Embedded Poetry in Chinese Fiction

Prose mixed with poetry

Embedded Poetry in Chinese Fiction

Though we don’t see much of it in contemporary Western literature, prose replete with embedded poetry actually was a thing in English at one point in time.

If you read enough old stuff, you’ll see some pretty obvious examples of embedded poems. Take this part of “Ligeia” by Edgar Allan Poe, for example:

At high noon of the night in which she departed, beckoning me, peremptorily, to her side, she bade me repeat certain verses composed by herself not many days before. I obeyed her. --They were these:

Lo! 'tis a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years!
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre, to see
A play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
The music of the spheres.

But this feels like cheating, of course. It doesn’t seem to be a real “embedded” poem when the text draws attention to the fact that a poem is coming up.

We’re going to see poems that are called out like this in Dream of the Red Chamber; in fact, we’ll see one in tomorrow’s translation post.

However, we also saw an embedded — and somewhat hidden — poem yesterday:

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