Vietnamese poetry originated in the form of folk poetry and proverbs. Vietnamese poetic structures include Lục bát, Song thất lục bát, and various styles shared with Classical Chinese poetry forms, such as are found in Tang poetry; examples include verse forms with "seven syllables each line for eight lines," "seven syllables each line for four lines" (a type of quatrain), and "five syllables each line for eight lines." More recently there have been new poetry and free poetry.
With the exception of free poetry, a form with no distinct structure, other forms all have a certain structure. The tightest and most rigid structure was that of the Tang dynasty poetry, in which structures of content, number of syllables per line, lines per poem, rhythm rule determined the form of the poem. This stringent structure restricted Tang poetry to the middle and upper classes and academia.
History
Beginnings
The first indication of Vietnamese literary activity dates back around 500 BCE during the Đông Sơn Bronze-age civilization. Poetic scenes of sun worship and musical festivity appeared on the famous eponymous drums of the period. Since music and poetry are often inextricable in the Vietnamese tradition, one could safely assume the Đông Sơn drums to be the earliest extant mark of poetry.Nguyen 1975, p xv.
In 987 CE, Đỗ Pháp Thuần co-authored with Li Chueh, a Chinese ambassador in the early Lê dynasty by matching the latter's spontaneous oration in a four-verse poem called "Two Wild Geese".Nguyen 1975, p 3. Poetry of the period proudly exhibited its Chinese legacy and achieved many benchmarks of classical Chinese literature. For this, China bestowed the title of Văn Hiến Chi Bang ("the Cultured State") on Vietnam.Nguyen 1975, pp xvi-xvii.
All the earliest literature from Vietnam is necessarily written in chữ Hán (though read in the Sino-Vietnamese.Durand & Nguyen 1985, p 7.) No writing system for vernacular Vietnamese existed until the thirteenth century, when chữ Nôm ("Southern writing", often referred to simply as Nôm) — Vietnamese written using chữ Hán — was formalized.Nguyen 1975, p xviii. While Chinese remained the official written language for centuries, poets could now choose to write in the language of their choice.
Folk poetry presumably flourished alongside classical poetry, and reflected the common man's life with its levity, humor and irony. Since popular poetry was mostly anonymously composed, it was more difficult to date and trace the thematic development of the genre.Nguyen 1975, p 39.
High-culture poetry in each period mirrored various sensibilities of the age. The poems of Lý dynasty (1010–1125) distinctively and predominantly feature Buddhist themes.Nguyen 1975, pp 4-5. Poetry then became progressively less religiously oriented in the following dynasty, the Trần dynasty (1125–1400), as Confucian scholars replaced Buddhist priest as the Emperors' political advisers.Nguyen 1975, pp 10-11. Three successive victorious defense against the Kublai Khan's Mongolian armies further emboldened Vietnamese literary endeavors, infusing poetry with celebratory patriotism.
Later Lê dynasty (1427-1788)
Literature in Chữ Nôm flourished in the fifteenth century during the Later Lê dynasty. Under the reign of Emperor Lê Thánh Tông (1460–1497), chữ Nôm enjoyed official endorsement and became the primary language of poetry.Nguyen 1975, pp xviii-xix. By this century, the creation of chữ Nôm symbolized the happy marriage between chữ Hán and vernacular elements and contributed to the blurring of the literary distinction between "high" and "low" cultures.Nguyen 1975, p 69.
Due to the civil strife between Trịnh and Nguyễn lords and other reasons, poetic innovation continued, though at a slower pace from the late fifteenth century to the eighteenth century. The earliest chữ Nôm in phú, or rhymed verse,NB: "Rhymed verse" designates a specific form of verse, and should not be taken to mean that earlier Vietnamese verse was unrhymed. These earlier forms, like the Chinese forms they were based on, were rhymed. appeared in the sixteenth century. Also in the same period, the famous "seven-seven-six-eight" verse form was also invented. Verse novels (truyện) also became a major genre. It was around the fifteenth century that people started linking the traditional "six-eight" iambic couplet verses of folk poetry together, playing on the internal rhyming between the sixth syllable of the eight line and the last syllable of the six line, so that end rhyme mutates every two lines.Nguyen 1975, p 88. Orally narrated verse novels using this verse pattern received immense popular support in a largely illiterate society.
In the 17th century, Francisco de Pina arrived in Vietnam (Đàng Trong) and was credited with the creation of the Vietnamese alphabet. In 1651, Alexandre de Rhodes, a Portuguese missionary and disciple of Francisco de Pina, published the first trilingual Vietnamese-Portuguese-Latin dictionary (Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum), which helped furthered the development of the Vietnamese alphabet, however, did not gain wide currency until the twentieth century.
Tây Sơn and Independent Nguyễn dynasty (1788-1862)
Itinerant performers recite these epic poems, the most famous of which is the Tale of Kiều by Nguyễn Du, often said to be the national poem of Vietnam.Nguyen 1975, pp 112-13. A contemporary of Nguyễn Du was Hồ Xuân Hương, a female author of masterful and boldly venereal verses.Nguyen 1975, pp 117-18.
French colonial period (1862-1945)
Starting from the 1930s, Vietnamese alphabet poems abounded, often referred to as Thơ mới ("New Poetry"), which borrowed from Western traditions in both its free verse form as well as modern existential themes.Nguyen 1975, pp xx-xxi, 159.
Contemporary (1945-present)
The Second World War curbed some of this literary flourishing, though Vietnamese poetry would undergo a new period of development during the French resistance and the Vietnam War.Nguyen 1975, p xxi.
