to the fourth century A.D., and poetry written in the New Style (Lu-shih—or "strictly regulated"), which gradually evolved from the fourth to the eighth centuries A.D., reaching its culmination in the works of T'ang poets, who are, by common consent, the great masters of the art of Chinese Poetry. And since it is largely these T'ang poets whom Mr. Waley has chosen to translate, it is quite evident that, for the most part, his translations reproduce, so far as possible, the forms of this "new" or strictly regulated style.
Now, as Mr. Waley has told us, this style, although the divisions between it and the earlier style are often arbitrary (which is quite natural, since it grew out of the earlier style), is marked by a parallelism omnipresent not only in the words of the couplets, but extending even to the arrangement of the "tones" (which are arranged in pairs), and also in the vowel-assonance nature of the rhymes, while in quatrains, where two lines do not rhyme, these lines must end on the opposite tone to the thyme! During the T'ang period all these restrictions of form did not prevent poets from taking considerable licenses; but with the succeeding age, they became even more hampering and complicated, which led directly to the decline of Chinese poetry. Let us take an example from Mr. Waley, and see how his method reproduces that of the Chinese:
THE CRANES
By Po Chü-i
The western wind has blown but a few days;
Yet the first leaf already flies from the bough.
On the drying paths I walk in my thin shoes;
In the first cold I have donned my quilted coat.
Through shallow ditches the floods are clearing away;
Through sparse bamboos trickles a slanting light.
In the early dusk, down an alley of green moss,
The garden-boy is leading the cranes home.
There can be no doubt that this poem is a picture of early autumn. How is that picture achieved? By a series of statements each one of which is not only set against the other, but contradicts the other. For instance, "The western wind has blown but a few
