Climbing the Terrace of Kuan-Yin and Looking at the City
Hundreds of houses, thousands of houses,--like a chess-board.The twelve streets like a field planted with rows of cabbage.In the distance perceptible, dim, dim--the fire of approaching dawn;And a single row of stars lying to the west of the Five Gates.
About this text
Climbing the Terrace of Kuan-Yin and Looking at the City is in the public domain. This text is taken from A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems, Project Gutenberg ebook #42290, the Arthur Waley translation; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Various, Climbing the Terrace of Kuan-Yin and Looking at the City, in A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (1918), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #42290, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/waley-chinese/climbing-the-terrace-of-kuan-yin-and-looking-at-the-city.html, id L18866.
Form and metre
Climbing the Terrace of Kuan-Yin and Looking at the City is 4 lines in a single stanza. The lines average 15.2 syllables. 1 line ends on an unstressed syllable, a feminine ending.
Measured by Laurel's pipeline, not copied from a handbook: how stress and metre are counted, how rhyme is lettered, how a drifted rhyme is found. Where the dictionary cannot confirm a rhyme the letter is withheld, not guessed.
Scansion, line by line
Each line with its syllable count and the stresses the words themselves fix: / stressed, ˘ unstressed, · a syllable the word leaves free and the metre decides. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Hundreds of houses, thousands of houses,--like a chess-board. | 14 | /˘·/˘/˘·/˘···· |
| The twelve streets like a field planted with rows of cabbage. | 13 | ······/˘···/˘ |
| In the distance perceptible, dim, dim--the fire of approaching dawn; | 18 | ··/˘˘/˘˘···/˘·˘/˘· |
| And a single row of stars lying to the west of the Five Gates. | 16 | ··/˘···/˘······· |
The reader shows the same poem with its rhymes coloured and a stress row above each line, the notes beside their stanzas, and any word's definition on a tap; the analysis page takes the whole book apart. How every part of this site was made.