A little bit about the Book of Songs

                  

Book of Songs
A little bit about the Book of Songs
The founding of literature can be said to be the ballad, but the original form of the ballad was mixed with music and dance, and it was not until the advent of more complete musical instruments and writing that music and poetry were separated into independent arts.
The Book of Poetry is the earliest collection of poems in our country, there are 311 articles, of which Nanyi, Baihua, Huaxiao, Yougeng, Chongqiu, Youyi six poems are Sheng, there are no words, so there are only 305 existing articles.
The content is divided into three parts.
Wind is a folk song of various countries, a sentimental word, a joy of the people's heart, and a reflection of the current social situation. It is collected by the court musicians and then soundtracked, and there are also some folk music scores, which are included after being approved by the musicians, and there are fifteen national styles.
Ya is the court nobles in the feast, for the music of the lyrics, because the banquet has a size, so it is divided into large and small.
Song is the Son of Heaven to worship the ancestors of the gods, sing the praises of virtue, for the music and dance with the words, divided into three verses of Zhou, Shang and Lu.
The time is about from the beginning of the Zhou Dynasty (1122 BC) to the middle of the Spring and Autumn Period (570 BC), and the content includes religious poems of the Chengkang era, narrative poems and social poems of the Liping era, banquet and hunting poems of the court, and folk lyric poems. In this 500-year-long era, there were great ups and downs in political society, and the content of the poetry was also diverse.
The two emperors of Chengkang and Kang, known in history as the torturers, do not need to take 40 years, and the world is stable. At this time, it is a religious poem, when the children and grandchildren have achieved something, they will naturally remember the sweat shed by their ancestors, and when the people live comfortably, they will thank God for their virtue. This kind of praise for ancestors, reverence for the heavens, although the text is simple, but the pious religious feelings, we can get a glimpse from the poems.
Children and grandchildren have become emperors, and the commemoration of their ancestors, in addition to solemn sacrifices, is to write down the deeds of their ancestors in creating a family and country, all kinds of struggles, interwoven with materials of myths and legends, and intentional depictions, on the one hand, as a model for rulers, on the other hand, do not forget the merits of ancestors. Thus, the narrative epic emerged after the religious poem, and the function of the poetic verse transcended the religious stage and thus took on the concept of history.
After Zhaomu, the country gradually declined, King Li was expelled, King You was killed, and then King Ping moved east. After moving eastward, the prestige of the Zhou dynasty weakened, the princes annexed, and the Yidi invaded, and the society presented a very disorderly situation. Since the forty-ninth year of King Ping of Zhou, that is, into the Spring and Autumn Period, the political society and ideology of this era have had a fierce turmoil, reflecting this turbulent phenomenon is the social poems in the Book of Songs, the society in the poem is full of chaos and unrest, the people live in hardship, and the people's non-war mood comes out one by one. So far, the Book of Poetry has entered the stage of the public from the gods and ghosts.
Lyric poetry actually existed in the age of oral literature, and probably the relationship between men and women became more complicated, and the text and emotional content of these poems became more and more beautiful. Now let's look at the Book of Songs, religious poetry is the earliest product, because religious poetry is full of practical functions, and there are priests and rulers to preserve and play, while lyric poetry belongs to individuals, of course, it is not easy to preserve. When lyric poetry has been transformed from oral to literal, we can say that the era represented by the Book of Songs has entered the world of man from the world of God.
Social poetry and lyric poetry are the two most important parts of the Book of Poetry. From the social poems, we can see the whole picture of the social life of the day, and from the lyric poems, we can experience the romantic feelings of the time, and the activities of the hearts of men and women. It was also from this time that the Book of Poetry had a distinction between social literature and personal literature, and the development of personal literature gradually tended to be aesthetic and romantic, and gradually moved towards pure art.
The Book of Poetry represents an era that is more than 500 years long, and it was slowly collected by many people and all eras to become such a collection of poems. The earliest is Zhou Song, followed by the size and elegance, and then the Shang Lu Song and the national style. For such a long period of time, no matter the political form, social life, and the evolution of religious thought, they have left obvious traces. The progress of the art of writing is even more obvious, the later the work, the more beautiful the text, the more subtle the description, the neater the form, the more harmonious the tone, and the richer and more complex the social form and personal emotion. Although the text in the Book of Poetry has sentences of two to nine characters, the four words are the correct case of the Book of Songs, and the Book of Poetry is the representative of the four-word poems.
Source: History of the Development of Chinese Literature P23~46 (Taiwan Chung Hwa Book Company)