As early as the Song Dynasty, the alias of "long and short sentences" appeared in Ci, which indicated that Song people had recognized and revealed the physical characteristics of Ci with long and short sentences as the main body. Another example is the metaphor of "Ci is a beauty and poetry is a strong man" in Qing Dynasty (xipu Ci Hua with Qingtian Tongzhi). Comparing poetry with a strong man and beauty is not only in style and artistic conception, but also in physical characteristics. Indeed, compared with ancient poetry, especially modern poetry, poetry is like a beautiful woman compared with a strong man, with a graceful and charming and graceful physical beauty. We can investigate and describe the formal beauty characteristics of Tang and Song Ci from the following aspects.
First, the title form is more colorful.
Every word has a tune name, which is also called "tune" and "epigraph". The tone of a word is different from the title of a poem. The title of a poem specifies and reveals the content and theme of the poem, and the tone of words is a symbol of the content and nature of music. When people wrote lyrics in the Tang and Five Dynasties, the content of the lyrics often coincided with the melody, which was called "ode to the original tune" or "ode to the theme" by the ancients. In this case, the tone names of words actually have the function of pronoun appellation. Later, the content of Ci was gradually separated from that of Qupai, which only expressed its musical nature and metrical characteristics, so some poets added a topic or preface to Qupai to reveal the origin of creation and its ideological content. From Zhang Xian to Su Shi in the middle and early Northern Song Dynasty, the use of topics and word order began to increase gradually, and it was not until the Southern Song Dynasty that it became more popular.
In this way, a word is tonal, topical and orderly in title form, which is more novel and colorful than the monotonous title form of traditional poetry (few poems are orderly under the title); Compared with most poems (especially in the Song Dynasty), the tone of words is mainly three characters, which is beautiful and pleasing to the ear, and can also make people have richer aesthetic associations. At the same time, the writing of word order (such as that of Su Shi, Jiang Kui and others) also pays more attention to artistry and lyricism, which is more closely coordinated with the writing of words and has the beauty of setting each other off.
Second, the institutional structure is more swaying.
Another notable feature of the external form of Ci is that it is divided into sections, which is in sharp contrast with the monotonous plate form of Qi Yan's ancient poems and modern poems.
Words belonging to a single paragraph are called "monotonous" or "monolithic"; There are as many as three or four sections, which are called "three folds" and "four folds"; Most words are divided into two sections, which are called "double tones" or "double folds". As the lyrics of entering music, word segmentation is mainly based on music segmentation. In the Tang and Song Dynasties, there was a kind of music called "Quan". "Time" is also called "movie" and "Tan". There are several times of music, and the corresponding lyrics also have several paragraphs. During the Tang and Five Dynasties, most people chose the single tone, namely "ditty" and "zaqu", because they were especially suitable for drinking, entertainment and singing. Music is divided into two parts at most, so there are also the most hyperbolic or word hyperbolic. The second song is expressed by a pause when playing and singing, while the writing and engraving between the upper and lower lyrics are marked by spaces. Triple and quadruple tones are rare, mainly because the tune is too long to be popular to sing.
In this way, the division of lexical chunks not only broke the main structure of Qi Yan's poems, but also made China's ancient poems embark on the road of liberation, created more flexible and diverse structural forms, and enriched the connotation of formal beauty of China's ancient poems.
Third, the sentence syntax is more diverse.
There is also one of the most important physical features that can be seen at a glance, that is, long and short mixed sentences, so the word is also called "long and short sentences"
Although a few works in Tang and Song Ci are five-character or seven-character poems, long and short sentences have always occupied an absolute dominant position in the style of Ci. The sentence patterns in Tang and Song Ci ranged from one sentence to eleven sentences. Moreover, the syntax is more flexible and changeable, breaking through the rhythm and syntax of ordinary poetry, which can be described as long and short, odd and occasional, and extremely complicated. According to computer statistics, the most frequently used sentence patterns in Song Ci are: four characters, seven characters, five characters, six characters and three characters. It can be seen that the sentence patterns of Song Ci have broken the long-standing traditional pattern that strange poems with five words and seven words dominate the whole country, which is a great progress in the evolution of ancient China poetry. Although there are great differences in the long and short sentence patterns of Tang and Song Ci, they are not random, but "taking music as a sentence", and there are specific regulations and norms to follow. Phrases are long and short, beats are fast and slow, and vary from sound to sound. Then, if you fill in words by tone and shape them with things, words will naturally form irregular and changeable sentence features. According to the statistics of Ci Yun and Ci Pu compiled by Qing people, there were more than 800 kinds of ci tones and 2300 kinds of ci styles used in Tang, Song, Jin and Yuan Dynasties. Not only the tune system is different, but also a multi-body. There are differences in paragraph systems, and there are also differences in flat tone phonology. The changes in sentence structure and syntax are an important part.
The combination of long and short sentence patterns, swaying paragraph structure and even novel and diverse title forms of the words together constitute the appearance image of the words, giving people graceful beauty outside the traditional poetic style of the frozen square board; Coupled with the variety of rhymes and rhymes and the precise and diverse combination of sounds, Tang and Song Ci has formed hundreds of "sounds" and "styles", which are really dazzling and have their own styles, forming a beautiful landscape in the China Ancient Poetry Aesthetics Gallery.
I hope this helps.