How He Zhizhang created the "Book of Returning Dolls"

In the first year of the Tang Dynasty (679 AD), the 21-year-old He Zhizhang was admitted to the Jinshi Weishi. In the first year of the Tang Dynasty (695 AD), the 37-year-old He Zhizhang entered the dynasty as an official after being promoted to a super-plucked group of class members in high school, and began his brilliant life. He Zhizhang was a famous poet of the Prosperous Tang Dynasty, and his poems were known for their absolute sentences, and the Quan Tang Poems contained nineteen poems. "The Book of Homecoming Dolls" is one of the masterpieces.

We know that the seven-word sentence of the "Book of Returning To the Hometown" has a total of four sentences: the young man leaves home and returns to the old man, and the township tone has not changed the sideburns. Children don't know each other, laughing and asking where the guests come from. These four verses are actually the four components of the structure of the absolute verse, which are the opening sentence, the continuation sentence, the turning sentence and the compound sentence. Usually we are used to calling it "starting and turning".

So, how was this ancient poem of He Zhizhang written? The matter has to start from the time when He Zhizhang told the old man to return to his hometown.

In the third year of Tang Tianbao (744 AD), on the fifth day of the first lunar month, the eighty-six-year-old He Zhizhang was ordered to leave Beijing to return to his hometown, and Tang Xuanzong led a hundred officials to travel, which can be described as unprecedented and unlimited scenery. At the end of february of the lunar calendar, when I returned to my hometown of Xiaoshan, Zhejiang, there were officials and people from Yuezhou who lined up to greet them, which can be described as a glorious return to their hometown and a glorious ancestor. There were not many old people in his hometown, and he hardly knew the young people, which made him get too many unexpected feelings, so he had the idea of composing a homecoming poem to express his feelings of returning to his hometown. The thing that made him feel most deeply was that he was obviously back in his hometown, and the people in his hometown always regarded him as a guest from afar. On the morning of the first ten days of his return to Xiaoshan's hometown, a young student met He Zhizhang on the road and actually smiled and asked He Zhizhang where he zhizhang came from. This incident made He Zhizhang suddenly have inspiration, thinking, where did this laughing questioner come from, is not it the syndication of this homecoming poem that he wants to write?

The "conjunction" in ancient poetry is also called "concluding sentence", which means "end, end". From the perspective of the structure of the poem, the "syndication" is the end of the seven-word poem.

When a poem has a syndication, it has a poetic ending, and He Zhizhang, who is well versed in the way of poetry, knows that the next thing he has to do is to conceive the opening sentence of the poem. The opening sentence means the beginning of the poem. When the nervous usher was sent, He Zhizhang finally calmed down on this first afternoon, let the next person prepare his pen and ink, and began to create his own homecoming poem. He Zhizhang said to his heart: "Now, when we face our chorus, I ask you, what is the premise of our chorus, that is, laughing and asking where the guests come from?" The premise of where the laughing questioner comes from is our opening sentence. ”

He Zhizhang replied in his own heart: "Although I only entered the DPRK as an official at the age of 37, I left my hometown at the age of 21, and now I have returned to my hometown for 86 years, and the time I have left my hometown is as long as 65 years." Therefore, our starting sentence should be a small departure from home. ”

He Zhizhang said to his heart: "Yes, our starting sentence is that the little one left home and the old man returned. Now that we have the conjunction and opening sentence of this homecoming poem, all we need to do is conceive the sentence of the poem. Let's go back to our syndic, face our synapse again, I ask you, where do we come from? The main reason why the laughter comes from is our sentences. Inflections and syndications are direct causal. ”

He Zhizhang's own heart replied: "The main reason why the laughing questioners come from is that none of the young people in my hometown know me, just as I don't know any of them." Therefore, our paraphrasing should be that children do not know each other. ”

He Zhizhang said to his heart: "Yes, children do not know each other, which is the main reason for the emergence of our syndication, and it is the transfer sentence of our homecoming poem." Now, all we have to do is to conceive our confession, and in the face of our sentence I ask you, what is the premise of our sentence, that is, children do not know each other? The premise of children not knowing each other is our confession. The acceptance sentence is the premise of the transfer sentence and the result of the opening sentence. ”

He Zhizhang replied in his own heart: "The premise that children do not know each other is that I have changed too much. When I left my hometown, I had a full head of black hair, and now I had a full head of white hair, and the white hair on my sideburns had long since begun to fall off, and now it had become sparse, only my hometown dialect was not bad and had not changed much. Therefore, our acceptance sentence should be the township tone without changing the sideburns. ”

He Zhizhang said to his heart: "Yes, the township voice has not changed and the sideburns have declined, which is exactly the continuation of our hometown poem." Now, let's consider the title of this homecoming poem; the title of the poem, which is too big and too broad to be appropriate, and we can't find a suitable alternative for a while, so we tentatively set up a book of homecoming dolls. ”

He Zhizhang's own heart replied: "Well, the title is "The Book of Returning Dolls." The opening sentence is a small child who leaves home and returns to the old man, and the continuation sentence is the township tone without changing the sideburns. The paraphrase is that children do not know each other when they meet each other, and the compound sentence is to laugh and ask where the guest comes from. ”

After He Zhizhang finished writing, he looked at this homecoming doll book with satisfaction and concluded that it would be his own heirloom. He Zhizhang recalled what he had seen and heard since his return to his hometown, and thought that the Mirror Lake, which he had only recently visited, had not changed because of the change of time, and his heart could not help but set off an emotional wave again, so he wrote down the second book of the return to his hometown: Leaving his hometown for many years, and recently personnel have been half-consumed. Only the mirror lake in front of the door, the spring wind does not change the old time wave.

This is the story of the birth of the famous poem "The Book of Homecoming Dolls".

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