Tang Poetry Study Notes: 01 Ascend

Du Fu's "Wangyue"

How about Dai Zongfu, Qilu Qingwei.

Create Zhong Shenxiu, yin and yang cut dawn.

Swinging the chest was born in the clouds, and decided to enter the bird.

Will be the top of the mountain, overlooking the mountains small.

Before the Tang Dynasty, the popular tone of poetry was laid by the court literati of the Southern and Northern Dynasties, called "palace poetry", a school of manneristic and fragrant taste. With the image of ascending to the heights, the atmosphere of the Sheng Tang Dynasty came out at once, and the wilting and hollowness of the Chinese poetry world was finally swept away.

1. The meaning of travel

In Chang'an, the twenty-third year of the new century (735), Tang Xuanzong personally visited the WufengLou, blessed the people with feasts, drinks and revelry, and also let the local officials within three hundred miles bring the song and dance troupe into Beijing to perform competitions in front of the building. The scene was so lively that it was almost about to happen.

This is a silhouette of the kaiyuan prosperity, and song and dance have become the main theme of the times. In Chang'an City this year, Du Fu, who was only twenty-four years old, lost the examination hall, and a strong and fierce heart did not know where to go.

Du Fu's family was not rich, and the only remaining entanglement could not bear the price of goods in Chang'an, and there were no relatives and friends who could turn to them for a long time. This situation is like the young people who have left their hometowns today and are full of enthusiasm and ideals to work in first-tier cities, but they can't spell out the bright ones, and even more tragic. Because Du Fu had no other way to seek employment except to participate in the imperial examination.

Such a genius who reads books, such an aspiring young man who wants to assist the Ming Emperor and govern the world like an ancient sage, what else can he do except be an official? I thought that the heavens and the earth were big, but I was suddenly knocked down by the cruel reality, and when I got up, I found that there was no place for myself.

Many of us have encountered the same situation today, so whether it is a dilemma to go home or grit your teeth and endure. What will we do? People who are a little more heroic will always take out their last savings and temporarily withdraw from the arena to travel and relax. The world is still big, you may wish to raise a good spirit and return to the horse to fight again.

Du Fu's choice was the same as ours, feeding horses and chopping firewood all the way, traveling around the land of Qi Zhao (that is, today's Hebei and Shandong).

What is the meaning of travel?

The first point is to get rid of the negative associations brought about by the old environment, because where you are deeply hurt, every grass and tree may make you feel sad.

The second point is to help you get rid of tool awareness, because in a familiar scene, everything you see will be more or less instrumentalized.

For example, when you stand at an intersection, casually look or even if you don't look, you know that this road leads to the company, and at what time to take the car to avoid the morning and evening rush hours;

Another road is the food street, where you can relax and fill your stomach when you leave work.

Do you also know which building is the hospital, which door to enter from the registration, which bus can take you to which friend's home... Everything is a tool for you to achieve a specific goal.

If a person lives in an instrumental mentality for many years, he will definitely look abominable and tacky, and even he himself will find boring. At this time, it is necessary to change to a strange scene.

Even if it is just an ordinary city, without any beautiful scenery, it will also make people feel aesthetic pleasure, because the unfamiliar environment will always make people open up the aesthetic distance from life.

When you stand at a new intersection, you don't know where each road leads, and you're not in a hurry. This means that this intersection is not a tool for you to reach a certain goal. In this way, even if you take the wrong road, you will not be angry, but will only enjoy the street scene with a leisurely attitude. It doesn't hurt to step faster or slower, because without a goal, there is no need for execution; there is no need for execution, of course, no need for a harsh schedule.

The reason why many people today are very tired of traveling and do not feel that there is any aesthetic experience is because they do not understand this truth and do not open up enough aesthetic distance between themselves and the environment in time and space.

We know that distance produces beauty. You can try to understand a scene in life from this sentence: When a man successfully marries a goddess who has been in love for many years, but the feelings tend to turn from thick to weak, is this just because of the nature of liking the new and hating the old? Not all of them. Love can help people open up the aesthetic distance, and married life is instrumental. Instrumentation must mean zero distance, and zero distance will definitely make the beauty disappear.

2. Poetry and far away are actually the same thing

The best aesthetic distance should not only be "far", but also "high". Even if you're not traveling, as soon as you climb to the commanding heights of your city — maybe a mountain, maybe a tall building — you're at an aesthetic distance from real life. From the vantage point of view, everything that is familiar becomes strange.

The reason for this change is that although all the streets and houses have not undergone any actual changes, the original spatial relationships have suddenly disappeared, and your new perspective has given them a whole new set of spatial relations.

That's how the beauty of poetry comes from. Can you imagine a poem that goes beyond people's life experience at all? Don't the verses that move us awaken the experiences and emotions that we are familiar with? Why is it that the same content, spoken in everyday language, is bland and boring, and written into poetry is stirring? The truth is the one just told.

Poetry expresses the same content as the familiar streets and houses in your city, and the poetic language uses rhetorical techniques such as inversion, metaphor, rhyme, etc., to form a new language that is aesthetically distant from real life.

This makes the original spatial relationship suddenly disappear, and the new perspective brought by the new language gives them a completely new set of spatial relations, and this strangeness brought by distance produces beauty.

"Poetry" and "far away" are actually the same thing from the perspective of "ascending", so they can be paired up. If you don't understand this, it is difficult to understand the beauty of poetry and the meaning of travel.

During the "New Culture Movement", Hu Shi took the lead in advocating vernacular poetry, and the reason why it finally ended in failure after many years of vigorous effort was because Hu Shi and his followers did not understand this set of basic principles of aesthetics, and did not understand that it was impossible to open up the aesthetic distance by using vernacular as a poetic language.

The language of poetry must be clearly distinguished from everyday language.

