Elementary School Tang Poetry

Li Bai (701-762)

For most Chinese, poetry is almost synonymous with Tang poetry. It was 李白 Li Bai's poem 夜思 we first learned in elementary school, ambitious parents train their kids to recite many of the 300 Tang poems from 唐詩三百首, the saying is once the poems are memorized, even if you can't write, you'd do well by just plagiarizing. This is even more true today, every Chinese New Year celebration TV program from China invariably has some foreigners reciting Tang poems in fluent Mandarin, we are fascinated by how our beloved Tang poetry is appreciated by clever foreign devils.

Unfortunately, we had not received much training in poetry ourselves, worse, to memorize the poems for homework, I usually just machine gun the words as if they might leak out of my brain if I don't use them before expiration.  Tang poems are extremely rigid in form 格律, the rhyme of the entire poem must follow the official rhyme table and the tone of each word must follow certain accepted patterns. These poems are meant to be sung or 吟, an art lost generations ago. By the time I was a kid, only old "rancid bookworms" 酸秀才 would recite poems with any musicality, it sounded ancient and self absorbing that I found it unattractive. Today, I don't have homework and I can afford to, at least, slow down a little bit, I pause slightly as we were taught in elementary school, for example, the very first 5 word poem we learned，夜思 :

床 前 - 明 月 光  　
疑 是 - 地 上 霜
舉 頭 - 望 明 月  　
低 頭 - 思 故 鄉

instead of 2 words, pause, and 3 words, it is 2,2,3 for 7 word poems:

誓 掃 - 匈 奴 - 不 顧 身  　
五 千 - 貂 錦 - 喪 胡 塵
可 憐 - 無 定 - 河 邊 骨  　
猶 是 - 春 閨 - 夢 裡 人

and the words just go together and it works for all Tang poems.

Since Tang Dynasty, China was ruled by foreign invaders twice and the spoken language had changed a lot in 1,000 years. The 1st poem doesn't rhyme in modern spoken Mandarin, but it is correct by the official rhyme rule. (For Tang poems, the even lines must rhyme, line 1 is optional, all other odd lines must not rhyme.)