The term ci (or tz’u) meant “song lyric.” Ci poetry was a form of Chinese verse in which a poet composed a lyric poem that could be sung to a popular melody. It was a form that had its origin in popular music, but developed into a vehicle for serious poetry during the ninth and 10th centuries (late TANG DYNASTY), and reached its full flowering during the Sung dynasty (960–1279). Popular music in China had been revolutionized during the eighth and ninth centuries by new influences from Central Asia, and new song forms were developed with prescribed numbers of lines, syllables per line, rhyme schemes, and the like. The songs were popular not in the sense of being folk lyrics sung by the masses, but rather in the sense of songs performed for the entertainment of a sophisticated urban audience by courtesans.Given their origin in such performances, it is not surprising that the subject matter of early ci lyrics was inevitably love—most often the songs dealt with a woman who grew old waiting for her absent lover, who never returned.
As serious poets began to experiment in the ci form, they assigned their lyrics to existing tunes. They also adopted the persona of the forlorn, waiting woman in most of their lyrics. Few poems exist with their musical notations, but the earliest ci poems have only one stanza. Some later ci contain three stanzas, but most commonly the ci were made up of two stanzas in identical or nearly identical form. Such two-part ci naturally presented ideas that contrasted or complemented one another, such as a description of a scene and a reaction to it, or a dream and then the reality. As the ci form became more and more popular, large handbooks (known as cipu) were compiled containing model lyrics corresponding to each popular ci melody. Generally the same 800 or so melodies were used over and over again in the hundreds of thousands of ci poems produced in Sung China by some 4,000 poets. The ninth century saw the earliest known ci poets: Wen Tingyun (812–870) and Wei Zhuang (836–910). The best known ci poet of the 10th century was Li Yu (937–978), the last southern Tang emperor. Imprisoned after his overthrow, Li Yu spent a good deal of his time during his final years composing poetry, much of it concerning the loss of his kingdom and of his beloved wife. Such themes echoed the forlorn sadness of the waiting woman bereft of her lover in the conventional ci poems. LI QINGZHAO, China’s most celebrated woman poet, was renowned as a composer of ci lyrics in the 12th century, generally evoking that same mood of forlorn sadness, in her case often over her dead husband.
The range of subject matter open to the ci poet remained relatively narrow until the 11th century, when the poet Su Shi (1037–1101) began to compose ci on a wide variety of subjects previously treated only in the more traditional shi form. Despite criticism that he was disregarding the essential quality of the ci, Su Shi developed a new approach that was called haofang pai or “heroic” style, intended to directly express the poet’s own feelings rather than those of a persona.
Bibliography
■ Idema,Wilt, and Lloyd Haft. A Guide to Chinese Literature. Michigan Monographs in Chinese Studies, 74. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1985.
■ Landau, Julie, trans. Beyond Spring: Tz’u Poems of the Sung Dynasty. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.