So we can say that the poems with the theme of ascension open up a double aesthetic distance for us. Conversely, if a person neither ascends to the heights nor even travels, nor lacks the sensitivity to poetry, then his face is easy to appear tacky. Defining tackiness from an aesthetic point of view means that people and real life cannot be separated, and everything that is thought and done is instrumental.

Tacky can't be said to be a bad thing, because it often means a down-to-earth life, doing everything in pursuit of cost performance. But why don't we like cheesy faces? This is because the tacky life will fully reflect the animality of human beings, even if you sit on the golden mountain, you will not be able to live a sense of superiority.

The sense of superiority is always contrary to practicality, and the same is true of ascending, climbing is both a physical high point and a spiritual sense of superiority.

When Du Fu roamed to the border of Shandong, he encountered the towering Mount Tai. The majestic scenery made his heart flutter, and he wrote this famous "Wangyue":

At the time of writing this poem, Du Fu was still only at the foot of Mount Tai, looking from a distance to a close-up view, aroused by the mountain's pride, and decided to climb to the top of the mountain to "see the mountains and small mountains". Becoming smaller is, of course, not just "mountains", but all that is mundane. What about the failure of the imperial examination, what about the inability to realize the ideal for a while, and the bitterness of all kinds of trivialities is only because of standing too low and looking too close. Since it is born in a prosperous world, the young blood will never freeze.

At this time, the poet only imagined ascending at the foot of the mountain, imagining the perspective of God after ascending, and he could already be resurrected from the setback with blood. This is the sound personality under the atmosphere of the Tang Dynasty, so that posterity continues to pursue from the poems and is moved by the poet's touch.

Ascend

The wind was rushing, and the tall apes roared, and the white bird of Nagisa Qingsha flew back.

Boundless falling wood, the Endless Yangtze River rolling in.

Wanli Is often a guest in the autumn and has been sick for more than a hundred years.

Hardship hated the frost sideburns, and poured out the newly stopped cloudy wine glass.

1. The Yangtze River is not endless

As the saying goes, "literature is not the first", it is difficult for literary works to distinguish between victory and defeat, and in the end, the advantages and disadvantages can often only be spent in each eye. Sometimes people believe in public opinion, and most people say that what is good must be good. But clever works are often not vulgar and can only be appreciated by a few people.

So, can the opinions of a small number of authorities be accurate? Not always, the fashion of the times and personal preferences will affect their judgment. Can you trust your own judgment? People will always improve, and your judgment today may not be recognized tomorrow.

In this way, to choose a poem that can represent the highest achievement of Tang poetry must be an impossible task. But Master Xiong Yi chose one, and that was Du Fu's "Ascending":

"Ascending to the Heights" is Du Fu's work in his later years, when he was in the kuí prefecture, which is today's Fengjie in Chongqing, with severe lung disease and a difficult life. Around the day of the Chongyang Festival, he ascended alone to overlook the distance, and the autumn scenery along the Yangtze River made him feel sad.

The meaning of the poem is not difficult to understand, first write about the scene seen when ascending to the heights: the autumn wind is cold, the mourning of apes is heard in the woods by the river, the sandbar in the heart of the river is deserted, and the birds are returning their nests. The boundless fallen leaves fluttered and the river rushed.

In such a depressed atmosphere, the poet examines his life, and every year he is displaced and travels thousands of miles, envious in vain for the birds that return to their nests. Suddenly, people are old, time passes mercilessly like endless rivers, and they have ushered in the autumn of life, dragging the sick body to ascend alone. The hardships of a lifetime have stained the sideburns, and only wine can be poured with sorrow, but the illness is too serious, the people are too sloppy, and even the wine cannot be drunk.

The whole poem can be divided into two paragraphs, the first four sentences are imagery, and the last four sentences are sentiments. Of the four sentences of the image, the first two are small visions and the last two are large visions. It was as if a camera was mounted on a helicopter, sweeping over the Jiangxin sandbar in front of it, and the birds that followed the sandbank suddenly took off into the air and overlooked the human world from the perspective of God. This is the lens language commonly used by today's film directors, and it has long been used by ancient poets.

This kind of lens language will make the things in the close-up suddenly become small, let the things that have just attracted your attention become insignificant, and let those who are either heavy or fresh in joy and sorrow suddenly be diluted by the sense of vastness.

The fallen leaves are endless, filling the entire space. The flow of the river is endless, it has been like this for eternity, and it will continue to be like this in tens of millions of years, filling all the time.

When you carefully experience the famous set of battles of "boundless falling wood, endless Yangtze River rolling in", you will find that the former sentence gives you endless space, and the latter sentence gives you endless time. In this way, the feelings of ape cries and bird flights in the first two close-up sentences will quietly change.

"Flowing water" is a metaphor for time, and this stem was buried by Confucius. Confucius and Du Fu also stood at the water's edge, Confucius saw the irrevocable "flow" of water, but Du Fu saw the irresistible "rushing" of water.

That is to say, although Du Fu used Confucius's stem, his feelings changed subtly. When you see "flowing away", your heart is sad and helpless; when you see "running", your heart is fear and sorrow.

Looking at the Yangtze River from a high place and watching the waves rolling, you can see both "flowing" and "running". Going and coming are actually the same thing objectively, but subjectively what kind of perspective will be formed depends on your state of mind at that time. Everything you see and all the scenery you see cannot be objective, but can only be rendered by your state of mind.

What Du Fu saw was "endless Yangtze River rolling in", and the perspective of "rushing" produced a huge sense of oppression, which was enough to make people hold their breath. It was as if his tiny self was naked and helpless, watching the emptying waves coming at him, and he had nowhere to escape.

2. The sorrow and desolation of ascending alone

After du fu's exclamation of time, we look at the boundless fallen leaves, which are the autumn scenery of nature. The poet of twilight is particularly sensitive to such a scene, and he sees the ruthlessness of the years. The falling leaves in the endless space and the rolling waves in the endless time oppress the poet's fragile heart, so that it gives birth to feelings that are not easy to arise in the daily environment, which has the reflection of "thousands of miles of sad autumn are often guests, and more than a hundred years of illness have been on stage alone".

