"Farewell to the Ancient Grass" is a famous work of Bai Juyi's youth, and almost everyone who has gone to school has read it. However, this poem has indeed been controversial in the past.
For example, there is a Qing Dynasty scholar Gu An, in his "Tang Law And Summer Record", he believes that Bai Juyi is "one year old and one year old", inheriting the upper and lower levels, but writing too revealingly. The "ancient road" and "deserted city" in the fifth and sixth sentences form the "joint palm" in the image.
In addition to these problems, some people have questioned what the "departure" of "leaving the original" means. Some people also questioned the "clichés" of the last four poems of this poem, which are not new. So I cut it off, leaving only the first four sentences in our language textbooks.
The reason for this is actually not that there is anything wrong with the poem written by Bai Juyi, but that the people of later generations have problems in the standard of "evaluation".
The saying that "clapping" is a "poetic disease" has not yet arisen in the Tang Dynasty. What "detachment" means, the controversy continues. As for the waist chop "Endowed with Ancient Grass Farewell", it may also be that the present people were misled by the Ming Dynasty and did not understand the author's life.
"Endowed with Ancient Grass Farewell" - Tang Bai Juyi Away from the grass on the original, one year old and one withered away. Wildfires burn endlessly, and spring winds blow again. Yuanfang invaded the ancient road, and Qingcui took over the deserted city. He sent Wang Sun to go again, and he was full of affection.
Bai Juyi wrote at the beginning of this poem "away from the grass on the original", which made many people confused. What is "detachment"? Some people say that it may refer to a remote mountain where Bai Juyi lived when he was a child, and there is a grassland called "yuanyuan" under the mountain.
However, most of the Tang poetry appreciation dictionaries interpret "separation" as "weeds draped in appearance". The word "Phi Li" comes from Baoyu's "Wind Endowment", which means that the weeds spread out in all directions, indicating that the wild grasses grow luxuriantly.
On the surface, the sixteen-year-old boy Bai Juyi missed the paradise of his childhood, and it was more logical to write "away from the original grass" with a pen, but if you understand the author's life, you will feel that he did not write "away from the original", but originally wrote "Xianyang Ancient Plain".
According to the biography of Bai Juyi in the old and new Book of Tang, Bai Juyi's ancestor was Bai Sheng after the Prince of Chu. The crown prince was killed, Bai Sheng defected to the Qin state, and Bai Sheng's descendant was the Qin general Bai Qi. When the Qin Dynasty collapsed, his ancestors were killed in battle on the Xianyang Plain.
Therefore, he wrote about the weeds on the Xianyang plains at the front of the poem, and then used the Chu allusion of "Wang Sun returned and did not return", indicating that he was actually remembering his ancestors when he wrote this poem.
Therefore, the "separation" here obviously does not refer to the grass on the "separation from the original". And "detachment" can only be interpreted as weeds scattered in all directions.
The first four sentences of "Leaving the Original Grass" are borrowed from the life and death of the weeds, and the metaphor includes the ancestors of Bai Juyi, those heroes who died in battle on the Xianyang Plain, although their flesh has disappeared, but their spirit is not extinguished.
Gu An believes that "one year old and one withered glory" is written too "revealing", which affects the meaning of the third sentence "wildfires burn endlessly", which is just his family's words.
One withered and one glory represents the life and death of the weeds, which is also a natural phenomenon. Wildfires burn inexhaustibly and are unnatural. It is the disaster brought to the weeds by the intervention of external forces.
These two verses illustrate that weeds have a tenacious ability to regenerate both under the constraints of the natural life cycle and under the harsh external interference. So there is no such thing as the phenomenon that the previous sentence is too obvious and makes the next sentence unfulfilled.
The explanation of the word "he palm" is not found in the Modern Chinese Dictionary today. It cannot be seen in ordinary entry-level poetry grammar books. There is only one explanation for the "joint palm" in "Ci Hai", that is, the Buddhist family's hands are folded together.
The explanation of "he palm" on the Internet is that it refers to the first and second sentences of the poem, or the called out sentence and the opposite sentence, some words have the same or similar meaning, this phenomenon is called "poet taboo".
