The Uses of Poetry

August 9, 2026

Poetry isn’t really part of our lives anymore, if ever it was. I recently read that most educated Chinese people can recite one or two poems about West Lake¹ that I’m currently trying to write something about. Hmm. I can remember the first few lines of John Keats’ La Belle Dame sans Merci² (“O what can ail thee knight at arms”, etc.) but, like most British-Australians, the only poem I can recite by heart is Philip Larkin’s This be the Verse³ (“They fuck you up, your mum and dad, they may not mean to but they do”, etc. etc.).

The Chinese word for poetry, 诗 shī, combines the speech radical 讠with 寺 sì (a temple, a place of focused attention). Chinese poetry has always been understood as a heightened, disciplined form of speech, requiring both technical skill and moral cultivation to produce. The oldest anthology, the Shijing 诗经 (Classic of Odes, ~1000–600 BCE), was edited by Confucius himself and treated as a moral text as much as an aesthetic one.

The Compulsory Education curriculum requires students to memorize over 300 classical poems before graduating high school. Reciting poetry is a form of cultural fluency.⁴

The Tang Dynasty (618–907) is considered one of the golden ages in Chinese civilization and poetry. Two hundred years later, the Song Dynasty (1127–1279) was another but it mostly followed poetic forms perfected during the Tang Dynasty. My current interest in Chinese poetry began when I was reading about two people, Bai Juyi and Su Dongpo, who were always being referred to as poet-officials or poet-engineers. I imagined they did their jobs as administrators and governors and wrote poetry as a pastime but no. Appeals to the Emperor were usually in the form of letters (scrolls) but poetry was also used to record happenings and to make certain points. An official would write hundreds of these in a year and they are usually referred to as “administrative verse” as opposed to “lyrical” or “scenic” verse. Lyrical verse was often deployed to create connections with the public or to make implicit appeals for labour in order to dredge a lake, for example. Administrative verse was used to document civic works and also to secure further funding from central government.

It’s wrong to think of these people as poet-engineers or poet-officials. Being able to write poetry complete with allusions to historic and contemporary events was what was expected of every educated official. Literary skill was mandatory cicil service preparation for all officials. It was the standard expectation. To call these governors and magistrates poet-officials or poet-engineers reflects a cultural bias of ours.

The poems may have been able to be divided into administrative and non-administrative but these are merely differences of content and audience. These poems still followed the rules of Tang Dynasty poetry. And what rules they were! This first is a descriptive poem documenting lake dredging work completed, but it also asks the public to appreciate it.

Bai Juyi, On Qiantang Lake Spring Walk (钱塘湖春行), 823 CE

孤山寺北贾亭西，
水面初平云脚低。
几处早莺争暖树，
谁家新燕啄春泥。

乱花渐欲迷人眼，
浅草才能没马蹄。
最爱湖东行不足，
绿杨阴里白沙堤。

North of Gushan Temple, west of Jia Pavilion,
The lake’s restored water level rests beneath low-hanging cloud.
Early orioles jostle on sun-warmed branches,
Young swallows carry fresh mud to build their spring nests.

Wild blooming flowers dazzle wandering eyes,
Short spring grass barely covers the hooves of horses.
Nothing delights me more than wandering the lake’s eastern shore,
The White Sand Dike shaded beneath rows of green poplars.

In this next poem, BAI Juyi is reporting back.

BAI Juyi, On Dredging West Lake (浚西湖), undated Bai Juyi administrative verse

湖山春事属吾曹，浚水疏堤足岁劳。莫羡笙歌游赏处，此湖功在万民膏。	Spring stewardship of lake and hills falls to us officials, Year-round labour dredging waters and clearing dikes is our duty. Do not merely envy the scenic spots for song and leisure, This lake’s true merit sustains the livelihood of all townsfolk.

Two centuries later, SU Dongpo wrote the following.

SU Dongpo, Spring Dawn at Su Causeway (苏堤春晓), undated Su Dongpo scenic verse

苏堤春晓柳如烟，十里清波接远天。当年取土清湖淤，化作长堤十里绵。	Willow mist shrouds the Su Causeway at spring dawn, Ten li of clear lake water stretches to the distant sky. Long ago we dug mud to clear the lake’s choking silt, That spoil became this long winding causeway stretching endlessly.

We may as well admit now that these poems are untranslatable, and for the following reasons.

Format

You’ll notice that each poem or stanza in the Chinese has four lines of seven characters. The Chinese language is unique in having a script that can achieve this level of economy. It‘s not compression. Everything that needs to be either said or alluded to is there. The last two poems above are quatrains called juéjù (绝句) having 4 lines of 5 or 7 characters. We can think of characters as syllables and there are four lines of seven sounds/words. There’s also the form known as regulated verse lǜshī 律诗 that has eight lines but with strict tonal patters, contrasting couplets for the middle two pairs, and rhyme on alternate lines. We’ll get to that.

Tonal parallelism and Rhythmic Balancing

The tonal rules for both types of Tang Dynasty poems are summarized in something called the Tang Poetry Pingze Simplified Chart here⁵. Here, we need to know a bit about how tones operate in Chinese, specifically Mandarin because Mandarin is the type of Chinese spoken by officials. (The name Mandarin comes from the Portuguese word for official.) Mandarin has four tones: They’re called named “even” or “level” (平; píng), “rising” (上; shǎng), “departing” or “going” (去; qù), and “entering” or “checked” (入; rù). The last three are collectively referred to as “oblique” (仄; zè)⁶ Mandarin learners know them as tones 1, 2, 3 and 4, respectively. There’s also the absence of tone but it’s not considered to be a fifth even if it functions as one. Anyway. according to the chart, there are level tones and the other three and the tones of the first two words/syllables/characters set the tones and therefore the words/characters that can be used for the remainder of the poem.