The two sentences of "Wanli" are completely inconsistent with the grammar of ancient Chinese, but the language of poetry is to have various inversions and omissions, and must be different from the conventional grammar in order to bring people outside of real life and produce an aesthetic mentality in the strangeness.

"Wanli" corresponds not to "sad autumn", but to "frequent guests". Du Fu spent his life wandering and living in an uncertain place, and at this time he was still a "guest" in Kuizhou, and seeing that the water birds were still nesting and people were inferior to the birds, he deepened the sadness of "being a guest". Those who are not guests are still miserable, let alone the guests who have wandered for thousands of miles? What's more, the guests are not only adrift, but also old and sick.

Of course, "one hundred years" is only an approximation, and it is also an illusion of time in a guest journey. It is precisely because of the wandering of thousands of miles and the taste of all kinds of hardships that decades are like a hundred years.

The Chongyang Festival, which should have been a day to reunite with family and drink chrysanthemum wine with relatives and friends, but he only had to "go on stage alone", lonely and lonely, and a person felt the infinity of the universe and the number of surpluses.

Chongyang Festival is a day of family reunion, and everyone ascends to admire chrysanthemums and drink chrysanthemum wine. In traditional mathematical philosophy, nine is the largest yang number, so September 9 is called "heavy yang".

The Chongyang Festival that was spent alone at that time was like the Spring Festival when I couldn't go home today. Wang Wei wrote in the poem: "Alone in a foreign land as a stranger, every festive season to think of relatives." The Haruka brothers ascended to the heights, and there was one less person planted everywhere. ”

Only by thinking of the background of Chongyang can we understand the desolation of Du Fu's "solo stage".

Du Fu seems to have become accustomed to desolation, and the ambition of "to Jun Yao Shun, and then to make the customs pure" in his youth seems to have not yet achieved half a point, but people are old and sick, and they no longer have the opportunity to take one more step towards the ideal. He could only "bitterly hate", deeply regretting that he should have passed a cup of wine to his relatives and friends during the festival, but one person could not drink it.

3. The ultimate in symmetrical beauty in Tang poetry

The poem is of course well written, with the most duffy and melancholy style, but you can certainly find hundreds of Tang poems to challenge it. Yes, why is it better than "a pot of wine between flowers, drinking alone without blind dates"? Why is it better than "the moon rises out of the sky and the sea of clouds"? Seems unexplained. If there is really no reason, why can it represent the highest achievement of Tang poetry?

The reason is really clear, and this has to start from the style of poetry.

This poem is called the Seven Laws of Speech in terms of genre, or the Seven Laws for short. "Seven words" refers to the fixed seven words of each poem, and "law" means "law", that is, format and law.

The "law" of the rhythm poem is embodied in two aspects, one is that the structural arrangement of each verse is fixed, and the other is that the tonal arrangement of each word is fixed. If any detail violates these hard rules, it is called "out of the law", that is, breaking the law in the world of poetry.

You can think of the Vinaya as the Eight Strands of Poetry, but in fact, the Verses not only appear earlier than the Eight Strands, but also have stricter requirements for form than the Eight Strands. It is often said that the Eight Strands of Literature bind the mind, but the originality of Tang poetry is precisely expressed in the same rhythmic poems as the Eight Strands of Literature.

Rhythmic poetry was an emerging style of the Tang Dynasty, and because it was new, it was called near-body poetry or modern-body poetry. Correspondingly, the traditional, relatively liberal way of writing poetry is called archaic poetry.

Ancient poetry does not pay much attention to the rules, nor does it care much about tone, as long as each sentence has the same number of words and rhymes with each sentence. Therefore, free and loose poets love to write ancient poetry, such as Li Bai; well-carved poets love to write near-body poetry, such as Du Fu.

People often say that Li Bai and Du Fu are the two peaks that stand side by side in the world of Tang poetry, which is certainly true from the artistic height. But if we look at the originality of Tang poetry, it is Du Fu, not Li Bai, who has expanded the artistic potential of near-body poetry to the limit, so Du Fu can best represent the achievements of Tang poetry.

The biggest difference between near-body poetry and ancient poetry is the pursuit of symmetrical beauty, in short, it is to write poetry as a couplet.

The greatest contribution of Tang poetry in the history of poetry is to explore the beauty of symmetry to the limit, and on the road of this kind of exploration, the poet who works hardest and achieves the most is Du Fu.

In all of Du Fu's poems, this "Ascending to the Heights" not only forms a confrontation between sentences and sentences, such as "Boundless Falling Wood Xiao Xiao" and "Endless Yangtze River Rolling";

Even within each sentence, different words and imagery will form a confrontation, such as the sentence "The wind is fast and the sky is high apes howling", the "wind is anxious" is against the "sky high", and the opposite of this sentence is "Nagisa Sand White Bird Flies Back", "Nagisa" and "Shabai" are opposed, and a group of small pairs of units and another group of small pairs form a larger set of battles.

This is a formal beauty that only old Chinese can achieve, and no other language can reach it. Therefore, it is well-deserved to let this "Ascend" represent the highest achievement of Tang poetry.

Du Fu's "Ascending to the Heights" is not only an ancient song in the theme of ascending to the heights, but also because it exerts the beauty of symmetry to the extreme, it has become the most qualified poem to represent the highest achievements of Tang poetry.

Near-body poetry is an emerging poetic style of the Tang Dynasty, paying special attention to symmetrical beauty and timbre beauty.

Du Fu was the most diligent and accomplished poet in the field of near-body poetry.

This song "Ascend" also represents the most typical ascending mood, which is the feeling that sorrow cannot be broken from it, and the feeling of being vague and not knowing where to start.

Ascending is easy to feel nostalgic, and nostalgia time is the most triggered emotional response. Through this poem, I will comb through how the metaphorical relationship between the image of "flowing water" and time is formed in Chinese literature.

