(c) Tone-arrangement. The tones were disregarded. (Lines can be found in pre-T’ang poems in which five deflected tones occur in succession, an arrangement which would have been painful to the ear of a T’ang writer and would probably have been avoided by classical poets even when using the old style.)
Lü-shih (New Style).
(a) The rhymes used are the “106” of modern dictionaries (not those of the Odes, as Giles states). Rhymes in the flat tone are preferred. In a quatrain the lines which do not rhyme must end on the opposite tone to that of the rhyme. This law is absolute in Lü-shih and a tendency in this direction is found even in Ku-shih.
(b) There is a tendency to antithetical arrangement of tones in the two lines of a couplet, especially in the last part of the lines.
(c) A tendency for the tones to go in pairs, e.g. (A=flat, B=deflected): AA BBA or ABB AA, rather than in threes. Three like tones only come together when divided by a “cesura,” e.g., the line BB / AAA would be avoided, but not the line BBAA / ABB.
(d) Verbal parallelism in the couplet, e.g.:
After long illness one first realizes that seeking medicines is a mistake;
In one’s decaying years one begins to repent that one’s study of books was deferred.
This device, used with some discretion in T’ang, becomes an irritating trick in the hands of the Sung poets.
[1] Not to be confused with the Four Tones of the Mandarin dialect, in which the old names are used to describe quite different enunciations.