China's earliest ancient poems

The origin of five-character poems is very early, and there are some five-character poems in the Book of Songs. But its official rise was in the Han Dynasty. The last four sentences of Lady Qi's Song in the early Han Dynasty are five words, which are Yuefu folk songs in the middle and late Western Han Dynasty, such as the nursery rhyme "Evil roads defeat fertile fields and slander good people." Gui Shuhua is not real, and Huang Nestle is on it. I used to be envied by people, but now I am pitiful. "It is also a complete five-character work. Compared with four-character poems, five-character poems only add one word, but increase the overall rhythm. Therefore, the capacity of the sentence is much larger and the expressive function is much stronger, which provides more space for the change of the poem. The origin of seven-character poems is also very early. There are also some seven-character quatrains in the Book of Songs, such as "cutting ice on the second day of the second year and collecting Lingyin on the third day". In the late Warring States period, there was a seven-character labor song. Xunzi's Xiang Xiang Ci adopted the style and tone of folk songs. Some proverbs and Yuefu songs in the late Western Han Dynasty, such as "painting the land is not a problem, carving wood is out of date", are all based on seven words. Zhang Heng wrote four sad poems in the Eastern Han Dynasty, which were the earliest seven-character poems of literati. Later, Cao Pi wrote Ge Yanxing, which is generally considered to be the first mature seven-character poem. In Wei and Jin Dynasties, compared with five-character poems, seven-character poems were neglected. It was not until the early Tang Dynasty that seven-character poems gradually flourished, and many excellent works appeared, such as Lu's "Ancient Meaning Chang 'an" and Zhang's "Moonlit Night on a Spring River".