Meng Haoran (an idyllic poet in Tang Dynasty)
Meng Haoran (689-740) was born in Xiangyang, Xiangzhou (now Xiangyang, Hubei), known as Meng Xiangyang in the world. Because he has never been an official, he is also known as Monsanto, and he is a famous pastoral poet in the Tang Dynasty.
Meng Haoran was born in the prosperous Tang Dynasty, and he was determined to use the world in his early years. After experiencing the hardships and pains of his official career, he can still respect himself, not flatter the world, and be a lifelong hermit. Once lived in seclusion in Lumen Mountain. Traveling to Chang 'an at the age of 40 should be promoted by Jinshi. He once wrote a poem named Gong Qing in imperial academy, and he wrote for it. In the 25th year of Kaiyuan, Zhang Jiuling led his troops to the shogunate and lived in seclusion. Meng's poems are mostly five-character short stories, mostly pastoral poems and secluded poems, and most of them are in the mood of serving immortals. Although it is not without cynicism, it is more of a poet's self-expression.
Although Meng Haoran's poems are not as extensive as Wang Wei's, they have unique artistic attainments, so later generations call Meng Haoran and Wang Weihe "Wang Meng", and Meng Haoran's Collection has been handed down in three volumes.
The life of the character
Poetic youth
In the first year of Tang Yongchang (689), Meng Haoran was born in Xiangyang City, with a scholarly family and a thin production.
In the first year of Emperor Taizong (698), Meng Haoran studied fencing with his younger brother.
In the second year of Tang Jinglong (708), Meng Haoran was 20. He visited Lumeng Mountain all the year round and wrote the poem "Lumeng Mountain Topic". Poetry marks the basic formation of Haoran's unique poetic style.
In the second year of Tang Jingyun (7 1 1), Meng Haoran was 23 years old and lived in Lumen Mountain with Zhang Zirong.
Wandering around for official positions
In the first year of the Tang Dynasty (7 12), in winter, I sent Zhang Zirong to take an examination of Jinshi, and wrote a song "Send Zhang Zirong Jinshi Residence". From the age of 25 to 35, in order to enter the body, leave relatives, travel far, roam the Yangtze River valley, make friends, and pay homage to officials and celebrities.
In the fifth year of Tang Kaiyuan (7 17), I visited Dongting Lake. Gan Yi said to Zhang. Climb Yueyang Tower and write a poem "The Story of Yueyang Tower".
In the sixth year of Tang Kaiyuan (7 18), in February, Zhang called it the history of Jingzhou. Go to work in April Haoran lived at home, wrote poems lamenting poverty and frustration, and longed for someone to introduce him to the emperor.
In the eighth year of Tang Kaiyuan (720), Haoran fell ill in late spring, and gave Zhang Zirong a poem "Send Zhang Ba when he was ill in late spring". On September 9th, Haoran and Jia Gan went to the fairy mountain to sing poems and make wine.
In the 12th year of Tang Kaiyuan (724), Meng Haoran was thirty-six, and Hans was reinstated as the secretariat of Xiangzhou. Lu Wei is Xiangyang's order, and Hao Ran and he have forgotten each other. Because Xuanzong was in Luoyang, he went to Luoyang for an official, and stayed in Luoyang for three years with nothing.
In the 13th year of Kaiyuan in Tang Dynasty (725), Li Bai went out to Shu to help Han in Dongting, and Meng Haoran made friends with Li Bai and became close friends. When Hans died, the son of heaven wrote an inscription for his monument. Haoran and Lu Wei set up a stone mountain.
In the 14th year of Tang Kaiyuan (726), in March, Haoran traveled to Yangzhou, passing through Wuchang, and met Li Bai. Li Bai bid farewell to a poem in the Yellow Crane Tower.
Don't be an official in Beijing
In the 15th year of Tang Kaiyuan (727), Meng Haoran rushed to Chang 'an for the first time to take the imperial examination.
In the 16th year of Tang Kaiyuan (728), in the early spring, he wrote the poem Chang 'an Pingchun in Chang 'an to express his yearning and feelings. Meng Haoran was thirty-nine years old and failed in the imperial examination. In the same year, Meng Haoran made friends with Wang Wei, who painted Meng Haoran, and they became friends. Meng Haoran stayed in Chang 'an to offer poems after the failure of Jinshi. He once wrote poems in imperial academy, became a famous minister and paid tribute to him. He and Zhang are very good friends. Legend has it that Zhang said that he was invited to the interior office privately, which coincided with the arrival of Xuanzong, and Haoran fled under the bed. Zhang said he didn't dare to hide it. According to the facts, Xuanzong was ordered to see it. Haoran recited his poem to the sentence "I was exiled by a wise ruler because of my mistakes", and Xuanzong was very unhappy. He said, "You don't want to be an official, and I haven't abandoned you. Why should you accuse me?"! "Put it back in Xiangyang. After roaming in wuyue, I was extremely poor.
live/dwell in seclusion
In the seventeenth year of Tang Kaiyuan (729), Meng Haoran left Chang 'an, moved to Xiangyang, Luoyang, traveled to wuyue in summer, and went boating with Cao San. Cao San's suggestion was to recommend Haoran, who declined to write poetry politely. The next year, he visited the famous temples in the south of the Yangtze River.
In the 19th year of Tang Kaiyuan (73 1), Meng Haoran was 43 years old in the same year. In spring, he presented Xie Fuchi's poems in Yuezhou to show his concern for farming. Continue to write poems with friends in Jiangsu and Zhejiang.
