Looking at the distant mountains and waters, how many hearts have you seen in the exchanges? The pot is empty and afraid to drink a glass of wine, and it is difficult to write a rhyme poem. The road is obstructed for a long time, and the news is late. Lonely lights at night keep silent for a long time, and the husband remembers his wife and father and son.
This seven-word ancient poem was written by the Song Dynasty poet Li Yu. The format is neat and follows the rules of the Tang and Song dynasties, and describes the love and meaning of the husband and wife who live separately in the two places.
At first glance, there is nothing special about it, the word image, the first rhyme, the whole verse is facing each other, and the reading is catchy. However, it is this poem that is known as the first strange poem in China throughout the ages.
It turns out that this poem is also in line with the law of poetic format when read backwards, and there is no violation, but it expresses a different meaning from reading it.
We read it backwards like this:
The son remembers his father and wife, and the lonely long vigil is lonely. Late return to send geese no news, long time away from people blocking the way. Poetry rhymes and become difficult to write, and the wine glass is afraid of empty pots. Confidants have seen several times have come and gone, and the water is across the mountain to look at the eyes dry. ”
When reading along, the reader sees a man far away from home, looking in the direction of his hometown, drinking alone, and he has drunk all the wine in the jug.
Because of the reasons of the road, he and his family were separated, and he wanted to write a letter to express his lovesickness but did not know how to write. The letters sent in the past have not been replied to for a long time. Alone and lonely, he watched the long night, missing his wife and children at home.
Although the meaning of lovesickness was also expressed when reading backwards, the meaning changed: the wife and children missed their distant husbands at home, only the wife watched over the long night, the letters sent in the past did not get a reply for a long time, and after being separated for so long, they were blamed for the long distance that blocked the two people's keeping.
Full of lovesickness has been conceived into a poem and embarrassed to write it out, holding up the wine glass to think of a drunken Party Hugh and worried about what to take to dispel the sorrow when the wine in the wine pot is drunk. I knew in my heart that he was also thinking about himself, and the mountains and rivers were blocked, and he could only look at him from a distance.
The same acacia has different melancholy, the man is bold and unrestrained, the woman is amorous and subtle, and the different meanings of the phrases will change.
Every word of this poem has a deep meaning, no matter how you read it, the meaning he expresses is complete, which is the subtlety of this poem.
The author writes the background of the poem
It is rumored that the author of this poem, Li Yu, had a very good relationship with his wife, but because of his official duties, the children were still young, and his wife stayed at home to take care of the children, and Li Yu could only leave his hometown alone to take up his post in a foreign country.
In ancient times, the traffic was not developed, and the correspondence was also transmitted by horseback on the public transport of the station, so it took a long time for the family letter to be delivered, and it took several months or even half a year for a letter to be delivered, and it was a long time to get the reply letter.
Young Li Yu left his gentle and virtuous wife and felt deeply lonely in a strange foreign land. Every late night when he thought of his wife and children, he drank to dispel his sorrows, he knew that his wife and children also missed him, and every time he wrote back, he did not get a reply for a long time, so his family wrote one letter after another, and the long-term lovesickness had nowhere to vent, so he expressed them in words. So after much grinding, I wrote this poem.
Li Yu himself must not have thought that his family letter of lovesickness had become a work of study and research for posterity, and the amazement he brought to people lasted for more than a thousand years.
When reading this poem, we can't help but sigh at the profound achievements of the ancients, without a certain writing foundation, we can't write such a masterpiece.
The ancients were good at multi-wording
We who use modern texts are accustomed to expressing our emotions in the most direct way and language, even if it is poetry and song, we will not chew words like the ancients.
The reason why ancient poetry is brilliant may be related to the history of cultural development at that time, after all, at that time, the text was also in the process of development, and a word was repeatedly used to express multiple meanings, and we did not have so many choices now.
Chinese characters have evolved over more than two thousand years, and the earliest oracle bones are only hieroglyphs, with very few shapes and sounds. In the Shang and Zhou Dynasties, simple strokes appeared in the text, which evolved into the current script after the golden script, small seal, lishu, cursive, calligraphy, and xingshu.
Nowadays, the Xinhua Dictionary contains more than 7,000 commonly used Chinese characters, although there are nearly 100,000 Chinese characters to follow, but most people can know less than 10,000 words, then in ancient times, the number of commonly used Chinese characters is not much, so the ancestors invented a word multi-purpose, a word multi-meaning, let our descendants carry out endless exploration.
The development of poetry
The earliest poems on the mainland appeared in the poetry classics, and after the Spring and Autumn Period, a hundred schools of thought sounded in unison, and Chu Ci was produced in the Warring States. "The road is long and its repair is far away, I will go up and down and seek" Qu Yuan's "Leaving the Troubles" has been sung to this day.
Later, Han Fu and Lefu poetry continued to develop, forming Gelug poetry during the Tang Dynasty. The new form that emerged after the Song Dynasty was song ci, and there were more and more ways of expression of words. Modern poetry has many forms to choose from.
This poem made by Li Yu belongs to the Seven Words of Law. Such poetic formats prevailed during the Tang and Song dynasties. The seven-word poem is a genre of ancient poetry, which requires seven words per sentence of the poem and eight sentences for the whole poem. The second, fourth, sixth, and last word of the eighth sentence of these eight sentences must be the same rhyme.
The individual sentence should rhyme with the preceding sentence corresponding to it, corresponding to the law of the poem. In this poem by Li Yu, "Knowing, Poetry, Chi, Child" and "Lonely, Alone, Pot, Dry" all strictly conform to the rules.
This poetic format is also known as palindromic poetry. Palindromic poetry was adopted by many literati after the Western Jin Dynasty, it is a very unique genre of writing, in terms of creative techniques, it prominently inherits the artistic characteristics of repeated arias of poetry to achieve its purpose of "speech and narrative", resulting in a strong artistic effect of looping and overlapping chants. It is mainly based on a single text, and uses the order of sentences as an important means to express special meanings, which makes people intentionally unfinished beauty, and likes to repeatedly consider and understand the recitation.
A short story of palindromic poetry
There is also a small story in the creation of palindromic poetry: a young man married a woman with excellent literary ability as his wife, and the two respected each other and loved each other, but under the ancient system, it was common for men to have three wives and four concubines.
When the young man married a beautiful concubine again, he and the concubine Qingqing me forgot the previous love with his wife. The man went to the field and took the concubine with him, but left his wife at home alone in the empty house.
The wife is jealous and angry when she stays at home alone, and hates her husband for being too ruthless. In the empty and depressed days, she wrote a long poem, embroidered word by word into a colorful splendid embroidery. This figure has more than 800 words, whether it is reverse reading, horizontal reading, oblique reading, interactive reading, back-reading one-word reading, overlapping one-word reading, can be turned into poetry. You can read more than a thousand poems of three, four, five, six, and seven words, and the talent is wonderful, throughout the past and the present.
Through poetry, the wife describes the two people's love from the initial affection to the later strange road, from the husband and wife love like fire to the later husband only to see the new person smile and not see the old person crying mercilessly, not only expressing her determination to be loyal to her husband and never changing her heart, but also flogging her husband for forgetting the basic principles of being a man, forgetting the etiquette of loyalty and filial piety and the warmth of human feelings.
The husband was ashamed when he saw it, and immediately took his wife from home, and the two were reunited, and they loved each other as before.
This story is slightly similar to the background of Li Yu's poems, and the husband and wife are separated from each other. The difference is that Li Yu's poems are easy to understand, rigorous in format, more in line with the rules, and express resonant emotions, so they are more popular with the public.