Early V. p. developed on the basis of both cl. poems by Buddhist monks and Confucian scholars and numerous folk verses sung by minstrels and peasants at rural festivals. The genre used most often in popular verse is the six-eight ( luc-bát )couplet form, a V. innovation in which a line of six monosyllabic works is followed by a line of eight. This form can comprise a number of tonal iambs or anapests, with both final and medial rhyme, as shown in the first four lines of The Tale of Kiêu , with o representing either of the two flat or even tones, x one of the four sharp or oblique tones, and R a rhyme:
? ? ? ? ? ? R1
Tram nam trong coi nguòi ta
? ? ? ? ? oR1 ? ?R2
Chu tài chu mênh khéo là ghét nhau
? ? ? ? ? ? ?R1
Trai qua môt cuôc bê dâu
? ? ? ? ? ?R2 ? oR3
Nhung piôu trông thây má pau pôn lòng
A hundred years—in this life span on earth Talent and destiny are apt to feud You must go through a play of ebb and flow And watch such things as make you sick at heart
Such couplets are found in proverbs and sayings, work songs, love songs, children’s songs, lullabies, and riddles. But the alternation of hexasyllables and octosyllables can continue almost without limit, the number of lines reaching several thousand in the case of such long narratives as The Tale of Kiêu by Nguyên Du, The Story of Phan Trân by Dô Cân, and Luc Vân Tiên by the blind poet Nguyên D’inh Chiêu. A variation of the six-eight meter is preceded by two lines of seven words, thus engendering the “double-seven six eight” ( song-thât luc-bát )meter, used in elegies and ballads and typified by Phan Huy Ich’s or Doán Th? Diêm’s tr. of The Song of a Soldier’s Wife (a poem first written in cl. Chinese by Dang Trán Con), or Marquis Ôn-nhu’s The Plaint of an Odalisque . All those moving pieces, first meant to be chanted, later became limited blockprint editions circulated among friends and connoisseurs and printed in chunôm , the demotic script which in the 11th c. assimilated Ch. characters to transcribe individual V. words.
The same gentry scholars who created such popular stories in vernacular V. verse, several of whom remained anonymous, often authored prodigious poetic compositions well crafted in Ch. itself. Whichever lang. they used, their clear preference was for the 8-line stanza ( bát cú ), sometimes reduced to a quatrain called tú tuyêt , with each line containing either 7 words ( thât ngôn )or 5 ( ngu ngôn )and obeying the rules of Ch. prosody. The 254 poems left by Nguyên Trãi in the 15th c., the collection composed by Emperor Lê Thánh-tông and the court ministers who clustered around him as the “28 constellations” in his Tao-pàn Academy, and the pastorals of Nguyên Binh Khiêm all reveal features of V. culture in a distinctly native rhythm—the caesura falling after the third syllable of the seven in the line rather than after the fourth, as in T’ang poems—as well as native imagery, allusions, and metaphors.
With the ascendancy of the Roman script ( quôc-ngu ), invented in the 17th c by Western missionaries, both Ch. and “southern” characters lost their hold on V. education and culture. By 1918, the year the old-style literary examinations were abolished, the new romanization designed to facilitate assimilation of Fr. culture and the newborn press rapidly stimulated literary output among Fr. -trained writers. Thê Lu, Luu Trong Lu, Chê Lan Viên, Huy-Thông, Xuân-Diêu, and Huy-Cân began to write “new poetry,” an innovative genre launched by Phan Khôi in 1932, turning away from Ch. versification with its rigid rules for tonal harmony and parallelism, and utilizing new rhythms (e. g. 8-word lines) and new rhymes, as well as alliterative and assonantal reduplication and sound symbolism. Poets in and around the literary group Self-Reliance ( Tu-luc )exhorted love, individual freedom, and the beauty of Nature in stanzas that were first printed in the group’s magazines Phong-hod and Ngay nay before appearing in book form.
Romanticism and lyricism took full advantage of the musicality of the lang. in poems by the original Nguyên Khac Hiêu, who experimented with verse in 3-word and 5-word lines; by Trân Tuân Khai, who succeeded in combining the old and the new; and by Quách Tân, who sounded like a Nguyên Khuyên, a Trán Tê Xuong, or a Dông-hô, who exuded love of the countryside. This trad, of modern poetry couched in plebeian terms was quickly followed by such talented writers as Nguyên Bính, Dinh-H?ng, Vu Hoàng-Chuong, and Bàng Bà Lân, who overnight became the idols of a city youth attuned to their newly expressed sensibilities. Whereas Buddhist, Confucian, and Taoist themes still dominated a segment of 20th c V. p., new ideals of liberty and happiness crowded compositions by a new generation who, north of the 17th Parallel, concentrated on anticolonial and socialist topics or who, south of the demarcation line, lamented the moral decay, broken families, and disrupted careers that they readily blamed on the war years. Women, who figure prominently in the literary scene, inherited the trad, begun by female poets such as Doàn Thi Diêm, Hô Xuân-Huong (well-known for her erotic imagery through clever double entendre) or Nguyên Thi Hinh (known as “Lady Thanh-quan” and noted for her sober and elegant cl. verse).
In content dependent on the social context and expressing a painful conflict between traditional (i. e. Sino-Vietnamese) and foreign (i. e. Western) elements, and in form rising above the old constraints to ingenious inventiveness, modern V. p. steadily increases its riches, whether inebriated with “achievements” of socialism inside the country or, since 1975, despondent over the travail of the emigrés’ separation from the motherland, writers who yet express their nostalgia in prolific creations in expatriate publications around the world.
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