Hyangga
Hyangga () were poems written using Chinese characters in a system known as "hyangchal" during the Unified Silla and early Goryeo periods of Korean history. Only a few have survived. The number of extant "hyangga" ranges between 25 and 27, depending on whether the "hyangga" are regarded as authentic or not. Features. The "hyangga" were written using Chinese characters in a system known as "hyangchal". They are believed to have been first written in the Goryeo period, as the style was already beginning to fade. 14 "hyangga" are recorded in the "Samguk Yusa" and 11 in the "Gyunyeojeon". Wihong, the  husband of Queen Jinseong of Silla, and the monk Taegu-Hwasang compiled a book about "hyangga". The name "hyangga" is formed from the character for "back-country" or "rural village" (used by Silla people describing their nation, specifically to distinguish these distinctly Silla poems from pure Chinese literature) and the character for "song." These poems are accordingly sometimes known as "Silla songs." Another dominant theme was death. Many of the poems are eulogies to monks, to warriors, and to family members — in one case, a sister. The Silla period, especially before unification in 668, was a time of warfare: the  hyangga capture the sorrow of mourning for the dead while Buddhism provided answers about where the dead go and the afterlife. Structure. The structure of "hyangga" is incompletely understood. The only contemporaneous reference is a comment by the compiler of Gyunyeo's biography that "their poetry is written in Chinese in penta- and heptasyllabic lines, [while] our songs are written in the vernacular in three "gu" and six "myeong"". What is meant by "three "gu" and six "myeong"" remains unresolved. Peter H. Lee interprets it as "three-line stanzas of six phrases each", while Alexander Vovin translates it more literally  as "three stanzas, six names". Since the work of linguist Shinpei Ogura in the 1920s, surviving "hyangga" have traditionally been classified into one of three forms: a single-quatrain form used in folk songs; an intermediate two-quatrain form; and a ten-line form of two quatrains and a concluding couplet, the most fully developed form of "hyangga". This classification has been questioned in Korean scholarship since the 1980s, and a new hypothesis, proposed by Kim Sung-kyu in 2016, suggests that there were really only two forms of "hyangga", a single-quatrain form and a two-tercet form. Kim  interprets two consecutive lines of the ten-line form as one long line with a caesura and the so-called concluding couplet of the ten-line "hyangga" to be a refrain for each of the stanzas, forming two tercets with shared final lines. Kim argues that apparently eight-line forms are the result of a line being lost during transmission. The two hypotheses are illustrated below with the ten-line work "Jemangmaega", written for the funeral of the poet's sister. The translation is from the Korean of Sung 2006. Example. A typical hyangga is ""the Ode for Life Eternal  or, perhaps, ""the Ode for Nirvana"". The poem is a song that calls upon the moon to convey the supplicant's prayer to the Western paradise, the home of Amita (or Amitabha, the Buddha of the Western Pure Land Sukhavati). The poem's authorship is somewhat unclear; it was either written by a monk named Gwangdeok (hangul:광덕 hanja:廣德) or, one source says, the monk's wife. List. The 11 "hyangga" composed by Kyunyeo are: