I showed the poem to my friend Ma, a social science researcher who studies classical culture. He told me a painful truth: almost none of the poem's tonal patterns met the requirements of regulated verse.

I was furious. What made me even more furious was that he was right.

We then discussed the question of regulated verse.

“Modern-style poetry” is simply another name for regulated verse. It includes quatrains and eight-line poems, with either five or seven characters per line, and has extremely strict requirements for level and oblique tones.

For example, in an eight-line regulated poem, the second, fourth, and sixth characters of each line must follow either a level–oblique–level or oblique–level–oblique pattern. The second characters of the two lines in each couplet must contrast in tone; between couplets, the second characters must have the same tonal category, a requirement known as “linking.”

Rhymes must use level-tone syllables and follow a rhyme dictionary, rather than relying entirely on contemporary pronunciation.

Those, broadly, are the rules of eight-line regulated verse.

Why did people in the past devise such strict and complicated metrical requirements?

To achieve harmony of sound.

That harmony has two elements: rhyme and tonal pattern.

Rhyming means placing characters with the same final sound in the same position, usually at the ends of lines. Rhyme creates recurring sounds, producing a kind of musical beauty.

What about level and oblique tones? Level tones were roughly longer sounds with an even pitch, neither rising nor falling. The other three tones were roughly shorter sounds with rises or falls, creating a contrast between level and oblique. Poets used this contrast to give their poems rhythmic beauty.

The problem is that pronunciation constantly changes. So-called modern-style or regulated verse could also be called “Tang-style poetry”: it was invented and perfected in the Tang dynasty and best suited the spoken language of Tang people.

Regulated verse sounded very harmonious to Tang ears. Later, pronunciation changed, but the rules of regulated verse had become fixed. People could no longer compose entirely according to what sounded harmonious in their own speech; they had to follow the established rules. Speech and writing no longer matched, and recitation flowed smoothly only with old pronunciations. Naturally, later poets could not surpass the Tang poets.

In fact, by the Song dynasty, people were already struggling to write regulated verse well, which is why the more accessible Song ci lyrics emerged. What had been an innovation for Tang people became a constraint for people of the Five Dynasties and Song.

Today, the spoken language differs greatly from the language used when regulated verse's rules were established, so those rules have lost their vitality.

If the contrast between level and oblique tones still followed a clear musical logic, their arrangement would create rhythmic beauty. If musical beauty could be achieved only by following the Pingshui rhyme system, theories of modern poetry would surely place great weight on the rules of regulated verse. Yet they do not.

In other words, regulated verse is dead. It has become detached from real life and turned into a cultural inheritance. It can remain alive in museums and classical texts, and it deserves to be passed down by recitation. But as a form for new literary creation, regulated verse is indeed dead. In the future, no writer will make a name by composing it.

Contemporary writers and poets should therefore follow these principles when thinking about poetry:

1 Strive to write modern poetry and avoid composing classical verse where possible.

2 Even if you do write classical verse, write only ancient-style poetry and firmly reject regulated verse.

3 People today need not rhyme according to ancient pronunciation. Whatever language you write in, rhyme according to that language.