The Concise Yue Fu Folk Songs
3 min readDuring the Southern and Northern Dynasties, due to the long conflicts between the two dynasties and their diversity in politics, economy, cultural and natural environment, social life, etc., the two regional folk songs also display their owncharacteristics and styles. To sum up, the essential difference between these two dynasties lies in their national characters. The Southern songs are mainly amorousand sentimental, while the Northern ones are sonorous and vehement. The long lyrics Xi Zhou Qu of the Southern and the lyric the Poem of Mulan of the Northern are both regarded as representative masterpieces. And especially, the Poem of Mulan is time-honored and world-renowned.
There are nearly 500 pieces of Southern folk songs in store, far exceeding that of Yue Fu folk songs of the Han dynasty. However, most of them are love poems, which are widely-ranged and broadly-themed. The Southern folk songs use pun and are often in the tones of female. Most are short and of five-character and four-line, fresh and natural in language, and exceedingly sentimental and gentle in emotions. Its birth and flourish is largely thanks to the development of urban culture at that time. Take Xi Zhou Qu,a classical love poem, for example: it narrates how badly a young woman misses her lover in the north. This poem is rich in tunes and sentimentsand expresses the young woman’s gentle and lingering affection, making readers truly touched. The abundance of Southern folk songs, however, has two sides. On one side, its amorism contributes to the formation and popularity of the poems of Court style in liang and Chen dynasty. On the other side, the concentration of such a huge number of love poems breaks through the limitation of ruler-oriented poetic creation to which the Confucian poetic critics stick, so that its emergence is more of initiative and positive significance.
Although the Northern folk songs are much fewer than the Southern, they are widely-ranged and abundant in contents. Not like the limited themes of love poems of the Southern, the Northern poems mirror every aspect of social life like a long and splendid scroll which describes the living status of Northern races.
Compared with the Southern counterpart, the northern poems embody a unique feature of art-the simplistic language, frank expression, unstrained and energeticstyles. With only 27 characters, Chile Song,a famous Northern folk song, accurately depicts a vision of simple but boundless grassland. The poem constructs an open artistic conception and vast vigor, creating an image of the living status of Northern race and optimistic and unconstrained spirit. All above, it is praised as an eternal poetic masterpiece.
Also, there is another enduring masterpiece worthy to mention, The Poem of Mulan. Together with Peacocks Flying Southeast, these two narrative poems are considered to be the most outstanding pieces among the Yue Fu folk songs. The Poem of Mulan creates a girl joining in the army in her father’s place by disguising as a man, which makes a breakthrough to the traditional idea of “women inferior to men”, embodying a variety of virtues of ancient Chinese women and their lofty ideals tomake a remarkable contribution as men. For this, it is regarded as a combination of realism and romanism. In the meantime, it has a lot of glittering points such as theprecise and appropriate clipping, long-short sentence, abundant depiction and strong expression.A1l these merits would be a big treasure for reference for later generations.
