After the Spring and Autumn Period, four-character poems gradually declined, but many poets still wrote four-character poems. For example, Cao Cao and his son in the Three Kingdoms period, Ji Kang in the late Wei Dynasty, Lu Ji and Lu Yun in the Western Jin Dynasty, and Tao Yuanming in the Eastern Jin Dynasty. At the same time, there have also been some excellent works, such as Cao Cao's "Walking out of Xiamen, Although the tortoise lives long": "The old horse crouches and aims at a thousand miles. In the year of martyrs, go forward bravely. " People have been chanting it ever since.
The origin of five-character poems is very early, and there are some five-character poems in the Book of Songs. But its official rise was in the Han Dynasty. The last four sentences of Lady Qi's Song in the early Han Dynasty are five words, which are Yuefu folk songs in the middle and late Western Han Dynasty, such as the nursery rhyme "Evil roads defeat fertile fields and slander good people." Gui Shuhua is not real, and Huang Nestle is on it. I used to be envied by people, but now I am pitiful. "It is also a complete five-character work. Compared with four-character poems, five-character poems only add one word, but increase the overall rhythm. Therefore, the capacity of the sentence is much larger and the expressive function is much stronger, which provides more space for the change of the poem.
During the Eastern Han Dynasty, great progress was made in the creation of both folk songs and literati. Yuefu folk songs, such as Drinking Horses in the Great Wall Cave, Traveling Up the Mountain and Joining the Army in the Fifteenth Five-Year Plan, are all remarkable works. Ban Gu was the first writer to write five-character poems. His epic poems, with five words and sixteen sentences, show the phenomenon of literati learning folk new poems at first. Later, Zhang Heng's Song of Union, Qin Jia's Poems for Women and Li Yan's Poems for Wisdom came into being. By the end of the Han Dynasty, with the appearance of Nineteen Ancient Poems, five-character poems had reached a quite high level. Since Jian 'an, five-character poems have overwhelmed four-character poems and entered its heyday.
The origin of seven-character poems is also very early. There are also some seven-character quatrains in the Book of Songs, such as "cutting ice on the second day of the second year and collecting Lingyin on the third day". In the late Warring States period, there was a seven-character labor song. Xunzi's Xiang Xiang Ci adopted the style and tone of folk songs. Some proverbs and Yuefu songs in the late Western Han Dynasty, such as "painting the land is not a problem, carving wood is out of date", are all based on seven words. Zhang Heng wrote four sad poems in the Eastern Han Dynasty, which were the earliest seven-character poems of literati. Later, Cao Pi wrote Ge Yanxing, which is generally considered to be the first mature seven-character poem. In Wei and Jin Dynasties, compared with five-character poems, seven-character poems were neglected. It was not until the early Tang Dynasty that seven-character poems gradually flourished, and many excellent works appeared, such as Lu's "Ancient Meaning Chang 'an" and Zhang's "Moonlit Night on a Spring River".
There are more words in a seven-character poem than in the May 4th Movement, and one sentence can express more complex and complete meaning, and the tone is more soothing and long. After the Tang Dynasty, five-character poems and seven-character poems became the main poetic styles, and four-character poems tended to die out.