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I. Introduction

In studying the art of Manchu poetry, one cannot overlook the poems and songs composed at the Qing court. These poems include both those authored by the emperor as well as those written at his behest. Most are poems praising military accomplishments and virtue or describing life in the palace. Though from today's perspective they lack much in the way of concrete meaning, their forms reveal some special characteristics.

Manchu court poetry may be divided into two types, narrative and lyric, depending on content and form. Generally speaking, narrative poetry is longer and lyric shorter. The shortest lyric poems vary from four to eight lines, with every four lines representing a stanza. There is no upper limit on the length of longer works, most of which are also based on a four-line stanza format. Each stanza is a rhyming unit.

Rhyme in Manchu poetry is produced when the same sound is written with the same letters. It is thus not entirely the same as rhyme in Chinese poetry, which also employs tones in creating rhymes. This feature is obviously absent in Manchu, which, of course, has no tones. Manchu poetry differs from Chinese poetry in another important way too, in that it relies not only on rhyme but also on alliteration. The requirements for alliteration are somewhat stricter than for rhyme in that every line in a stanza must begin with the same sound, while only the second and fourth lines need to end with the same sound. Alliteration might thus be said to have an A A A A pattern, while rhyme typically exhibits an A B C B or an A A B A pattern. Rhyme between stanzas is optional. Because in a longer poem it is difficult to maintain alliteration and rhyme from beginning to end, these almost always shift from one stanza to the next.

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