Asian Topics on Asia for Educators || The Book of Songs and China's Literary Tradition

THE BOOK OF SONGS AND
CHINA'S LITERARY TRADITION
Simplicity of Poetry in the Book of Songs: "Roll up Your Skirts"

Paul Rouzer :: And when we look at these particular poems now, they seem for the most part to be folk songs or poems produced by ordinary people, peasants, artisans, hunters, fisherman, and so forth. And they're very, very simple, very easy to understand. A lot of them bear a lot of similarities to folk poetry in all sorts of cultures.

The poems in the Book of Songs** are written for the most part in simple stanzas. Each stanza will express the main idea of the poem, and then subsequent stanzas will change one word or two. But the main idea of the poem remains the same in each stanza.

Many of them involve courtship rituals or marriage rituals, quite often women flirting with men or men flirting with women. A good example of that is one poem, very popular poem, in which a woman tries to lure a hesitant lover across the river to meet her for a tryst.

"Roll up Your Skirts," from the Book of Songs

If you really care for me,
then roll up your skirts and cross the Jung.
If you don't care for me,
aren't there other ones who will,
you craziest of crazy boys?

Paul Rouzer:: This is a good example of the simplicity of these particular poems. A type of simplicity that appeals very much to the modern reader and has made the Book of Songs** very, very popular in present times.

** The Book of Songs is also known as the Book of Poetry, the Classic of Poetry, and sometimes the Book of Odes. These are all possible translations of the Chinese title, Shi jing [Shih-ching in Wade-Giles romanization].