Serendipity: Seizing the Toned Picture of Poetry in the Light of Prosody

What could prosody really do to help us digging further into the classics for the roads still not taken beneath, behind, and between the roads overly trodden? How much could prosody truly help us to make sense of the literary phenomena or scenarios that never cease seizing our attention nor ever relieve us consequently of our incessantly mixed curiosity and bewilderments? Why is the poem WANG Anshi王安石(1021-1086)'s poem "Stopping by Guazhou on board a boat" 《泊船瓜洲》, for instance, so unforgettably poetic? It is because, first and foremost, as the paper argues, what actually sustains the poem is literally the poem's simple emotionally fine-toned and fine-tuned"sound pattern," which proves, however underappreciated, not only "more integral[than] syntax" but also, indeed, more heart-appealing than mere verbal and visual images. What is so special of this simple poem, as the paper further argues, is the often overlooked function words, which, as if conditioned and coordinated by an "invisible hand," add so much to the poem. These "trivial" and "invisible" function words enliven the simple sound pattern; they season the poem in ways so traceless but ever-present like "a grain of salt" in the water in terms of this favorite metaphorical expression in The Upanishads or impact reading in ways as these familiar phrasesmay also thus suggest:i. e. "hui shi housu"绘事后素(To paint is to leave a vacant space behind the painted), "dayin xisheng"大音希声(Great music sounds barely audible), or "daxiang wuxing"大象无形(A great image has no image). The paper then explores accordingly whether or how it is possible to read afresh the classics not only in Chinese but also in English, among other major non-tonic modern languages, such as Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," along the same line of thought in the light of prosodyfor a crucial but often overlooked possibility of mutual illumination. Since the literary scenario is by no means a local but a global phenomenon, this illumination is exactly also what Goethe emphasizes as an irreplaceable necessity while deploring as in Pandora how we as humans are so "[d]estined, to see the illuminated, not the light."