A pair of ospreys, which inspired the title of the poem.
Guan ju (traditional Chinese: 關雎; simplified Chinese: 关雎; pinyin: Guān jū; Wade–Giles: Kuan1 chü1: "Guan guan cry the ospreys", often mistakenly written with the unrelated but similar-looking character 睢, suī) is the first poem from the ancient anthology Shi Jing (Classic of Poetry), and is one of the best known poems in Chinese literature. It has been dated to the seventh century BC,[1] making it also one of China's oldest poems, though not the oldest in the Shi Jing. The title of the poem comes from its first line (Guan guan ju jiu), which evokes a scene of ospreys calling on a river islet. Fundamentally the poem is about finding a good and fair maiden as a match for a young noble.
Guan ju boasts a long tradition of commentaries. Traditional Chinese commentators, represented by the "Three Schools" and the Mao School, hold that the poem contains a moral pertinent to the relationship between genders. However, modern commentators, and some Western sinologists, offer different interpretations.
The poem has been culturally important since antiquity. According to the Analects, Confucius remarked that it displayed both joy and sorrow but neither to an excessive degree.[2] The poem has subsequently been alluded to repeatedly in Chinese literature and continues to be quoted on occasion in the modern written language and in speech. In particular, the lines 窈窕淑女 "fair and good lady", 求之不得 "seeking and not getting", and 寤寐求之 "seeking day and night" have become well-known four-character classical idioms or set phrases (chengyu).
Calligraphy and watercolor illustration of the Guan ju by the Qianlong Emperor.
^W. A. C. H. Dobson, The Language of the Book of Songs (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968) p. 21.
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