1. Ascending the Stairs: A Key Event in the History of Literature

The ancients ascended, either by climbing the mountain or by ascending the stairs. Climbing the stairs to feel this kind of activity has begun since the Three Kingdoms period.

At the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, the world was in chaos and the masses were divided, and this history was very familiar to the male students who loved to listen to "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" since childhood. Everyone was most interested in how Sanying fought Lü Bu and how Guan Yu passed five levels and slashed six generals.

Few people noticed a weak scholar named Wang Yue. He fled all the way in the turbulent situation and attached himself to Liu Biao's door in Jingzhou. He has both talent and ambition, but there is no room for Liu Biao to show his life, which makes him depressed and often has a nostalgia for the land.

There is a wheat city in Jingzhou, which is the wheat city that Guan Yu "walked the wheat city". If it weren't for Guan Yu's aura being too strong, Mai Cheng would have left his name in Qingshi because of Wang Cang.

One day, Wang Yue climbed the Maicheng Tower and looked far away, and could not help but feel a hundred feelings, and wrote a "Climbing the Tower". There are two themes of the article, one is that huaicai does not meet, and the other is homesickness.

Wang Cang must not have imagined at that time that his ascent would become a key event in the history of literature, an important literary code. Since then, his name, life and the image of "ascending the stairs" have been firmly entangled, and have continued to resonate with poets thousands of years later.

After Wang Cang, for about four hundred years, history passed through the Three Kingdoms, Wei, Jin, and Southern and Northern Dynasties. In the Northern Dynasty, there was a Northern Zhou established by the Yuwen family, and later on the basis of the Northern Zhou, a unified Sui Dynasty was born, and soon the Sui Dynasty was replaced by the Tang Dynasty.

Originally, yuwen hu of the Northern Zhou Dynasty built a tall building on the high slope on the bank of the Yellow River in Puzhou, Shanxi, because there were often guàn finches perched on the upper floors, so people called this tall building the Stork Tower.

Tang Dynasty poets walked through the Stork And Bird Tower, and as usual, they had to go up to the tower to inscribe poems, and write all kinds of desolation and emotion. But according to word of mouth, all that everyone can recite today is a five-word poem by Wang Zhizhuo, "Climbing the Stork and Bird Tower":

The day runs by the mountains, and the Yellow River flows into the sea.

Want to go to the next level.

The poem is very short and seemingly realistic, but it implies an intense philosophy, and uses the bright and dangling atmosphere to clear the sad tone set by Wang Cang. But as long as we are careful to understand, we will find that the tone of sadness has not really disappeared, but is only covered by heroic imagery.

Let us re-read the first two sentences: "The day is at the end of the mountain, and the Yellow River flows into the sea", what exactly is it expressing? The simplest answer is: of course, this is a truthful description of the scene in front of you.

As mentioned earlier, there is no such thing as "truthfulness" in the poet's description of landscapes. "Truthful" in the true sense means objective presentation and no emphasis, like a few street scenes taken by laymen picking up a camera.

But when a master goes to shoot a street scene, he will highlight the key content he wants to present, dilute the unimportant content, and screen the real street scene into a subjective artwork through cleverly arranged composition, light and shade, light and shadow, so the beautiful scenery in the photos and movies in travel magazines is often much more beautiful than the real scene.

Those places where the real scene is more beautiful than the photo have a common feature: it is not messy. The reason why the night view of some cities is more beautiful than the landscape of the day is precisely because the lights outline a large silhouette, and the night covers up all kinds of dirty mess.

In the same way, when the poet ascends the Stork Tower and looks around, he must see many things, such as tourists, passers-by, pillars, eaves, trees nearby and grass in the distance, floating clouds in the sky, and cattle and sheep on the ground... If the poet wants to write not a poem at this time, but an article, it will definitely lay out a lot of scenes. But poetry must be condensed, and the shortest genre of poetry with only twenty words needs to be condensed even more.

2. Flowing Water: How to Become a Spokesperson for Time

Climbing the tower and looking away, among all the scenes, the only thing that makes the poet feel the most is "sunset" and "Yellow River", and thousands of other contents must be deleted from the canvas of poetry.

So, what are the two scenes of the sunset in the west and the flowing water in the east?

They are expressing the same thing, which is "man's sense of urgency in the face of the passage of time."

You may say, of course, "the day is at the end of the mountain" can be understood in this way, but what is the time of "the Yellow River entering the sea"?

This is because in the ancients, the image of rivers rushing has long become a literary code. This goes back to the Analects, where Confucius famously exclaimed by the river: "The deceased is like a sifu, who does not give up day and night!" "It's lamenting that time is like flowing water day and night, without stopping for a moment.

When such a relationship between flowing water and time occurs, people will "reminisce about the lost water years". It is precisely because of this code that the poet can say here and mean the other, and the words are endless and the meaning is infinite.

The reason why reading poetry is to "feel" is to a large extent to experience the unspoken meaning that the code brings to you. In the obstacle of modern people reading ancient poems, an important part is that they are detached from the ancient context, and it is not easy to be awakened by the words in the poems. Or rather, we have lost our tacit understanding with the ancients and cannot see the stems they have buried.

Why, then, does the poet love to express time with flowing water?

This brings us to the "imagery" characteristics of classical Chinese poetry. The reason why poetry touches people's hearts is that the most important thing to mobilize is people's image thinking. If you use abstract thinking to speak of reason, you can at most convince people with reason, but it is difficult to make people feel empathy, and naturally it is difficult to make people resonate.

There is no better way to invoke image thinking than to use imagery. Because the imagery is a figurative thing, the sense of picture is very strong, and the well-designed picture will always make people have been moved and captured before they can invoke reason.

Today's advertising industry understands this truth best, and many successful advertisements are irrational and purely win with imagery.

