Lack of verse makes language worse
Why are we verse averse? What is it that makes modern society so squeamish to put a little effort into everyday parlance? In other words, where are today’s poets? Are modern-day muses bemused and belittled by the zeitgeist of fake news, tabloid headlines, polemic masquerading as journalism, the pressure to begin every sentence with “So ...”, “Y’know ...” or “Umm ...”? Not to mention the fact that virtual conversation is making the question “What do you mean by that look?” anachronistic, but only if such non-face-toface exchanges fall within 140 characters or fewer … a communications platform that is increasingly devoid of anything resembling human “character”.
Mind you, perhaps during the Warring States Period (475-221 BC) poet and palace sage Qu Yuan (340 BC-278 BC) also bemoaned the deterioration of social discourse especially within the imperial court.
Whether or not this led to opting for felo-de-se versus political accommodation and abandonment of principle will never be truly known. But it does beg the question of whether the early 21st century truly marks a new nadir in the quality and quantity of human discourse and the capacity for such interactions to be transcendent to the mundane and intractably partisan. Or have we naked apes seen it all before in endless cycles, but simply don’t have SMS records from the Warring States Period to back up such sweeping assertions? So … (see what I did there?), with apologies to the wordsmiths of classical Chinese verse, non-Wordsworthian, here’s a holiday tribute to the hundreds of millions now in their hometowns and looking ahead perhaps dejectedly at the cheerless chore of making travel arrangements to return to their places of employ.
Chunyun, the largest annual human migration, began earlier this month as over half the nation asked: “Is it hoarfrost on the ground? I lift my eyes and see the moon, I bend my head and think of home’’, (by Li Bai). And the left-behind elders, the grandparents and immediate progenitors of the restless and ambitious youth who inflate the outskirts of Shenzhen, Guangdong province, Shanghai and Beijing beyond their previously bucolic boundaries, anticipate the pre-holiday chill perhaps with: “Thread in the hands of a fond-hearted mother; Makes clothes for the body of her wayward boy; Carefully she sews and thoroughly she mends, Dreading the delays that will keep him late from home,’’ (by Meng Jiao).
During the countless homeward journeys of many
li, weary passengers peer through steamed-over train and coach windows to see the cyclical slumber of nature beneath the frosty fields and think: “Boundless grasses over the plain, Come and go with every season; O Prince of Friends, you are gone again … I hear them sighing after you,” (by Bai Juyi).
Chunyun participants crossing borders might pine for the home-hearth and good tidings from native-village neighbors should they spend their Chinese New Year in lands where banks remain open weeklong, perhaps enjoying the continuation of public services while also lamenting: “All alone in a foreign land, I am twice as homesick on this day,” (by Wang Wei).