The Odes (Shi) are one of the Five Confucian Classics. The title, “Shi”, roughly translated to “poems”, “odes”, or “songs”, and they are also known as the ‘Classic of Poetry’. They are performance texts, composed by unknown individuals and compiled as anthologies. Highly rhetorical accounts of the past, they are thought to represent a cultural legacy and a guide to the distant past by Imperial Chinese elites.
As an anthology, the Odes are split into three rhythmical sections: the “Court Songs” (Ya), the “Hymns” (Song) and the “Airs of the States” (Guó Fēng). The 40 Hymns (Song) were often performed alongside dances and plays to commemorate the Shang, Zhou and Lu ruling dynastic houses, and they formed a key part of state sacrifices despite having no formal rhyme scheme. The Court Songs (Ya), numbering 105 pieces, can further be separated into two categories: major and minor. Used for official state events and entertainment, they conveyed political messages through their musical patterns; “The tones from a time of good rule are peaceful and happy, as the government is balanced. The tones from a time of chaos are resentful and angry, as the government is unbalanced.” (Nylan 2001:81). The most commonly used, and most significant in number with 160 different poems, was the Airs of the States (Guó Fēng). These short, single-themed songs concerned daily life, love, and war, and are structured in brief stanzas with an occasional line-by-line rhyme scheme. The Guó Fēng verses of the Odes anthology found its origins in localised and regional folk songs of the various territorial states of Zhou, and were compiled through mass governmental collection.
It is within the fascinating evolution of the Guó Fēngthat these short, single-themed folk songs concerning daily life developed into extended metaphorical vehicles for expressing emotion and intent in situations of diplomacy and high society. They are said to have been collected by officers dispatched by the Zhou Dynasty court to allow the king to observe the state of the common people. For the Zhou, whose ideological governance style was rooted in the benign nature of their rulers, the conditions of the common people were of great importance in indicating successful rule. As such, the Guó Fēng was compiled and performed for royal audiences to allow them to assert their benevolence.
Despite this, they were very commonly known due to their folk origins, serving a dual purpose of contributing towards common discourse and being expressionistic of high culture. For the elites, they represented a cultural legacy and guide to the distant past. They operated as a didactic instrument, preserving cultural lessons and teachings held only previously in memory – using continuous metaphorical imagery to do so. By the imperial period, the Odes were taught from a young age: an “early thesaurus and book of etiquette rolled into one…” (Nylan 2001:92). Publicly, they functioned as graceful and indirect vehicles for expressing emotion and intent in diplomatic settings, allowing one to address delicate matters subtly, within accepted customs and without embarrassment.
For the non-elites, the Odes placed a strong emphasis on friendship and humans as social beings, operating as a means to integrate oneself within a larger social phenomenon. They facilitated singing in harmony and contributed towards a sense of community. Both performers and listeners – through their interpretations – participated in endowing each Ode with meaning alongside that intended by the original composer.
The evolution of the anthology from its early textual history into what we see now is not cohesively documented, although the fairly consistent voice throughout suggests at least one unified final reworking of the collection. The notion of an original text attached to a single time/place/situation/author is misleading. Rather, conscious repetition and their malleable nature gave the performance texts cultural influence and allowed for elites and royal audiences to renovate individual Odes and endow them with expressions of high culture.
Works cited:
Nylan, Michael, ‘Chapter 2: The Odes,’ The Five “Confucian” Classics (2001)