We can also refer to the way the novel is written. Although a good speculative fiction can be ups and downs, fascinating, and give people the pleasure of solving puzzles, it is difficult to arouse the reader's deep touch. Therefore, no matter how well written speculative fiction is, it cannot rank among the first-rate literature.

The masters of reasoning of the Golden Age, whether Agatha Christie or John Decason Carr, became classics and had hundreds of millions of readers worldwide. But no matter which master, there is no half chance to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. This is not to blame for their lack of creativity, but because of the limitations of the genre itself, the literary works of rational interest are destined to be so.

Back to the imagery of time. "Time" is a very abstract thing, so if you want to describe time in poetic language, you must visualize time.

The characteristic of time is that whether you pay attention to it or not, day or night, it is running endlessly, it does not stop for a moment, and it is gone and cannot be reversed. This has been true for eternity, and it is destined to be true for thousands of years. Well, to give time to find an "image spokesperson", there is no more suitable than flowing water.

Today we see that major companies are looking for image spokespersons for their products, and this idea is actually the idea of classical poetry.

It's just that crappy manufacturers often don't understand the principle of endorsement, and as a result, they either use one image to represent another image, or use some characteristics of one image to cover up some characteristics of another image, which is not as clever as the poet. This leads to consumers either not being impressed or not understanding.

Using flowing water as a proxy for time can also make many differences. Du Fu's famous sentence "The Yangtze River is not exhausted", the coming of the Yangtze River water is a feeling, and now "the Yellow River flows into the sea", the castration of the Yellow River water is another feeling. The coming force gives people a sense of oppression, and the castration brings the fear of powerlessness to retain. So, when the imagery of the sunset and the flowing water intertwine, how does the poet react?

The "Chronicle of History" tells the story of Wu Zixu's revenge, saying that Wu Zixu led Wu Guo's army into the capital of the motherland, dug up the grave of the enemy King Chu Ping and whipped the corpse to vent his anger.

Shen Baoxu, the minister of the State of Chu, blamed Wu Zixu for doing things excessively, and Wu Zixu said: "I am far away at dusk, so I have done it backwards and done it against it." The meaning of this sentence is that I am like a person who is in a hurry, the sun is about to set but there are still many roads to go, there is no way, only against common sense, unscrupulous means. The idiom "perverse" comes from here.

For all those who have ambitions and obsessions, "time is not waiting" is always a deep sadness. Du Fu summed up from Zhuge Liang's life that "he died before he left the teacher, and the hero was full of tears", which is also the same truth.

So what can be done to seize that fleeting time? Wang Zhizhuo gave an exhilarating answer: "I want to be poor and go to a higher level." "It is precisely because the time is not waiting for me that I need to seize the opportunity to climb the peak of life."

When you understand the meaning of time in the first two poems, you can truly appreciate the heroic spirit in the last two poems, and realize how the height of climbing the stairs expresses the height of life.

Such a poem should make you interested in the life of the poet Wang Zhizhuo. However, it is difficult to determine who the author of this poem is. In the various records left by the ancients, there are different opinions on the ownership of copyright, but I will not make cumbersome examinations here.

The literary code of ascending the tower was laid down by Wang Yue at the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, and sorrow was its main theme.

Flowing water has become an image of the passage of time, from Confucius's famous saying that "the deceased is like a sifu, who does not give up day and night.".

Poetic language should win with image thinking, and the best way to call image thinking is to use imagery.

The theme of "Climbing the Stork and Bird Building" is to realize the necessity of courage and perseverance from the sense of urgency that the time is not waiting.

Li Bai "Dengjin ling phoenix platform"

Phoenix on the phoenix stage phoenix tour, phoenix to the Taikong River self-flow.

WuGong flowers and grass buried in the path, the Jin Dynasty crown into an ancient hill.

Three mountains and half of the blue sky, two waters divided into egret islands.

There are always floating clouds that can cover the sun, and Chang'an is not seen to make people sad.

Ascending, it is possible to be endless, or it is possible to be blocked by clouds and mountains. When people are angry, it is easy to feel that "they want to go to the next level", but after suffering setbacks, their vision will also change.

Come and read Li Bai's famous work "Dengjinling Phoenix Platform" to see what kind of emotions can be generated by changing the mood and ascending to the top, and whether the poem has any reason to talk about.

1. Nostalgia for the past and wounds for the present

When a warrior ascends to a high level, he will say, "I come, I see, I conquer", and a literati ascend to a high level and say, "I come, I see, I write poems." When you go to a place of fame, if you only visit but do not write poems, it is not like the poet's style.

But when Li Bai ascended the Yellow Crane Tower in Wuchang, there was really no inscription poem. The reason is that Cui Hao climbed the stairs one step ahead of him and wrote a seven-law poem "Yellow Crane Tower". Li Bai said with chagrin: "There is a scene in front of you, and Cui Hao's inscription poem is on the top." This is to say that Cui Hao's poems are really well written, and he has no confidence that he can surpass others, so he simply does not write anything.

What kind of poem can make the poet Li Bai discouraged? Cui Hao wrote:

The people of the past have gone by the Yellow Crane, and the Yellow Crane Tower is empty here.

The yellow crane is gone, and the white clouds are long in the air.

Harukawa calendar Hanyang tree, yerba buena parrot island.

Where is the Nippori Pass, the Yanbo River makes people sad.

Cui Hao's poem probably often pressed on Li Bai's heart. After a few years, Li Bai came to Jinling (today's Nanjing) to ascend the famous Phoenix Platform, and worked hard to write a seven-law poem "Dengjin ling phoenix platform":

The Phoenix Terrace of Li Bai's era is a monument with a history of 300 years. As early as the sixteenth year of the Southern Dynasty's Liu Song Dynasty Yuan Jia (439), a large bird like a phoenix flew here, attracting the so-called hundred birds and phoenixes. It doesn't matter whether things are true or not, political correctness is the most important. Since this is a rare auspicious rui, of course, a high platform should be built to commemorate it, so there is this phoenix platform.

