Five-character quatrains, a genre of China's traditional poems, are short poems with five words and four sentences, which conform to the rules of metrical poems and belong to the category of modern poems. This style originated from Yuefu poems in Han Dynasty, was deeply influenced by folk songs in Six Dynasties and matured in Tang Dynasty. Five-word quatrains but twenty crosses can show a fresh picture and convey a true artistic conception. Seeing the big because of the small, there are always many small ones, and short chapters contain rich content, which is its biggest feature.
There are two levels in the Five Musts. Representative works include Li Bai's Thoughts on a Quiet Night, Wang Wei's Birds Singing in the Stream, Du Fu's Eight Arrays, Wang Zhihuan's In the Heron Tower and Liu Changqing's Farewell Master.
Genre evolution
Five-character quatrains are short poems with five words and four sentences, which conform to the norms of metrical poems. It belongs to the category of modern poetry and is a kind of quatrains. This poetic style was not initiated by poets in Tang Dynasty, but originated from the ancient poems of Yuefu in Han and Wei Dynasties. Its style is simple, advocating nature and really interesting. Judging from a five-character quatrain written by Yu Xin, a poet of the Northern Zhou Dynasty, its stylistic form was formed at least at the end of the Northern and Southern Dynasties. "After years of travel, I have a lot of feelings. Recently, I learned Hengyang geese and crossed the river in the autumn equinox. "
This is one of Yu Xin's "Three Masterpieces of He Kan". This poem is straightforward and completely in line with the rules of the Tang Dynasty. The second sentence rhymes with the fourth sentence, and the first sentence rhymes with the third sentence. The title of this poem is Jue. But before the Tang Dynasty, there were not many such neat five-character quatrains. It was not until the early Tang Dynasty that modern poetry was produced, and the five-character quatrains gradually improved and finalized. In the past, five-character poems were generally called "five-character poem archaism" or "five-character poem archaism" for short.
The name of quatrains may come from the "conjunctions" of literati in the Six Dynasties. According to the literature, there was an atmosphere of composing poems with chapters at that time, and each person composed a whole poem with four sentences and five words. If you cut off what everyone has done and do a separate article, it is called "unique skill", and the name of the quatrains comes from this.
Since the Six Dynasties, the word "quatrains" only refers to small poems with five words and four sentences. In the Tang Dynasty, due to the change of musical tune, the old Yuefu poems often could not be accompanied by music, so musicians often sang quatrains created by literati, which was an important reason for the prevalence of quatrains in the Tang Dynasty.