“Songs of the South” (in simplified Chinese 楚辞) is the book recording poems or songs written during China’s Warring States Period. Most of the poems came from poets from the Chu country. To China, it was the second poetry collection only to “The Book of Songs”. Together with the “The Book of Songs”, the “Songs of the South” was main resources for the study of Chinese ancient History nowadays.

In fact, as mentioned above, the Songs of the South was composed by poets from Chu Country in the Warring States Period. Therefore, most of the songs recorded in this book mainly were South folk songs, ancient myths at the southern China, etc.

In the past, poems would have 4 words in a line. However, the Songs of the South had a lot of poems which broke this rule. It therefore marked the development of poems and it was very significant to Chinese literature. For the poems in the Songs of the South, there were poems with different structures and also the number of words used in different lines in a poem would be different. Moreover, there was no fixed style for people to write poems in this period. Therefore, it allowed a lot of creativities for poets to write.

In the book, poets would use different kinds of techniques to write poems, like the personification, metaphor, etc. All these allowed poets to write freely and express their feelings more easily.

During the term of Chu Jong Noble in Chu Country, wars were started and the country conquered a lot of other small countries, and some of the people even reached the northern part of the country. This sped up the exchange of culture between people from the north and the south and such fusion of culture would also be seen in the poems in the Songs of the South.

Therefore, this book could be regarded as the first book which has a lot of originality added and the poems were really elegant. Apart from the tidiness of the poems, there were fewer restrictions seen and therefore, we could be able to see more emotional poems.

 

Filed under: Ancient China

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