Shi Jing, The Book of Odes: Lessons from the States, Odes Of Chen

[x_los]

* I found the best option for the weekly reminder emails, via Gmail. The external service options are more involved than our purposes require. Does anyone know anything about how to arrange an Apps Script? Basically all it has to do is tell ten people, on Saturdays, to come and get their juice/poems.

Until someone knows what to do there, I'll send out manual messages weekly. If you'd like to receive these and are not getting them, please let me know.

* If you haven't read it yet, chapter one, on tetrasyllabic shi poetry, in How to Read Chinese Poetry is hugely useful for the Book of Odes, imo.

* IF YOU HAVE FRIENDS WHO MIGHT LIKE TO JOIN or have other ideas, please let me know on this post.

* Every week I search the poems' English results to see if I can find any scholarship or neat bits and pop the results in Resources. Here is this week's collection.

**NEXT BATCH MARCH 8.**

Comments

Re: 142. 防有鵲巢 - Fang You Que Chao

[superborb]

Baike:

"embankment": dam, dike. One source says embankment; one source says a "fang", an evergreen tree that gives a red dye.

"height": mound, hill

"pea": a type of creeper / climbing plant, grows in low, wet places. Several plants are then proposed to be what the plant is.

"the middle path of the temple": in the ancient halls, the main corridor in the courtyard

"tiles": baike glosses this as tiles, and then one source says DUCKS [i'm dying]

So again, it's the contrast of "things that don't belong here": magpies on dams, water plants on hills, roof tiles on courtyards.

Mao's commentary says this is Xuan gong believing in slander, and Ju Zi worried about it. Zhu Xi disagrees and says it's a love poem and modern scholars mostly agree it's a poem for lovers who are worried about separation and losing their love.