Now let me introduce the fourth link of modern physical rhythm poetry. The duality of metrical poems, also known as duality, is a major feature of Chinese rhetoric. Duality is not only used in couplets, but also widely used in the five laws and seven laws of poetry about objects.
During the Southern Dynasties, some scholars and poets, such as Liu Xie, Shen Yue and Xie Tiao, paid great attention to the dual art of poetry. After the maturity of modern poetry, the basic norms of antithesis are stereotyped.
Simply put, between the upper and lower sentences of a couplet in a poem, words with the same or similar nature are placed in the corresponding position, and the upper and lower sentences form a certain echo relationship in meaning. This relationship can be strengthened, broadened, contrasted, contrasted and so on. These two sentences have a harmonious and orderly aesthetic feeling, which is the dual neologism.
For example, Du Fu's quatrains.
Two orioles sing green willows,
A line of egrets rose into the sky.
The window contains autumn snow in Xiling,
Mambo Wu Dong Wan Li Ship.
Only four well-known poems are actually two couplets. We can see that two and one, thousand and ten thousand are numerals to numerals, individual and line, autumn and Li are quantifiers to quantifiers. Yellow, white and emerald are all color words. Sesshū Tōyō at the door of the window of the sky belongs to the conversion of names, and both singing and containing are verbs to verbs. The combination of Xiling and Wu Dong can also be said to be locative words.
Judging from the overall artistic conception of this poem, first, two contrasting pictures are formed between the two couplets, and then the two couplets form a bigger and more beautiful picture.
Duality can be roughly divided into two types according to the degree of leniency and strictness, also called right, and can be further subdivided. Ancient poets paid special attention to the classification of nouns and divided them very carefully. For example, it is divided into astronomy, seasons, geography, houses, clothing, diet, utensils, birds, animals, insects, fish, plants, flowers and fruits and so on.
The smaller the scope of duality, the more orderly it is. The ancients were particularly strict about words expressing the meaning of position, quantity and color, but they were strict about some parts of speech such as verbs, adverbs, pronouns and function words. The requirements are not so strict, and sometimes they are wider.
Generally speaking, any antithesis with the same part of speech, structure and rhythm is regarded as a pair of works or a pair of sentences.
For example, two sentences in Li Bai's "Farewell to Friends in Huainan" are standard work pairs, and the rest are called wide pairs. For this knowledge, we can refer to some ignorant books compiled by the ancients, such as "The Enlightenment of Melody", "Li Weng Dui Yun" and so on. These books are arranged according to rhyme, and are specially used to train the enlightenment reading materials of antithesis rhyme and allusions. Every rhyme, from single-word pairs to double-word pairs, three-word pairs, five-word pairs, seven-word pairs, and then to eleven-word pairs, is harmonious and catchy, from which we can gain knowledge of pronunciation, vocabulary, allusions, rhetoric and so on.
After mastering the general skills of antithesis, you can begin to try to create rhythmic poems. Usually, the two couplets in the middle of a metrical poem must be antithetical, but the two couplets before and after it are not required, and the quatrains basically do not pay attention to antithesis. In fact, neat quatrains like Du Fu's quatrains are rare.
Why do metrical poems choose the two antithetical sentences in the middle instead of the first or last couplet? This is because, generally speaking, the four parts of metrical poetry play a role in the whole poem, and the first part will be too stable if it is opposed. Similarly, as a closed sentence, the suffix must be concise, powerful and full of momentum. If it is used in antithesis, it will easily become boring. This is why most of the five-seven-character quatrains don't use antithetical sentences.
Writing poetry itself is an act of freely expressing feelings. Once trapped by heavy shackles, it will be boring, so poets don't like it. In contrast, the middle two pairs are relatively stable and easy to form duality. Of course, there are also a few modern poems that break through this rule, or there is only one antithesis, or there are three antitheses. What's more, Du Like's poem "Yu Miao" basically uses these four antitheses.
Dayu Temple is located in an empty valley. The autumn wind is bleak and the sun shines on the main hall.
The abandoned courtyard is full of oranges and grapefruit, and pictures of dragons and snakes are hung on the walls of the old house.
When Dayu was carved on the stone wall, the waves rolled in and the river flowed eastward along the path of Baisha.
A long time ago, Yu Dayu used four means of transportation to control floods, cut stone walls and dredge waterways, so that the water from the Yangtze River flowed into the sea.
This is an extreme phenomenon and is not suitable for popularization.
As far as the creative practice of ancient and modern poets is concerned, the two antithetical poems in the middle account for about 99%. In the arrangement, except the first pair and the second pair, all other couplets should be correct. However, there are few cases of ancient and modern poets' writing arrangements, so I won't introduce them in detail here.