The iconicity of Chinese characters makes Han classical poetry rich in imagery. For example, the American poet Pound believed that the Chinese character "spring" means "the sun lies low under the branches of the growing vegetation." Therefore, , poems composed of Chinese characters are like groups of moving pictures, allowing readers to get rid of phonetic grammar and directly enter the realm described by the poet.
Chinese characters also have a very important influence on the form of Chinese poetry, which is mainly reflected in:
1. The neatness of sentences
In addition to the words and Except for songs, most of them have sentences of neat length. For example, "The Book of Songs" is basically four characters, "Chu Ci" is generally six characters plus the word "xi", and most ancient and modern poems are five or seven characters. For example:
Guan Guan Suijiu,
In Hezhizhou.
A graceful lady,
A gentleman likes to fight.
("Book of Songs·Guan Sui")
2. Level and oblique tone
Ping and oblique are the two major categories of Chinese tones. In modern poetry, lyrics, and music, there are very strict regulations on the use of flat and oblique characters. In some positions, flat characters must be used, and in other positions, oblique characters must be used. For example:
Throw the bamboo to leave the knot, and wear it to suppress the long strip.
(Han Yu: "Spring Snow")
Antithesis refers to the fact that in a couplet of poems, the words in the same position in the upper and lower sentences must belong to the same category, such as "The green plum blossoms in Dongpu, The green grass is blooming in the West Garden.” "East" and "West", "Pu" and "Garden", "Green Plum" and "Green Grass", "Fa" and "Open" are each opposite to each other.
3. Vocabulary and syntax
Because each Chinese character is basically an independent unit with both form, sound and meaning, and many Chinese characters have multiple meanings. There are various bonding relationships among them, so the words in the poems formed by this bonding appear to be extremely complex and diverse. For example, adding another word after the word "wind" can form many words: grace, scenery, wind and thunder, wind and frost, wind servant girl, etc.
In terms of syntax, due to the characteristics of the Chinese language (such as the lack of morphology, flexible structure, etc.) and the independence of Chinese characters, in Chinese classical poetry, it is often seen that two Chinese characters are separated, or a certain character is separated. Some Chinese characters are moved from the back to the front. A typical poem is Du Fu's "The fragrant rice pecks at the remaining grains of parrots, and the green phoenix perches on the old phoenix branches." The normal syntax should be "The parrot pecks at the remaining fragrant rice grains, and the phoenix perches on the old green phoenix branches."