Beyond the last image: Poetic endings in Chinese tradition

This comparative study of poetic ending in Chinese and Western traditions starts with the close reading of a number of Du Fu's poems, focusing on a type of ending that presents an image rather than a statement of thought.;An examination of the subsequent lyric traditions from the yuefu and gushi traditions through the southern dynasties reveals that the use of xing or associated image was gradually shifted from the beginning to the ending towards the High Tang.;As the back of the development of the image ending is a poetics of incompleteness and suggestiveness, and of the fusion of emotion and scene. It has thenceforth been embraced by critics as well as by poets as a conscious device to extend the semantic dimension of the text.;A number of pre-modern Western lyric poems (Joachim du Bellay, Holderlin, Shelley) using the image ending are scrutinized in the light of this perspective. The argument that these poems have hardly been critically appreciated in terms of their use of the image ending, as well as a scanning of early reception of Chinese poetry in translation in the West, will illuminate some of the basic differences between Chinese and Western poetics.;A diachronic examination of poetic ending in Chinese tradition starts from that of the Shijing (The Book of Poetry), a study of its basic structural patterns, and its various forms of beginning and ending. These are discussed in the context of the three modes of presentation in Chinese poetic and critical convention, fu or direct statement, bi or figuratives, and xing or images associated with thoughts. While xing is generally used at the beginning in the Shijing poems, the ending is usually in the fu mode.