However, this so-called "poet's taboo" concept was formed relatively late. It is generally believed that it was only proposed during the Ming and Qing dynasties.
Until then, there doesn't seem to be such a statement. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, strict theoretical norms were not formed and were incorporated into official doctrines.
Nowadays, when we look at the poetic theories left by the ancients, the earliest is the "Poetry" and "Wenxin Carved Dragon" of the Southern and Northern Dynasties, which only talk about the sentiment and rhyme of poetry. The poetry theory of the Tang and Song dynasties mainly talks about equality and confrontation, and does not talk about "combined palms".
Therefore, during the Tang and Song dynasties, there was no so-called "joint palm". Later generations listed "clapping" as a "poetic disease", and now it is impossible to find out where the source of this statement is.
But what is certain is that the term "combined palm" did not exist at least in Bai Juyi's time, even in the last years of the Northern Song Dynasty, when Xie Fangde's "Rewriting a Thousand Family Poems".
It was not until the Ming Dynasty that the situation changed somewhat. Xia Tang, a Ming Dynasty man, wrote "Tang Poetry Collection" and changed the title of "Farewell to the Ancient Grass" to "Grass".
Xia Tang may have revised the title of the poem precisely because he thought that the second half of the poem was more old-fashioned and committed the "poetic disease" of "clapping".
The poem "Farewell to the Ancient Grass" was disseminated through ancient children's enlightenment books such as "Thousand Family Poems". In other words, the poem is one of the "teaching paradigms" of ancient poetry.
Ancient literati, like today's netizens, were concerned about children's education, so they could not tolerate that the example was always flawed. However, Xia Tang did not "cut the waist" of this poem, he only redrafted the title of the poem according to his own understanding.
After the "confirmation" of Gu An of the Qing Dynasty, after the five or six sentences of Bai Juyi's poem committed "clapping", today's talents directly judged that the second half of Bai Juyi's poem was unqualified when compiling teaching materials, so they "cut off" it.
This is to use the standards formulated by later generations to standardize the poetry of predecessors, which seems very pedantic and undesirable. According to this standard, many famous poems before the Ming and Qing dynasties committed the crime of "clapping".
For example, Li Bai's "Emei Mountain Moon Song", "Emei Mountain Moon Half Round Autumn, Shadow into the Pingqiang River Flow", "Moon" and "Shadow" The image is the same. By their standards, they also committed a slap in the face.
But we can't deny it, it's a good poem. More examples abound on the Internet, so I won't list them all here.
The key lies in the formation time of "combined palm" and "grid law", which is tens or even hundreds of years later than the time when Bai Juyi wrote this poem. If you look at ancient poems according to such requirements, won't the Book of Poetry have to be destroyed directly?
Most people in the Ming and Qing dynasties could not write poetry, and the Qing Dynasty people also particularly liked to examine the evidence, and there were a lot of pedantic pedantic studies, but after half a day of examination, they did not understand what the theme of "Giving The Ancient Grass Farewell" was.
They think the poem is just a song of weeds, but they are very wrong. This poem is obviously borrowing the weeds on the Xianyang Plains to praise the heroes who died in battle on the Xianyang Plains in ancient times.
The last couplet, "Sending Wang Sun to go again, and saying goodbye to wang and sun", directly points out the real theme of this poem, which is its original title, and praises the wild grass to "send farewell" to the undead.
Because they did not understand bai juyi's life, Xia Tang and Gu An believed that the sixteen-year-old Bai Juyi was just writing poems, similar to "for giving new words to force sorrow". Does the old classic of "the return of the king and sun" have anything to do with him? Actually, there really is!
No matter what posterity thinks of this issue, at least from the information in the old and new "Book of Tang" and the documentary records of Bai Juyi's own family, he is the descendant of the Qin general Bai Qi.
Xianyang was originally the former site of the Qin Palace, and when he came to the Xianyang Plain, there was indeed a "Wang Sun" waiting for him to "return". If you really read this poem, you will not cut it off, let alone question him for writing it wrong.