The boy inside Book

Excellent collection and interpretation of classic poetry written 2500 years ago.

The Chou were less confident: archaic Chinese writings, including many of the Songs, are filled with notes of anxiety lest the ruler stray and Heaven, in its wrath, withdraw its charge from Chou:

To begin well is common;
To end well is rare indeed.

'The anxiety is reminiscent of the caution that the house of Israel needed to show, always under the watchful eye of God; but the situation of the Chou was even more precarious: they were not, like the people of Israel, chosen forever, but merely given an office which they could keep only so long as they carried out its duties and remained successful. And the clearest evidence of Heaven's support was to be found in the voices of the common people. The Chou were constantly reminded of the fate of the dynasty they had conquered, the Yin or Shang Dynasty, which had in its day enjoyed Heaven's favor and then lost it.'

The Chou was an agrarian dynasty, and their sense of beauty and order is closely related to the cycles and abundance of the agricultural year. In a society of warriors, life is directed to a single intense and uncertain moment of decision, crisis; this plays a powerful role in understanding the structure of time and events, hence of narrative. Agrarian time is cyclical, a complete and repeating series of acts and event, all of which are equally necessary and all of which contribute to the whole.

The need for wholeness in poetry of the Chou goes far deeper than the dynasty's need for assurance of universal support: it embodies a larger sense of how the world and events in it are structured.

The anthology presents the full human share of unhappiness and pain, but usually the reasons behind suffering are quite clear: desertion by a lover, misgovernment, the hardships of forced military service. In the increasingly turbulent and violent centuries that followed the 7th century BC, much in The Book of Songs seemed indeed to come from a lost era in which the world was comprehensible; and the anthology contributed much to the Chinese myth of the Chou as the ideal polity.

The flight of birds, their cries, the movement of animals, the condition of flowers, dewy or rain-dabbled, the restlessness of insects, the sound of their wings, the fading of the stars -- all these play their part in early Chinese imagery; as symbols, illustrations, or omens according to the context. That the cries of birds should be interpreted as words with real meaning strikes us at first as odd. But remember that such cries as the caw-case, coo-coo, cluck-cluck, quack-quack, are typical of the sounds that actually existed in early Chinese vocabulary. It was difficult to believe that birds and beasts did not use them with the same intention as human beings.