Alternating combinations of the Level Tone (Ping) and the Oblique tone (Ze), are categorized into Level-Starting Pattern and Oblique-Starting Pattern and these guide the composition of Five-Character Regulated Verse, Seven-Character Regulated Verse , Five-Character Quatrain , and Seven-Character Quatrain. Here’s a link⁷ to a little more detail on this. To make matters simpler, I’ll just indicate them as L for Level and O for Oblique。

For example, in the poem Spring View (春望, chūn wàng, ) by Du Fu, the tone pattern of the first line is O-O-L-L-O, and that of the second line is L-L-O-O-L:

O-O-L-L-O
國破山河在
L-L-O-O-L
城春草木深

I found a full translation and explanation of Spring View (and many other poems) here⁸. The tonal rhythm looks a bit different to what I just described above, and I expect this is because tones have drifted over the past thousand years. I’ll put it here anyway just to illustrate the impossibility of translation.

國破山河在 guó pò shān hé zài [nation] [broken] [mountain] [river] [exist]
城春草木深 chéng chūn cǎo mù shēn [city] [spring] [grass] [tree] [deep]
感時花濺淚 gǎn shí huā jiàn lèi [feel] [time] [flower] [splash] [tears]
恨別鳥驚心 hèn bié niǎo jīng xīn [hate] [separate] [bird] [startle] [heart]

烽火連三月fēnghuǒ lián sān yuè [beacon] [flame] [continously] [three] [month]
家書抵萬金 jiā shū dǐ wàn jīn [home] [letter] [balance] [ten thousand] [gold]
白頭搔更短 bái tóu sāo gèng duǎn [white] [hair] [scratch] [more] [lack]
渾欲不勝簪 hún yù bù shēng zān [at all] [want] [not] [hold] [hairpin]

The nation is broken, though mountains and rivers remain.
In cities in the Spring, the grass and trees grow deeply.
Sensing the moment, flowers shed tears.
Hating the separation, birds are fearful at heart.

The beacons have burnt continuously for three months.⁹
A letter from home is worth ten-thousand pieces of gold.
My white hair is even scarcer from scratching.
And can barely hold a hairpin.

Below are two examples of tonal rules taken from the chart.

Seven-Character Quatrain in Oblique-Starting Pattern with First Line Rhyming
O O L L O O L (rhyme)
L L O O O L L (rhyme)
L L O O L L O
O O L L O O L (rhyme)

Seven-Character Quatrain in Oblique-Starting Pattern with First Line Not Rhyming
O O L L L O O
L L O O O L L (rhyme)
L L O O L L O
O O L L O O L (rhyme)

Rules for word choices

If you’re swapping poems with a friend as was the custom, there are key words in the received poem that must be alluded to and built upon in the response. From my understanding, these are often the rhyme words. These rhyme words must be used and different rhyme words set in the same poem otherwise it wouldn’t be a conversation. Think of it as a fugue with these word choices as another layer.
There’s also the not insignificant matter of balancing imagery. If you use or allude to the colour yellow, for example, you must also balance it by using or alluding to the colour blue within your poem. It’s easy to imagine similar pairs such as mountain and water, but I imagine that far more complex and meaningful pairings are possible.

So no. Administrative verse wasn’t a lesser form of poetry. What I find distressing is how effortlessly poets like Su Dongpo were able to dash off poems commemorating things such as the beauty of the waitress serving him and his friends dinner before the meal had even ended. Poetry was intensely important yet treated so casually.

• • •

Drinking games

I recently learned of a drinking game people used to play in the town of Shaoxing. Perhaps they still do. Shaoxing has been famous for its local wine usually known as Yellow Wine or just Shaoxing Wine. It was the drink of poets and even today, is ordered on special occasions to accompany a meal. It’s ABV15%+ sipped neat. Shaoxing is also famous for its drinking games involving poetry. Here’s one.

One sunny and breezy day in the late spring of 353CE, a party was in full swing with 40-some poets, scholars, and artists playing a drinking game by a river in Lanting, or the “Orchid Pavilion,” a hilly southwestern suburb of Shaoxing. They floated cups of wine in the flow of the stream; when it stopped in front of a guest, he had to pick it up, drink, and compose a poem.

A total of 37 poems were written that day, but it was the foreword to the poetry collection by famed calligrapher Wang Xizhi (王羲之), titled “Preface to the Poems Collected from the Orchid Pavilion (兰亭集序),” that made this party one of the best known in Chinese literary history. ¹⁰

I recently heard of similar drinking game requiring 1) a boat on a particular Shaoxing river with a series of regularly spaced bends, 2) a few friends, 3) Shaoxing wine, and 4) poetry. It’s a variation of the above game called “The Cup Comes to You” (杯子来到你, I’m guessing）Every time the boat came to a bend in the river, everyone had to write a poem and the person whose poem was judged least best had to drink three cups of Shaoxing wine instead of one. As is always the way with drinking games, the winners keep winning and the losers keep losing.

• • •