Poetry is all about meter and rhyme. Everyone knows the basics of rhyme: simply put, it’s when the final characters of lines share the same or similar sounds, making the poem flow smoothly when read aloud. Many people use rhyme. It appears in modern poetry, and sometimes in lines of prose and fiction. It’s especially common in pop song lyrics, where many lines rhyme, though the rules are much looser than in classical poetry. One difference between classical poetry and song lyrics or other kinds of poetry is that classical rhyme distinguishes between level and oblique tones. For example, “guang” is level and “lang” is oblique, so even if both appear in the same poem, they don’t count as rhyming. But “guang” and “xiang” are both level, so they do rhyme with each other in a poem.
Meter: “lü” means music, while “ge” can be understood here as a literary form. So how does a literary form acquire a musical rhythm? The key lies in the tones of spoken Chinese characters. In Mandarin, there are four tones, as well as characters with no tone. In ancient times, the tones had different names: yinping, yangping, shangsheng, qusheng, and rusheng. In both ancient and modern poetry, they are grouped into two categories: level and oblique. In ancient rhyme, yinping and yangping characters are level, while shangsheng, qusheng, and rusheng characters are oblique. In modern rhyme, first- and second-tone characters are level, while third- and fourth-tone characters, along with toneless characters, are oblique.
