This character usually refers to a word or a term. In terms of poetry, it refers to a form of verse with varying sentence lengths.

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一叶叶，一声声，空阶滴到明
yī yè yè, yī shēng shēng, kōng jiē dī dào míng
Yi ye ye refers to leaves while yi sheng sheng indicates the sound of rain drops. Kong jie refers to empty steps or stairs. Di means dropping and dao ming means “till dawn.” The verse is from a ci poem, “Song of the Water Clock at Night,” by the Tang poet Wen Tingyun (c. 812–866), who may be the first master of the ci form. “The aroma from a jade censer,/ The wax tears of red candles,/ Reflect the sorrow felt within the painted hall./ Her darkened brows are faded./ Her hair, once full, is thin./ The night is long and the bed is cold./ On a clump of wu-tung trees,/ The midnight rain pours down./ She didn’t know being apart could be such agony./ One leaf followed by another,/ Sound followed upon by sound,/ Echoes from the empty steps till dawn.”

Wen’s lyrics are deceptively simple. He often seeks to capture the emotion of a figure, usually a woman, by portraying the scene of a single moment. In this poem, “faded brows” and “thin hair” depict a woman in a cheerless mood. The images, “aroma” and “wax tears,” together with “cold bed” create a world of desolation and loneliness. The “midnight rain,” “leaf,” “echoes” and “empty steps” reflect a long night of mental suffering, serving as a permanent reminder of a relationship that no longer exists. In this verse emotion is expressed indirectly through images drawn from the environment. The emotion is detailed.

The “Song of the Water Clock at Night” is collected in the Hua Jian Ji, or Among the Flowers, which is the first anthology of ci. In this book, verse is dedicated mainly to the celebration of love, secret rendezvous or love forever lost. The world depicted in the Hua Jian Ji is the world of the courtesan and the singing girls, the beautiful “flowers.” The ci poems collected in the Hua Jian Ji represent something of a contradiction, because they depict a luxurious world devoted to the pursuit of pleasure, but the reality of the times in which they were written was harsh. Therefore, these ci poems can be considered the products of escapism, the desire to find an end to pain.

 

(edited by REN GUANHONG)