The phoenix appeared briefly and never returned, only the Yangtze River under the mountain rushed unchanged. Can't the phoenix live here for a long time? Will it fly back after flying away?

If you ask the ancient intellectuals about these two questions, they will always give a negative answer, because it is not about any actual knowledge, but about the unique auspicious philosophy of ancient times. The appearance of the phoenix is, of course, a kind of auspiciousness, the result of political clarity.

However, the way the phoenix appears is also divided into five levels, from low to high: the fifth is the phoenix flying through the sky, the fourth is the phoenix soaring in the sky, the third is the phoenix falling and perching for a while, the second is the phoenix spring and autumn to roost, and the first is the phoenix settled down for life.

Legend has it that the first class only appeared in the Taiping Dynasty under the Rule of the Yellow Emperor, so the future emperors should be modest, dare not steal the limelight of the Yellow Emperor, and only take the third class as the highest level, which is the so-called "Phoenix Collection", marking the emergence of the Taiping Dynasty.

When we understand this background, it is easy to think that the feelings of the poet rising on the Phoenix Stage will mostly be related to politics.

"Phoenix on the Phoenix Tour", this is the Xiangrui that once had; "The Phoenix went to the Taikong River to flow by itself", the Phoenix has already left, and the Liu Song Dynasty that got xiangrui has long ceased to exist, only the water of the Yangtze River is still flowing in the east, just like it was at the beginning.

The poet likes to contrast natural landscapes and cultural landscapes, the invariance of the former reflects the changeability of the latter, and the eternity of the former reflects the ephemerality of the latter.

The "self" in the middle of "Jiang Ziliu" is a very favorite word used by Tang Dynasty poets. Of course, the Yangtze River flows on its own, and has never changed in any way because of human emotions, so it seems like nonsense to say that "the river flows from the river".

However, the poet has a special rhetorical effect in saying this, giving people the feeling that the Yangtze River should not be "self-flowing", but should be emotional about the rise and fall of personnel, which changes with the ups and downs of the human world. But it remains unchanged, indifferent to any major event in the human world, as if everything is insignificant.

How many "insignificant" things have been witnessed during this Yangtze River? The verse begins with "Wu Palace Flowers and Grass Buried Trail": Jinling is known as the ancient capital of the Six Dynasties, from the Wu Kingdom in the Three Kingdoms Era, through the Song, Qi, Liang, and Chen of the Eastern Jin Dynasty and the Southern Dynasties, once infinitely prosperous, but at this moment, the wild grass buried the former Wu Palace, and the once prominent Eastern Jin Dynasty family was left with only one tomb after another.

From the Phoenix Terrace, the three peaks loomed, as if half in the world, half in the sky, Egret Island is located in the heart of the river, the yangtze river flow is cut in two. Looking to the northwest, I really wanted to see the imperial capital Chang'an, which was the place where my heart was thinking, but the floating clouds obscured the sun, and I couldn't see anything.

The whole poetry is summed up in two main points, one is nostalgia for the past, and the other is to hurt the present. As long as the poet ascends to the heights, it is inevitable that he will cherish the past, and as long as he cherishes the past, he will inevitably hurt the present.

The last two sentences have several special images: floating clouds are metaphors for villains, the sun is metaphorical for emperors, and looking in the direction of Chang'an shows bold loyalty and a desire to exert political ambitions. Linking these images, the floating clouds obscuring the sun and not looking at Chang'an means that the villain is in charge and excludes the poet from the political center.

These images are usually used in sets and are common in poetry throughout the ages. This is not difficult to understand, because the most common dissatisfaction and depression of ancient intellectuals came from "always being able to cover the sun with floating clouds, and Chang'an not seeing makes people sad."

2. Where does the tension of art come from?

So, when we see "floating clouds" in poetry, should we necessarily make such an understanding?

It depends on the context. Li Bai has a poem "Send a Friend", two of which are very famous: "Floating clouds and wandering, sunset and old feelings." Although the "floating clouds" here are still matched with the "sunset", the relationship between the two is not "floating clouds covering the sun". If understood according to ordinary grammatical relations, these two poems say that the wanderer's mind is like a floating cloud, and the friendship of the old man is like the sunset, but it is wrong to understand it in this way.

Such sentences are called "intertextual" in rhetoric. "Floating clouds" describes both "wandering intentions" and "old people's feelings", and "sunset" describes both "old people's feelings" and "wandering intentions". Therefore, these two poems are actually one sentence, which should be said to be like floating clouds and sunsets, just like the wandering ziyi and the old people's feelings, although they are attached to each other and have a brief aggregation, they are forced to separate.

The language of poetry must be flexibly experienced.

Good verse will see irrationality in reason, and reason in irrationality, and magic lies between reason and irrationality.

The aforementioned "Phoenix goes to the Taikong River to flow by itself" is an example, and the last two sentences of the poem, "Always floating clouds can cover the sun, and Chang'an does not see to make people sad" is also an example - this seems reasonable, standing in Jinling of course can not see Chang'an, and you have to fly for several hours on a plane; but the poet says that the reason for not seeing Chang'an is "floating clouds covering the sun", as if as long as there is a gust of wind to scatter floating clouds, you can see Chang'an. This is certainly not possible, and the reader must turn to the metaphorical level to understand.

Now imagine a scenario: If you are a friend of Li Bai, and you are frustrated to see that he has recently suffered setbacks, you enlighten him with verses: "I want to be poor and go to a higher level." Unexpectedly, Li Bai replied to you: "Always for the floating clouds to cover the sun, Chang'an is not seen to make people sad." ”

There are so many floating clouds, what is the point of going to the next level? You don't know how to persuade him for a while, but it doesn't matter, there are all kinds of materials in classical poetry, just to see if you will be able to do it.