Prosody
As in most metrical systems, Vietnamese meter is structured both by the count and the character of syllables. Whereas in English verse syllables are categorized by relative stress, and in classical Greek and Latin verse they are categorized by length, in Vietnamese verse (as in Chinese) syllables are categorized by tone. For metrical purposes, the 6 distinct phonemic tones that occur in Vietnamese are all considered as either "flat" or "sharp". Thus a line of metrical verse consists of a specific number of syllables, some of which must be flat, some of which must be sharp, and some of which may be either.
Like verse in Chinese and most European languages, traditional Vietnamese verse is rhymed. The combination of meter and rhyme scheme defines the verse form in which a poem is written.
Traditionally in Vietnamese 1 word = 1 character = 1 syllable. Thus discussions of poetry may refer, for example, to a seven-word line of verse, or to the tone of a word. In this discussion, syllable is taken to be the least-ambiguous term for the foundational prosodic unit.
Vowels and tones
Vowels can be simple (à, ca, cha, đá, lá, ta) or compound (biên, chiêm, chuyên, xuyên), and one of six tones is applied to every vowel.
{| class="wikitable" !Tone Class!!Tone!!Diacritic!!Listen |- |rowspan="2"|Flat(bằng)||level||a (no diacritic)|| |- ||hanging||à|| |- |rowspan="4"|Sharp(trắc)||tumbling||ã|| |- ||asking||ả|| |- ||sharp||á|| |- ||heavy||ạ||
In order to correspond more closely with Chinese rules of versification, older analyses sometimes consider Vietnamese to have eight tones rather than six. This is due to the Chinese classification of tones which Vietnamese no longer uses due to the switch from chữ Nôm to the Vietnamese alphabet. However, the additional two tones are not phonemic in Vietnamese and in any case roll up to the same sharp tone class as they do in a six-tone analysis.
Rhyme Use of rhyme in Vietnamese poetry is largely analogous to its use in English and other European languages; two important differences are the salience of tone class in the acceptability of rhymed syllables, and the prominence of structural back rhyme (rhyming a syllable at the end of one line with a syllable in the middle of the next). Rhyme connects lines in a poem together, almost always occurring on the final syllable of a line, and sometimes including syllables within the line.
In principle, Vietnamese rhymes exhibit the same features as English rhymes: Given that every syllable consists of CVC — an optional initial consonant or consonant cluster + a vowel (simple or compound) + an optional final consonant or consonant cluster — a "true" rhyme comprises syllables with different initial C and identical VC. However additional features are salient in Vietnamese verse.
Rhyming syllables do not require identical tones, but must be of the same tone class: either all flat (e.g. dâu, màu, sầu), or all sharp (e.g. đấy, cấy). Flat rhymes tend to create a feeling of gentleness and smoothness, whereas sharp rhymes create a feeling of roughness, motion, wakefulness.
Rhyme can be further classified as "rich" or "poor". Rich rhyme (not to be confused with Rime riche) has the same tone class, and the same vowel sound: flat (Phương, sương, cường, trường) or sharp (Thánh, cảnh, lãnh, ánh).
extracted from Cung Oán Ngâm Khúc - Nguyễn Gia Thiều (1741- 1798) - Poetry compilation Tình bạn, tình yêu thơ - Education Publisher 1987
Poor rhyme has the same tone class, but slightly different vowel sounds: flat (Minh, khanh, huỳnh, hoành) or sharp (Mến, lẽn, quyện, hển)
Nguyễn Du: Truyện Kiều, lines 1519-20.
Finally, poets may sometimes use a "slant rhyme":
Nguyễn Du: Truyện Kiều, lines 1523-24.
Verse form
Regulated verse
The earliest extant poems by Vietnamese poets are in fact written in the Chinese language, in Chinese characters, and in Chinese verse formsEchols 1974, p 892. — specifically the regulated verse (luật thi) of the Tang dynasty. These strict forms were favored by the intelligentsia, and competence in composition was required for civil service examinations.Phu Van 2012, p 1519. Regulated verse — later written in Vietnamese as well as Chinese — has continued to exert an influence on Vietnamese poetry throughout its history.
At the heart of this family of forms are four related verse types: two with five syllables per line, and two with seven syllables per line; eight lines constituting a complete poem in each. Not only are syllables and lines regulated, so are rhymes, Level and Deflected tones (corresponding closely to the Vietnamese flat and sharp), and a variety of "faults" which are to be avoided. While Chinese poets favored the 5-syllable forms, Vietnamese poets favored the 7-syllable forms,Huỳnh 1996, p 7. so the first of these seven-syllable forms is represented here in its standard Tang form:Liu 1962, p 27.
| width="20pt" | L | width="30pt" | L / | width="20pt" | D | width="30pt" | D / | width="20pt" | D | width="20pt" | L | | LA |- | D || D / || L || L / || D || D || LA |- | D || D / || L || L / || L || D || D |- | L || L / || D || D / || D || L || LA |- | L || L / || D || D / || L || L || D |- | D || D / || L || L / || D || D || LA |- | D || D / || L || L / || L || D || D |- | L || L / || D || D / || D || L || LA |} L = Level syllable; D = Deflected syllable; LA = Level syllable with "A" rhyme; / = pause.
The other seven-syllable form is identical, but with (for the most part) opposite assignments of Level and Deflected syllables. 5-syllable forms are similarly structured, but with 2+3 syllable lines, rather than 2+2+3. All forms might optionally omit the rhyme at the end of the first line, necessitating tone alterations in the final three syllables. An additional stricture was that the two central couplets should be antithetical.Liu 1962, p 26.