Xu Zhimo
Quick answer: Xu Zhimo craft guide: how the Crescent Moon poet brought musical rhyme and refrain into modern Chinese verse, with his most famous poems to read first.
Some poets change what a language believes it can sing. Xu Zhimo, born in Haining in 1897 and killed in a plane crash in 1931, wrote at the exact moment Chinese poetry abandoned classical forms for the vernacular, and he showed that the new plain language could still be music. His poem of farewell to Cambridge, written in 1928 after revisiting the university that formed him, remains one of the most recited modern Chinese poems anywhere Chinese is spoken.
He is worth studying whenever you write in a style that has thrown off old rules, which is to say, whenever you write free verse. Xu's generation faced the question every contemporary poet still faces: once the forms are gone, where does the music come from? His answer was to rebuild rhythm, rhyme and refrain by hand, poem by poem.
Between two worlds
Xu studied in the United States before moving to England, where a period at King's College, Cambridge, in the early 1920s converted him fully to poetry. He returned to China steeped in the English Romantics, taught and edited in Beijing and Shanghai, and helped found the Crescent Moon Society, the group that argued modern vernacular poetry needed conscious form and discipline rather than shapeless freedom.
His life was brief and dramatic: celebrated, controversial in love, dead at thirty four when his mail plane crashed in fog. Cambridge later set a memorial stone for him beside the river he made famous, carved with lines from his farewell poem.
The signature moves
Read him, even in translation, and four habits stand out.
What his practice offers you
Treat music as a decision. In your next free verse draft, choose one device, a refrain, a rhyme pair, a fixed stanza shape, and commit to it for the whole poem; the constraint will start generating lines for you, which is exactly what Xu's circle discovered.
Learn his refrain trick precisely: repeat your opening lines at the end with one or two words changed, and let the change carry the poem's meaning. It is a simple, reliable structure for poems of parting, and parting was his great subject.
Where to start reading
Begin with Saying Goodbye to Cambridge Again in any reputable translation, then A Night in Florence and the pieces from his 1925 collection often translated as Zhimo's Poems. Anthologies of twentieth century Chinese poetry usually place him beside Wen Yiduo, his Crescent Moon colleague, and reading the two together shows how deliberately that group thought about form.
What poets can take from this
- Pick one musical device per free verse poem and hold it for the whole length.
- Repeat your first stanza as your last with a small alteration, and let the alteration be the point.
- Commit to a single scene per poem and deepen it instead of adding new locations.
- End on a gesture or movement rather than an idea.
- Read a rhymed poem aloud in translation and mark where the music survives; it teaches you which effects are structural.
Try it yourself
Write a poem of farewell to a place that changed you, in which you arrive and leave with almost the same lines, changing no more than three words between them.
Questions
What is Xu Zhimo's most famous poem?
Saying Goodbye to Cambridge Again, written in 1928, a musical farewell to the university's riverside scenery. It is memorised across the Chinese speaking world and commemorated on a stone at King's College, Cambridge.
What was the Crescent Moon Society?
A literary group of the 1920s, co-founded by Xu Zhimo, that argued modern vernacular Chinese poetry should have deliberate form, metre and musicality rather than formless freedom. It shaped a generation of Chinese verse.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.