Classic of Poetry (Shijing)

The Shijing, usually translated as the Classic of Poetry or Book of Songs, is the oldest collection of Chinese poetry. It contains 305 poems composed between roughly 1000 and 600 BCE, in short, mostly four-character lines. They are divided into three parts: the Feng or 'airs of the states', 160 folk-style songs about love, labor, soldiers and the seasons; the Ya or 'odes', 105 poems in court style; and the Song or 'hymns', 40 poems for ancestral and religious rites.¹

The songs come from the Zhou kingdom and the states that grew out of it. A later tradition holds that Confucius trimmed an earlier body of about 3,000 pieces down to 305. Most modern historians doubt that, though the Analects do show him quoting and teaching the poems. In the Han dynasty, after books were destroyed under the Qin, the anthology survived mainly in the Mao version, and became one of the Five Classics. The poems use repeated lines, nature images and short stanzas, and later critics named three modes of use: direct statement, comparison and evocative image. Generations of commentators read even love songs as allegories of political virtue.¹

The Shijing set the pattern for later Chinese poetry. Its imagery of birds, plants and seasons runs through the Tang poets, and its place in the classical curriculum meant that educated people for over two thousand years knew it by heart. It also reached Korea, Japan and Vietnam, and in the 20th century it was translated into English by Arthur Waley and Ezra Pound, among others.