Unlike the Eulogies, many of the Court Hymns are grand, expansive narratives to celebrate the Zhou they served as the dynasty’s core text of political and cultural memory. Respecting ‘heaven’s will’ was an important element of ancient Chinese politics by enforcing this message, the Book of Songs could underpin the rule of the Zhou Dynasty.
In short, Chinese poetry begins in religious ritual.īy accompanying rites, in turn, the Eulogies helped regulate social order. These hymns, all of them rather short, were performed in sacrifices to the Zhou royal ancestors: multimedia performances containing the aromatic offerings of meat, grain and alcohol ritual music on drums and bells, wind and string instruments dance to re-enact the military conquest of the previous Shang dynasty and the solemn hymns by which the Zhou king praised his ancestors and requested their blessings in return. It has continued to affect Chinese society since then, both through what the Songs say and the form they take. The collection had an impact on education, politics and communal life: in antiquity, the Songs were quoted and recited as coded communication in diplomatic exchange invoked as proof to cap a philosophical argument read as commentary – satirical more often than not – on historical circumstances and taught for the purposes of moral edification. In the same way that Homer’s epics took hold within the West, The Book of Songs played a role in spheres far beyond literature, with a lasting influence on Chinese civilisation. Why The Handmaid’s Tale is so relevant today By the end of the Western Han dynasty (202 BCE-9 CE), there were no fewer than four schools of the Songs at the imperial academy, offering a range of different interpretations for each song. Since antiquity, no other text has enjoyed a presence quite like The Book of Songs – in one critic’s words, it is “the classic of the human heart and the human mind.” It is the first poetic anthology of China Confucius himself is said to have compiled the “three hundred songs”- another early name for the text – out of a body of 3,000, “removing duplicates and choosing only what could be matched to the principles of ritual”.
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