On the Musicality of the Poems by Xu Zhimo

Abstract: The musicality of the poems by Xu Zhimo seems to be a well-known issue in the academic circle. As the founder of the Crescent Moon Society, Xu Zhimo laid emphasis on the beauty of sound in poetic composition. His poetry thus possesses a “natural” rhythm. Although he was a member of the New Poetry Movement, Xu opposed strongly to its prose tendency and created the style of “new metrical poetry” by his innovative use of the Chinese rhyme and meter. The softness and grace of the image and the depth of the artistic conception in Xu’s poems bring about a “silent voice” with special musical effects between the lines. However, there is still misreading in the understanding of the musical features of Xu’s poems. The vernacular feature of Xu’s poems, for instance, is usually rendered as the “natural” colloquial language that yields rhythmical effect. Yet the truth is that this colloquial language has been “distilled” and rearranged for the musical effect of the poem, thus becoming some “pseudo spoken language.” Besides, many people simply trace the source of Xu’s musicality back to the influence of the 19th century English and American Romantic poetry, and ignore Xu’s ingenious adoption of the traditional Chinese poetic rhyme—in particular the level and oblique tones—that has been passed down from The Book of Songs and Lisao. What’s more, Xu Zhimo might have probably been influenced by the folk songs of Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces. All these should be seriously considered to be the influential factors leading to the musicality of Xu’s poems. In addition, the value of the musicality of Xu’s poems should neither be confined to the judgment of the literary value of the poems’ themselves nor limited to the construction of the “poetic beauty” of Xu’s poems. It plays a benchmarking role in maintaining the traditional “beauty of form, sound, and meaning” in Chinese poetry, and effectively prevents the New Poetry from falling into the situation of “mechanically imitating” British and American modernist poetry. As the main factor of the unique charm of Xu’s poems, the musicality secures a prominent position for the poet as the “April Day on Earth” in the history of modern Chinese poetry, which then helps modern and contemporary Chinese poetry enthusiasts go beyond the inconsistent evaluation of the poet’s personal moral standards to be aware of his unswerving pursuit of freedom and democracy. It is this unswerving pursuit that constitutes the essence of Chinese New Poetry and that of the New Culture Movement as a whole. This is the greatest contribution that Xu Zhimo and his Crescent Moon School have ever made for the society.

Key words: Xu Zhimo’s poems; musicality; factors; literary values; social contribution