Poetic China: The Moonlight on Mimo Cliff

Poetic China: The Moonlight on Mimo Cliff

Author: Hu Shi (1891—1962)

It’s a full moon night again;

It’s a silent night in the quiet mountains again.

I return to my lodging alone in the moonlight.

How can I resolve the sad feelings that are hard to contain?

The sound waves of the winds go through pine trees on Mount Cuiwei.

They break the silence in the mountains like a dart.

The winds mess up the shadows of pine trees on my window,

But they cannot blow away the image of someone in my heart.

May brings two special days to the Chinese. One of them, May 4, marks the anniversary of an influential student movement in 1919, and the other one, the second Sunday of May, is Mother’s Day.

Today, we will see a poem written in the May 4th Movement, an important historical event in China’s New Cultural Movement from where a new form of writing emerged. Before then, the written Chinese language had always been completely different from its spoken form.

For instance, ni (你), the Chinese equivalent to the English word “you” in daily conversations, would become something like “thou” in English, namely ru (汝), er (尔), or jun (君) in the traditional Chinese written form. Also, written sentences used to be all as compact as news headlines, much briefer than spoken sentences.

Considering the traditional written form an obstacle in raising China’s literacy rate, Chinese students came up with a new way to make it resemble transcripts of the spoken language.

Hu Shi, a Peking University professor then, created so called “new poetry”, xin shi (新诗). The new poetry distinguishes itself from classical Chinese poetry by breaking the rules of all the old genres. In a word, the new poetry sets the poet free. There are successful examples of the new poetry. “The Moonlight on Mimo Cliff” is one of them.

Copyright: A POETIC PORTAL TO CHINESE CULTURE, China Pictorial Press