), in his Historical Records, listed Song Yu among the great poets of the Chu who lived after Qu Yuan, Sima Qian did not mention the authorship of "Nine Changes.
"[5] Jiao Hong (16th century—17th century, A.D.) believes that this poem was composed by Qu Yuan rather than Song Yu.
[8] Wang Fuzhi (1619–1692) clarifies that this poem uses the same title of another "Jiu Bian" composed by the son of the founder of the Xia dynasty.
[9] Modern scholar Gopal Sukhu agrees that this title "refers to music said to have been brought back to earth by Qi, the son of the founder of the Xia dynasty, after one of his visits to heaven.
"Nine" in antiquity was often used as a synonym for "many," and in the context of the Chu ci generally refers to a musical arrangement with "nine" modal changes.
The most significant "Sao-style" poem in Chu ci is "Li Sao (Encountering Sorrow)," which reputedly was composed by Qu Yuan.
Modern scholars believe that Qu Yuan and his "Li Sao" have influenced later "Sao-style" poems in Chu ci, and the poems composed in "Sao Style," such as "Nine Changes," "Yu Fu (The Fisherman)," and "Bu Ju (Divining the Abode)," "aim to capture Qu Yuan's poetic spirit and sentiment of desolation.
The prosodic unit of a Sao-style poem is a double-line sentence separated midway by the carrier-sound "hsi."
[26] From the structures above, the Sao-style sentence "contains on the average three times as many meaningful syllables as the tetrasyllabic line of the Shih Ching songs ("Song-style" poems in Shi Jing)," and the Sao-style poems "are very long and contain a good deal of narrative.
"[27] Undoubtedly, in "Sao Style," the longer lines and more meaningful syllables allow poets to describe complicated things.
Similar to "Yuan You" (also known as "Yuan Yu" or "Distant Journey"), which is "a Taoist re-casting of 'Li Sao (Encountering Sorrow),' tracing the path of an adept from worldly frustrations to the attainment of mystical union," "Nine Changes" also contains "a quest journey for a Fair One prompted both by frustrations at court and by grief over the passing of time.
"[29] Besides that, similar to "Yu Fu (The Fisherman)" and "Bu Ju (Divining the Abode)," "Nine Changes" also "develops a new depiction of nature far beyond the brief and simple images known from the 'Airs of the States (Guo Feng).'"
For example, the poet describes the wan and drear autumn in the first four lines: the trees are decaying, the leaves are falling, the air is cold, and the speaker feels sad.