Ancient poetry is the general name of China's ancient poetry, which refers to the poems created by ancient people in China. Ancient poems in a broad sense include poems, ci poems and Sanqu poems, while ancient poems in a narrow sense only refer to poems, including ancient poems and modern poems.
Formal features:
1. Concise sentences
Classical poetry, except words and songs, is mostly neat sentences. For example, The Book of Songs is basically four words, The Songs of Chu is roughly six words plus the word "Xi", and most ancient poems and modern poems are five or seven words.
2. Peace and confrontation
"Ping" and "Nuo" are two major categories of Chinese tones. In modern poetry, poetry and songs, there are quite strict regulations on the use of flat and even words. Some positions must be in plain characters, and some positions must be in plain characters. For example: "Although the country is broken, the mountains and rivers will last forever, and the vegetation will turn green in spring." Du Fu's "Spring Hope" uses the sentence pattern of "plain and faint".
Antithesis means that in a pair of couplets, words with the same position in the upper and lower sentences should belong to the same category, such as plum in Dongpu, green grass in Xiyuan, green grass in Dongpu and green grass in the garden, and "fa" is opposite to "kai".
3. Words and grammar
Because each Chinese character is basically an independent unit with both form, sound and meaning, and many Chinese characters are polysemous, and the bonding relationship between words is varied, so the words in this bonding poem are extremely complicated and diverse. For example, adding a word after the word "wind" can form many words: charm, scenery, wind and thunder, wind and frost, wind and wind, etc.
Syntactically, due to the characteristics of Chinese and the independence of Chinese characters, in classical poetry, two Chinese characters are often separated or some Chinese characters are moved from the back to the front, which is called inverted sentences. Typical is Du Fu's poem "Sweet rice pecks at parrot grains, phoenix perches on old branches". The normal syntax should be "parrot pecks fragrant rice, phoenix perches on old branches"
4. Rhythm and prosody
Judging from the sentence pattern, the four words of ancient poetry are generally two and two; Five words are two, two and one; These seven words are two, two, two and one. In a sense, sometimes there are special circumstances due to ideographic needs, such as: Shila | Wuyue | Gai | Chicheng, which becomes Type II, II, I and II.
Ancient poetry requires rhyme to make the tone harmonious and beautiful, for example, Li Bai's Thoughts on a Quiet Night uses rhyme. The rhyming position is usually at the end of even-numbered sentences, such as Li Bai's "Thinking about a Quiet Night". Could there be frost on the bright line at the foot of my bed? Looking up, I found that it was moonlight and sank again, and I suddenly remembered home. "Light" and "frost" are rhyming words. Usually odd-numbered sentences don't rhyme, except for the rhyme format of the first sentence.