五言과 七言의 변주곡

Abstract

The dictionary usually defines five- and seven-character poetry as ‘poems with five or seven characters in one line’. Therefore, a poem with four or six characters in one line can also be created. In the case of four- and six-character poetry, however the extent of creative achievement and interest by literati is much smaller than that of the five- and seven-character poetry. The advantage of four-character poetry is the ‘homogeneity of rhythms’, which gives it a sense of psychological stability when read, but in the other side, monotony is the biggest drawback for readers. Despite the addition of only one character to four-character poetry, five-character poetry is not only able to achieve the effect of rhyme in the last character, but also can convey the meaning smoothly in five characters, and so five-character poetry gradually replaced four-character poetry. Because of the influence of foreign music and the role of Music Bureau (樂府), five-character poetry became one of the most popular political poems among writers around the second century in ancient China. Meanwhile, unlike five-character poetry, which is characterized by its elegance, seven-character poetry is characterized by its splendor. Behind the splendor of seven-character poetry, however, there are the risk factors that are determined by how to control the two additional characters. Therefore, unlike five-character poetry, seven-character poetry had to undergo trial and error for a long time, and unlike five-character poetry, seven-character poetry was not able to grow immediately as the mainstream of the literary circles, even though it was created at a similar time as five-character poetry. Because the literati paid no particular attention to seven-character poetry which contained strong shamanism, and the influence of foreign music was not as strong as for five-character poetry, the appeal of seven-character poetry was relatively weak. Considering the format in which odd characters are placed in a row, the two types of Chinese classical poetry may be more likely to lean on the odd number of words, but our analysis of the overall delivery of meaning and rhythm revealed that the two types can be regarded as the embodiment of harmony between odd and even. In addition, we determined that the regular type of Chinese ancient poetry was completed by pairing system in both five- and seven-character poetry.