The "figures of speech," devices such as metaphor, simile, and play on words, are used by the Chinese with much more restraint than by us. "Metaphorical epithets" are occasionally to be met with; waves, for example, might perhaps be called "angry." But in general the adjective does not bear the heavy burden which our poets have laid upon it. The Chinese would call the sky "blue," "gray," or "cloudy," according to circumstances; but never "triumphant" or "terror-scourged."
The long Homeric simile, introduced for its own sake or to vary the monotony of narrative, is unknown to Chinese poetry. Shorter similes are sometimes found, as when the half-Chinese poet Altun compares the sky over the Mongolian steppe with the "walls of a tent"; but nothing could be found analogous to Mr. T. S. Eliot's comparison of the sky to a "patient etherized on a table." Except in popular poetry, puns are rare; but there are several characters which, owing to the wideness of their import, are used in a way almost equivalent to play on words.
Classical allusion, always the vice of Chinese poetry, finally destroyed it altogether. In the later periods [from the fourteenth century onwards] the use of elegant synonyms also prevailed. I have before me a "gradus" of the kind which the later poet used as an aid to composition. The moon should be called the "Silver Dish," "Frozen Wheel," or "Golden Ring." Allusions may in this connection be made to Yü Liang, who rode to heaven on the crescent moon; to the hermit T'ang, who controlled the genius of the New Moon, and kept him in his house as a candle—or to any other of some thirty stories which are given. The sun may be called "The Lantern-Dragon," the "Crow in Flight," the "White Colt," etc.
Such were the artificialities of later Chinese poetry.
