Qu Elegies (Ch’u Elegies, Chu Ci, Ch’u Tz‘u, Songs of Ch’u, Elegies of Ch’u, Songs of the South) (fourth century B.C.) collection of verses. Encyclopedia of World Writers, Beginnings To 20th Century

The Qu Elegies is a great collection of Chinese
poems second only to the renowned BOOK OF
SONGS. This collection of verses records the legends,
myths, religious philosophy, and social commentaries
of the tumultuous Warring States
period (403–221 B.C.). when imperial power broke
down and rival feudal states fought among one another
almost constantly.
The most important of these songs was attributed
to QU YUAN, who is generally regarded as the
father of Chinese poetry. He composed the Lisao
(translated in English variously as The Lament, Encountering
Sorrow, or A Song on the Sorrows of Departure),
which in 375 lines relates the poetic
account of a man’s spiritual journey from birth to
death. The poem’s somber mood and melancholy
reflect the poet’s disillusionment and the rejection
he felt after his master, the emperor, betrayed him.
Several major themes are represented in the collection
of songs, the foremost being the theme of
quest. A number of the elegies are religious texts
that relate the story of a shaman who embarks on
a spiritual journey to the supernatural realm. For
instance, in Nine Songs (Jiuge [Chiu-ko]), the protagonist
is a religious figure who goes in search of gods
and goddesses who may or may not show themselves.
A similar theme is explored in another song,
The Far-off Journey (Yuanyu), in which the main
character encounters and interacts with many deities
along his circular pilgrimage, which culminates in
his achieving his goal in the center of the cosmos.
Lisao also contains strong imagery of the poet’s
quest for virtue or for a virtuous person to guide
him on his path. His quest proves fruitless, ending
in his eventual decision to seek solace in death by
drowning himself in the river. This image combines
the poet’s quest with another significant
theme of the poem: Nature’s reflection of the
human condition, especially the subjection of humans
to the forces of fate, or predestination.As the
writer Richard Strassberg points out in his introduction
to Inscribed Landscapes, Qu Yuan “in the
end, was unable to view Nature as a mirror of personal
virtue, a scene of transformation, or a soothing
refuge. The environments he visited prove to
be merely extensions of his anguished sorrow and
feelings of misunderstanding.”
The literary styles of the elegies continue to explore
the relevance of nature. The general feature of
the elegies or “parallel prose” (bianwen or pianwen)
is the pervasive use of couplets of four or six characters
that maintain metrical symmetry. The key
rhetorical device used is the prevalent imagery of
polarities or binary opposites, such as the mountain
and water (or landscape) (shansui) imagery,
heaven and earth, and yin and yang (the dual, or
opposing nature of things). An example of this is
the asymmetry of beauty and pestilence represented
in the reference to flowers and weeds in the
Lisao. The poet, Qu Yuan, laments, “I grieve that
fragrant flowers grow amidst patches of weeds.”
Another important poem in the Qu Elegies is
the Tian Wen (Tien Wen) or Heavenly Questions.
This poem is comprised of rhymed riddles and
questions regarding the creation of the universe
and China’s early history.Most of the questions remain
unanswered except for a few, which allude to
answers derived from earlier oral traditions. Although
Tian Wen may appear to be a rather bewildering
work, it contains important information on
the myths and early beliefs of Chinese society in
the Warring States and earlier periods.
The Qu Elegies’s expansion of the more restrictive
four-syllabic verse form of the Book of Songs
greatly influenced the development of later forms
of writing in China. It is deemed to have had considerable
impact, for example, on the prose form of
fu poetry and the five-syllabic verse form of the
shih poetry of the Han dynasty (206 B.C.–A.D. 220).
In addition to the Book of Songs, the Qu Elegies
serves as one of the best collections of vernacular
literature in China and has served as a model of
poetry and inspiration for many authors writing
both inside and outside of the Chinese tradition.
An English Version of the Qu Elegies
Ch’u Tz’u, The Songs of the South: An Ancient Chinese
Anthology. Translated by David Hawkes. Taipei:
Tun Huang Publications, 1968.
Works about the Qu Elegies
Strassburg, Richard E., trans. Inscribed Landscapes:
Travel Writing from Imperial China. Berkeley:University
of California Press, 1994, 24, 199.
Wang, C. H. From Ritual to Allegory: Seven Essays in
Early Chinese Poetry. Hong Kong: Chinese University
Press, 1988.
Waters, Geoffrey. Three Elegies of Ch’u: An Introduction
to the Traditional Interpretation of the Ch’u Tz’u.
Madison: University ofWisconsin Press, 1985.

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