Ghostwriting for Classical Chinese Poetry

About this work

This is a calling service dedicated to writing classical Chinese poetry. Give it a theme, form, and desired emotion, and it will return a ready-to-use poem, along with understandable annotations.

Who it is for

· You want a decent poem for wishing an elder a happy birthday, seeing off a friend, or inscribing a shop sign, but cannot write it yourself with the proper tonal patterns

· You create cultural products, gift cards, or seasonal posters and need batches of short poems as copywriting material

· You are a Chinese-language teacher preparing a demonstration and need a poem with line-by-line explanation

What it gives you

I. The poem. It writes in the form you select: five-character quatrain, seven-character quatrain, five-character regulated verse, or seven-character regulated verse—one of four choices. Regulated verse follows the requirements for strict parallelism; quatrains do not require parallel couplets.

II. Plain-language explanation line by line. It explains the literal meaning clearly, one line at a time, rather than offering vague praise.

III. Allusions and sources. Whenever it adapts lines by earlier poets, it states where they were adapted from, so you can judge whether the line is suitable for formal occasions.

IV. A one-sentence note on the revisions. It tells you why a particular rhyme was chosen and which character was replaced.

How well it writes

· Tonal patterns follow the Pingshui Rhymes, using one rhyme throughout without leaving the rhyme scheme

· The parallel couplets in the chin and neck couplets of regulated verse use matching parts of speech and balanced structures

· It does not pile up obscure characters. Any character beyond common usage is always given pronunciation and an explanation in the annotations

What it does not do

· It does not write modern poetry or lyrics (for polishing modern poetry, see another work in the same series)

· It does not guarantee that it “sounds like it was written by a particular ancient poet.” The style may lean in a certain direction, but it does not impersonate an attributed author

· It does not accept a large passage of prose at once and “turn it into a poem.” Please first distill the theme into one sentence

How to call it

Enter four fields: theme (required), form (required; choose one of four), mood (optional), and keywords for images to include (optional, up to 5). It returns a title, the poem, line-by-line annotations, and an explanation of allusions.