Back In Time For Imperial Examination Chapter 101

Mr. Lu looked at his newly revised poem. Compared with the previous one, the generosity of missing the emperor and serving the country was stronger. As for the feeling of missing his family... he used the word "sighing and sorrow", and found the right rhythm, which can also express the mood of missing his father. The second couplet "Thoughts flow away like flowing water" was changed to "Thoughts fly away on double wings", which is more closely connected with the previous line "young swallows miss their family". The word "dream" in "dream on the official travel boat" also points out the deep affection between the father and son.

After the revision, the artistic conception is more complete, the poem has both interest and fu, and it can write about the affection between father and son and the righteousness between the monarch and his subjects, pointing out that the monarch's grace is deeper than personal feelings. It can be regarded as a work of average quality.

But it lacks rhythmic changes when read, and it is a bit stiff. Mr. Lu read it again and explained it to him in detail: "You use too many Shang and Qu tones in this poem, and not enough Ru tones, so it feels like a one-beat rhythm when read, lacking a sense of change. Among the four tones of Ping and Ze, Ping is long, Ze is short, and among Ze tones, Shang, Qu, and Ru are different. Qu and Ping are both rising tones, and the breath is long, while Shang and Ru are suppressed tones, and the breath is short. Too many Ping tones will make the breath long and slow when read, and too many Ze tones will make the breath short and steep."

He pointed to the sentence "Dream of sending an official to travel by boat" and said: "This sentence uses three falling tones in the front, and two yangping tones in the back, which are too loud and do not sound like the tone of a couplet. The next sentence, 'So I said to Cangjiang Liu', also uses the two tones of Shang and Qu alternately. Although the rising tone is quick, it is still different from the entering tone: the rising tone goes up, and the entering tone goes down, which can also suppress the upward momentum of the word. From the whole text, I found that only one word "Yi" is an entering tone. There are too many ping and falling tones, and the tone is stiff if it is loud again. If the places where the falling tone is used are changed to the three tones of 'shangquru', the tone will be richer and more lively."

Ryan Cui thought he had done a good job in prosody, parallelism and antithesis these days, but after Mr. Lu's guidance, he realized that he still had a long way to go.