If Tang poetry is marble, Song ci is silk. Born as song lyrics for banquet musicians, the ci grew into the most intimate instrument of Chinese verse — long lines and short, tuned to a melody, voiced for one listener at a time. Moonlight and lanterns, falling petals and returning swallows: the four ci gathered here are the form at its highest, each with its original, its meaning, and its world.
The ci (词) began as entertainment — words fitted to popular song tunes in the taverns and banquets of the late Tang and Five Dynasties — and ended as one of the highest forms of Chinese literature. Where the shi poem spoke in public, the ci spoke in private: its uneven line lengths follow the breath of a melody, and its traditional subjects — longing, parting, the turn of seasons — made it the instrument of everything too intimate for the official forms.
By the Song dynasty the ci had its own masters and its own two schools: the Graceful (wanyue, 婉约), delicate and suggestive, and the Bold (haofang, 豪放), expansive and thundering. The four lyrics gathered here cross both schools and both sexes of genius — a chancellor, an exile, a soldier, and the greatest woman writer in the tradition.
A Song critic put it bluntly centuries later: after this ci appeared, every other Mid-Autumn poem was waste paper. The judgment sounds like hyperbole until you read the field; then it sounds like reporting.
Thirty-three characters. A night of rain and wind, a deep sleep that failed to sleep off the wine, one question asked of the maid rolling up the blinds, one wrong answer, one correction. Li Qingzhao's Like a Dream
The Lantern Festival — the fifteenth night of the first month — was the one evening of the year when the Song capital genuinely let go: tens of thousands of lanterns, fireworks, dragon dances, perfume, and crowds in whic…
Yan Shu was the Song dynasty's model of the poet-statesman: a child prodigy who entered court at fourteen, a chancellor who governed calmly, a patron who employed half the literary talent of his generation, and a man who…