You can take the verse of Wang Anshi's "Climbing the Flying Peak" to persuade him: "Do not be afraid of floating clouds to cover your eyes, just because you are at the highest level." "Are you afraid of the floating clouds, then you can't all blame the floating clouds, but also blame yourself for standing not as high as the floating clouds." As long as you climb to the top, will you still be afraid of floating clouds obscuring your vision?

Li Bai may not be convinced, if he grasps our knowledge today, he will probably refute you like this: "Yuan Shikai was very active and enterprising when he was preparing to become emperor, and as a result, his second son Yuan Kewen wrote a poem with the meaning of advice, with two sentences: 'There is a lot of wind and rain in the high places, and it is not to go to the top floor of the QiongLou. 'Is it really good to climb that high?' ”

Although there is no truth in the world of poetry, there is no right or wrong, but the height of artistic techniques can still be tasted.

Take the previous few verses that are also ascending but have their own opinions, Wang Anshi and Yuan Kewen spoke too thoroughly, as aphorisms and aphorisms are good, but as poems are too direct.

Wang Zhizhuo and Li Bai can create a barrier in the open mood - the barrier between the floating clouds and the sun is obvious, and "going to the next level" is to stop the verse at the moment when it is about to go upstairs but not yet. The so-called artistic tension is reflected in such details.

Agatha has a novel with a very special title, the literal translation is "Towards Zero", and the usual translation is "Towards the Decisive Moment". At the beginning of the story, an elderly lawyer and criminologist said this:

"I love good detective stories, but you know, they start out wrong!" Murder begins with murder. But murder is the end. The story began long before that — sometimes years ago — all the causes and events that made certain people gather in one place at a certain time on a certain day. ...... Everything comes together in one place... Then, when the time comes – charge! 'Zero hour' has arrived and the attack has been launched. ”

I can't remember the plot of the novel, but I've always been impressed by this passage because it can be borrowed as the most precise expression of the artistic tension of poetry.

Ascending to the top is able to ascend to a great loneliness that spans ancient and modern times. Although this poem is not at all more unpopular than "Climbing the Stork and Bird Building", although there are many people who know it, there are really very few people who know why it is so.

1. From a spit to a lonely time

"DengyouZhou Tai Song" is Chen Ziang's most famous poem. The poem is very short, the meaning is very simple, the language is very simple, and you can memorize it after reading it once.

The precedence and the back of the verse are on the timeline, that is, the past and the future. The poet ascended the Youzhou Platform with high nostalgia, but he could not see the people of the past nor the people of the future, and when he thought of the infinity of the universe, he could not help but weep with sadness alone.

Literally, that's what the whole poem means. We will first think strangely: "I don't see the people who came later", but why didn't we see the ancients before"? Obviously, there are so many ancient heroes for us to remember, how can we not see it?

The reason is simple: they are all dead, so they can't see.

Of course, the ancients were all dead, otherwise they would not be called ancients. But what does the death of the ancients have to do with Chen Ziang's sadness?

Of course, there is a lot of relationship, because the ancients here do not refer to all the ancients in general, nor do they refer specifically to the ancient heroes Haojie, but specifically refer to the ancient Holy Lord Mingjun. Chen Ziang's real sadness is that he can't meet a wise leader, and his talent and ambition have nowhere to show.

This meaning is indeed not visible from the verse itself. We need to use the method of knowing people and discussing the world to figure out the background of the creation of this poem.

We can understand Chen Ziang's life and read his poems and articles, thanks to his friend Lu Zangyong. When Chen Ziang was dying, he entrusted his poetry manuscript to Lu Zang to be arranged by editors.

Lu Zangyong also wrote a special "Biography of Chen Ziang" to record his life. According to the "Biography", Chen Ziang was an official in the central imperial court just in time for the Khitan rebellion, and the king of Jian'an County, Wu Youyi, took command on the expedition, and many civilian officials in the imperial court were sent to serve as military staff officers, and Chen Ziang was also among them.

When the army marched to the vicinity of today's Beijing, it continued to receive news of the rout in the front, and the army's heart was shaken. Chen Ziang repeatedly and repeatedly proposed himself, willing to take 10,000 people as a forward to fight the Khitan decisive battle, but no matter how earnest he was, Wu Youyi did not agree and sent him to do paperwork.

Chen Ziang was full of grief and indignation, climbed the Jibei Building, imagined the past of king Zhao of Yan (yān) Zhao in the Warring States Period who built a golden platform here to recruit talents, wrote down a few poems and then sang while crying, singing the words "I didn't see the ancients before".

Here it is necessary to quote the original text of the "Biography": "Because of the matter of climbing the North Building of ji ji, feeling the birth of Yuè (Yuè) and Yan Zhao, a number of poems were given, but they were drooling and singing: I did not see the ancients before, and I did not see those who came after me." Thinking of heaven and earth, alone but weeping. When people don't know, they don't know either. ”

Chen Ziang's "Several Poems" consists of seven poems, allowing the encounters of various Ming Emperors and Sages in ancient times to flash in front of his eyes. Of course, this is borrowing from the ancient wounds of the present, and then he sings while crying, singing that the ancient Mingjun is dead, and the contemporary Mingjun has not come. Although the heavens and the earth are great, no one understands themselves and has no place for their own use.

Although the language of "Dengyouzhou Taige" is simple, the sense of loneliness that spans ancient and modern times can still transcend more than a thousand years of time and touch every lonely person today.

As a social animal, the most difficult thing for human beings to endure is loneliness, and the more sensitive people are, the higher the culture, and the more loneliness follows. Although the loneliness of living in isolation is painful, the loneliness in the crowd is the most bone-chilling.

Although Chen Ziang only had a few feelings of ascending because of a momentary dissatisfaction, once the poetry is formed, it will always transcend a momentary event, have its own life, and look for every lonely flame in infinite time and space.

2. The formation and circulation of "Dengyouzhou Tai Song"

Today's ordinary readers read Tang poems, and they read quite recent anthologies of Tang poems, which makes it easy to have the illusion that these poems have been like this from the beginning.

