Season Performance Of Classical Chinese Poetry

The Japanese literature is well-known for its strong sense of seasons, with theillustration of the necessary seasonal word "Kigo" in Haiku, which inspires the thesisof this paper. Compared to the Japanese ones, Chinese classical poems are possessedof the sense of seasons as well. Famous works are usually equipped with beautifuldescriptions of seasons, and critics adverted to this feature in the very early period.The seasonal descriptions have grasped their attention as the trigger of emotionalexpressions ever since they revealed the lyrical nature of the classical poems back inLu Ji's Wen Fu. However, studies on the seasonal expression are mostly lack of thehistorical perspective and the systematic thinking, let alone the summing-up of all theseasonal words.Based on the situation of the present research, this paper consists of four parts.The first part is the Introduction, introducing the research results on this topic, theorigin of the thesis, the methods and the academic accomplishments. The second partcontains Chapter1to4, in which the author proceeded a diachronic investigation onhow the seasonal expression gradually embedded itself into the lyrical structure of theclassical poems. Beginning with the analysis of the relationship between theawareness of seasons and the ancient agricultural society with the example of Li JiYue Ling, this part discussed the different developing stages of the seasonal expressionin Pre-Qin Period, Hanweijin Dynasty and Nanbei Dynasty, from foundation-settlingto transforming and finally to pattern-establishing. The third part is Chapter5. In thispart, the author summarized the main ways to describe the seasons and tried to list allthe seasonal words after reading and classifying the classical poems. The last part isthe Conclusion.The conclusion of this paper is as follow: Firstly, it involves the relationshipbetween the seasonal expression and the lyrical structure of the classical poems. In thepoems of Pre-Qin Period, seasons played the role as the trigger of emotionalexpressions and entered the poems' lyrical structure for the very first time, as well aslinking to the personal thinking on life and death. Hanwei Dynasty carried on thepoetic tradition of the period before, whose poems inherited the trigger pattern and thesymbolic tactics, and their descriptions of seasons were often related to thefriends&lovers missing theme and the life&death theme. Transformations happened in Jin Dynasty. The seasonal expression expanded its relations with the emotionalexpressions to various themes. Meanwhile, it did no longer play only the role of thetrigger but the background of the emotional expressions. These two alterationsbecame obvious in poems of Nanbei Dynasty, which encouraged the frequentparticipation of the seasonal expression and an unprecedentedly common linkbetween the seasonal expression and the lyrical structure. It is then that the sense ofseasons established its status as the supporting factor in both the expression and thestructure of Chinese classical poems. Secondly, the main ways of describing seasonsin classical poems could be sorted into four categories: the direct presenting ofseasons, the descriptions of natural scenes, the records of human activities and theliterary quotations and the idioms of works before.