Poem and music

Post 93 A strikingly descriptive poem

I can remember very well till now two stanzas of a Chinese poem which I learnt during my secondary school day in the early 1960s. It was a poem by Zhang Ji (张继):
"From the Han Shan Temple (Cold Mountain Temple) outside the city of Suzhou, was heard the midnight bell reaching the passenger boat" (姑苏城外寒山寺，夜半钟声到客船.)
In the 1990s when I visited Suzhou, China, I was delighted to have touched the bell that sent its sounds to the passing passenger boats nearby. The poem was so picturesque one could form a mental picture of what he was describing. I was not far off tangent in my imagination while being taught this poem in school.

John Keats, the famous poet says, “We read fine things but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the author.” How right he was!

Fou Ts’ong (傅聪) who won the third prize in the International Frederick Chopin Piano Competition, an equivalent to the Nobel Prize in music, in Poland in 1955, commented that there is a close relationship between poem and music. In the year 2000, when Yundi Li of China won the top honour in the competition held every five years, Fou Ts’ong remarked that the Chinese tend to have a strong poetic temperament and thus could play the masterpieces of Chopin, who was a very romantic composer, expressively.

“Poetry is the music of the soul, and, above all, of great and feeling souls.” (Voltaire, one of the greatest of all French authors, 1694-1778)

3 May 2011