Take this poem, for example, everyone will think that Chen Ziang must have written a poem, the full text is "before I did not see the ancients" and so on a total of four sentences, and also gave the poem a title called "Dengyouzhou Tai Song".

What genre should this poem be? The "Three Hundred Poems of Tang Dynasty" categorizes it into the "Seven Ancient Poems", then it must be the Seven Words Ancient Poem, although the first half is five words, the second half is six words, and there is not a single sentence of seven words at all.

The formation of ancient works is often not so simple. If we compare the truth, we will find that in the poetry collection compiled by the ancients, chen Ziang's name can not actually find this "Dengyouzhou Tai Song", until the Ming Dynasty Yang Shen's "Dan Lead Excerpt" did not mention this title.

The context in the original text needs to be excerpted: "Chen Zi Ang Deng Youzhou Tai Geyun: 'I don't see the ancients before, and I don't see the comers after me.'" Thinking of heaven and earth, alone but weeping. Its words are simple and have the style of Han and Wei, and the literature does not contain them. Yang Shen praised this poem for being good, and regretted that none of the previous anthologies had included it.

But where did Yang Shen know that its title was "Dengyou Zhou Tai Song"? This is again to blame the ancient text for not punctuation, because Yang Shen's meaning is likely to say: Chen Zi Ang deng Youzhou platform, "then" sang a song, the lyrics are like this, and so on. Later generations did not break the sentence correctly, mistakenly believing that "Dengyou Zhou Tai Song" was the title of this poem, and it was passed down all the way.

So, what is the relationship between Youzhou Terrace and Jibei Building? We should definitely take Lu Zang's "Biography" as the standard, chen Zi Onden is the Jibei Building. Yang Shen probably confused ancient and modern geographical names, because Jizhou was indeed renamed Youzhou later. Therefore, if you have to give this poem a title, it is obviously more appropriate to call it "The Song of the North Building of Dengji".

The title is "Song", and this poem is indeed a song rather than a seven-word poem, which is closer to the "fu" of the "Left Transmission" era. It is precisely because it is a song or gift from the mouth, so the text is simple, unadorned, very ancient, and the word count of each line is naturally not as strict as poetry. The editors of "Three Hundred Poems of Tang Dynasty" probably did not know how to classify it like a poem, so they had to classify it as "Seven Ancient Poems".

That's a reasonable speculation, but is it really the case?

This must be seen from the context of the compilation of ancient books. In fact, to a large extent, the "Three Hundred Tang Poems" is not really selected from the vast Tang poems, but further selected from the earlier Tang Poems of the same era.

Shen Deqian, the editor of the "Tang Poetry Bejue", has already included the "Dengyouzhou Taige" under the classification of "Seven Ancient Poems", and has also made a special explanation, saying that this poem should have been counted as a miscellaneous poem, but because there are too few miscellaneous poems selected, there is no need to separate a category, so it is attached to the "Seven Ancient Poems".

There is also a debate about this poem, Lu Zang's original text of "Farewell Biography" did not break the sentence, so should Chen Ziang's singing end in "those who don't see each other later", or end in "alone but drooling"? Both make sense. The two sentences "Reading the heavens and the earth are leisurely, alone but weeping" may be Lu Zang's expression of emotion.

Those who doubt that the copyright of the latter two sentences does not belong to Chen Ziang have a reason: the "person" of "comer" and the "down" of "snot" do not rhyme.

If you have a little knowledge of phonology, you will know that "the person" and "the next" do not rhyme today, but if you look up the "Guangyun" that recorded the Tang Dynasty rhyme system, you will find that "the person" and "the lower" are on the "horse" rhyme.

The Tang Dynasty poet Gao Shi has a very famous poem "Fengqiu Zuo", the first four sentences are: "I am a fisherman, Meng Zhuye, and I have been a yo-yo person all my life." In the grass of the wild song of Chake, it is better to be a bureaucrat under the wind and dust. These few sentences are rhymed with "who" and "down", which can be used as circumstantial evidence.

Although we have no way of knowing exactly how the Tang Dynasty people pronounced it, we can at least know that "who" and "lower" did belong to the same rhyme mother at that time, and can rhyme. Moreover, although people after the Tang Dynasty have changed their pronunciation, they still have to stick to the ancient way when writing poems and filling in words, such as the Ming Dynasty man He Jingming's poem "Since leaving his brother Shi Du, the capital city is a yo-yo", and he also rhymes with "down" and "person" as usual.

In this way, the two sentences of "Reading heaven and earth" are more likely to be Chen Ziang's original, rather than Lu Zang's emotion.

But say it is original, is this poem really original? Or rather, to what extent can it be considered original?

Let's open the "Chu Ci" to find Qu Yuan's "Long Journey", and I found that there are four sentences in it: "But the heavens and the earth are infinite, and the mourning life is long and diligent." The past is yufu and xi, and the comers are not heard. "This is simply too similar to "Dengyouzhou Tai Song", which is enough to fight a copyright lawsuit."

But whether Chen Ziang has borrowed qu Yuan's "Long Journey" or not, his true originality is manifested in the use of "the leisure of heaven and earth" to contrast personal loneliness. Using a very large background to contrast the very small is a very unique and clever way. This alone is enough to give the whole poem an independent value.

We modern people are really much luckier than the ancients, even if we encounter such an encounter as Chen Ziang, we can "leave no grandfather here, we have our own grandfather." But the intellectuals of ancient times had only one way to go, and once they could not get through, they could only lose the battle, and they could not change their ways.

When we read history, we always like the empire of great unification, but if you can go back in time machine, can you really adapt to it? I think most people can't adapt. Especially when you read a lot, books will always grind your knees.

"Deng youzhou tai song" is not a poem in essence, and there is no youzhou platform in the world, but this does not prevent Chen Ziang from leaving a sigh through ancient and modern times to the lonely people in the world.