The Book of Songs includes Airs, Court Hymns, and Eulogies. Its poems address work, ritual, emotion, and social life, preserving voices from different settings. It later became a classic with several traditions of interpretation. Literary images need to be read with historical context and commentary, rather than always translated directly into modern experience.
Historical background
The Classic of Poetry, also Shijing or Shih-ching, translated variously as the Book of Songs, Book of Odes, or simply known as the Odes or Poetry (Shī), is the oldest existing collection of Chinese poetry, comprising 305 works dating from the 11th to 7th centuries BC. It is one of the "Five Classics" traditionally said to have been edited by Confucius, and has been studied and memorized by scholars in China and neighboring countries over two millennia. It is also a rich source of chengyu (four-character classical idioms) that are still a part of learned discourse and even everyday language in modern Chinese. Since the Qing dynasty, its rhyme patterns have also been analysed in the study of Old Chinese phonology.
The Classic of Poetry contains the oldest chronologically authenticated Chinese poems. The majority of the Odes date to the Western Zhou period (1046–771 BCE), and were drawn from around provinces and cities in the Zhongyuan (Central Plains) area. A final section of 5 "Eulogies of Shang" purports to be ritual songs of the Shang dynasty as handed down by their descendants in the state of Song, but is generally considered quite late in date. According to the Eastern Han scholar Zheng Xuan, the latest material in the Shijing was the song "Tree-Stump Grove" in the "Odes of Chen", dated to the middle of the Spring and Autumn period (c. 700 BCE).
The content of the Poetry can be divided into two main sections: the "Airs of the States", and the "Eulogies" and "Hymns".
The "Airs of the States" are shorter lyrics in simple language that are generally ancient folk songs which record the voice of the common people. They often speak of love and courtship, longing for an absent lover, soldiers on campaign, farming and housework, and political satire and protest. The first song of the "Airs of the States", "Fishhawk" (Guān jū ), is a well-known example of the category. Confucius commented on it, and it was traditionally given special interpretive weight.
Style
Whether the various Shijing poems were folk songs or not, they "all seem to have passed through the hands of men of letters at the royal Zhou court". In other words, they show an overall literary polish together with some general stylistic consistency. About 95% of lines in the Poetry are written in a four-syllable meter, with a slight caesura between the second and third syllables. Lines tend to occur in syntactically related couplets, with occasional parallelism, and longer poems are generally divided into similarly structured stanzas.
All but six of the "Eulogies" consist of a single stanza, and the "Court Hymns" exhibit wide variation in the number of stanzas and their lengths. Almost all of the "Airs", however, consist of three stanzas, with four-line stanzas being most common. Although a few rhyming couplets occur, the standard pattern in such four-line stanzas required a rhyme between the second and fourth lines. Often the first or third lines would rhyme with these, or with each other. This style later became known as the "shi" style for much of Chinese history.
Compilation
The Confucian school eventually came to consider the verses of the "Airs of the States" to have been collected in the course of activities of officers dispatched by the Zhou dynasty court, whose duties included the field collection of the songs local to the territorial states of Zhou. This territory was roughly the Yellow River Plain, Shandong, southwestern Hebei, eastern Gansu, and the Han River region. Perhaps during the harvest. After the officials returned from their missions, the king was said to have observed them himself in an effort to understand the current condition of the common people.