In the 22nd year of Tang Kaiyuan (734), Meng Haoran went to Chang 'an for the second time, but he didn't. Haoran returned to Xiangyang that year.
In the 23rd year of Tang Kaiyuan (735), Han Chaozong was appointed as the secretariat of Xiangzhou, and was very appreciative of Meng Haoran, so he invited him to dinner and recommended him to the court. Meng Haoran didn't go to Beijing as agreed, because he thought that Han Chaozong, as a secretariat, couldn't let him be an official. In the same year, Li Bai went to Xiangyang to play with Meng Haoran. After Li Bai left, Haoran went to Shu and traveled to Guanghan.
Shogunate entrance
In the 25th year of Tang Kaiyuan (737), Zhang Jiuling became the long history of Jingzhou, which led to the shogunate. Before long, he returned to his former residence.
In the 26th year of Tang Kaiyuan (738), Haoran traveled to many places in Jingzhou. In summer, Haoran was lying in Xiangyang with gangrene on his back. The next year, my illness got worse and many friends came to visit me.
Finally nanyuan
In the 28th year of Tang Kaiyuan (AD 740), Wang Changling was demoted to Xiangyang to visit Meng Haoran. They met happily. Meng Haoran has a poisonous sore on his back. He will be fine. He died because he indulged in feasting and eating fresh food.
Poetry achievement
Wang Wei and Meng Haoran, the first person of the pastoral school in the prosperous Tang Dynasty and the pioneer of "Xiangxing" creation, are also called the pastoral school. In order to highlight their outstanding role in the pastoral school, later generations are also called the "Wang Meng Poetry School". This school is as long as the poems of Tao Yuanming and Schell (Xie Lingyun and Xie Tiao), with pastoral scenery and secluded life as the main theme, and its style dilutes nature. Meng Haoran's poems got rid of the narrow realm of chanting things in Lu and Tang Dynasties, expressed more personal hugs, brought fresh breath to Kaiyuan poetry circle and won the admiration of people at that time. Meng Haoran was the first poet who wrote landscape poems in the Tang Dynasty and the forerunner of Wang Wei. His travels are vividly described, and Dongting Lake's letter to Premier Zhang is magnificent.
Meng Haoran's life experience is relatively simple, and the theme of poetry creation is relatively simple. Meng's poems are mostly five-character short stories, mostly pastoral poems and secluded poems, and most of them are in the mood of serving immortals. Although it is not without cynicism, it is more of a poet's self-expression. Meng Shi's poetry is not carving, but thinking, full of wonderful self-satisfaction interest, not frugality and poverty. He is good at exploring the beauty of nature and life, immediately understanding the scene and writing his true feelings at the moment. For example, Qiu Deng Wan Shan sends Zhang Wu, Summer is in the South Pavilion, Guo Zhuang, Night Sleeping in Jiande, Night Song of Deer Gate, etc. , naturally become muddleheaded, but the artistic conception is clear and full of charm.
In Meng Haoran's view, the image in his landscape poems is no longer a description of the original landscape, nor a simple addition of his personal feelings, but a kind of expression technique, which combines the description of landscape images with the display of his thoughts, feelings and temperament, thus making the image description in his landscape poems reach an unprecedented height and raising the image in his landscape poems to an advanced artistic image form, that is, "image". It can be said that before Meng Haoran, no poet's landscape poems could touch the author's personality so deeply.
A relaxed and natural poetic style
Meng Haoran's poems are mainly characterized by seclusion, leisure, wandering and worrying, and his poetic style is light and natural, and he is good at five-character ancient poems.
Meng Haoran was the first poet who devoted himself to writing landscape poems in Tang Dynasty. He mainly writes landscape poems, and he is one of the representatives of the pastoral school of landscape poems. In the early stage, he mainly wrote political poems and frontier fortress ranger poems, and in the later stage, he mainly wrote landscape poems. Today, there are more than 200 poems, most of which were written when he wandered, and some of which were written when he visited his hometown Wanshan, Xianshan and Lumen Mountain. There are also several poems describing rural life. The geographical scope of this poem is quite extensive.
Landscape is the most important theme of poetry in the Southern Dynasties, which has experienced long-term development and made remarkable achievements. By Meng Haoran, landscape poetry has been promoted to a new height, mainly in the following aspects: the relationship between emotion and scenery in poetry is not only a mutual foil, but also a close combination of water and milk; The artistic conception of poetry is more pure and clear because all unnecessary and uncoordinated elements are eliminated; The structure of the poem is also more perfect. Meng Haoran prefers water rafting during his trip, as he himself said: "For many mountains and rivers, he often goes boating." (Jingqilitan) His poems mostly describe the beauty of Jiangnan water town and the interest of roaming, such as boating in the west)
Mr. Fang Rixi pointed out in the article "On the Lightness of Meng Haoran's Poetic Style": "Looking at Meng Haoran's poetic style, there are roughly three aspects: first, his thoughts and feelings are light, without intense feelings; Secondly, the poetic expression is weak and there is no strong poetic display; Third, the language is pale and there is no colorful description.
Rich artistic conception of landscape poems
The artistic conception of Meng Haoran's landscape poems is full of vitality and tranquility. But he can also express his greatness with magnificent writing. Such as "seeing Lushan Mountain in Lipeng Lake". Pan Deyu, a poet in the Tang Dynasty, took this poem and fishing in Putan in his early years as examples, calling Meng Zhi's poem "vigorous and overlooking everything" ("Yang Shi Hua"), which showed its important characteristics of exuberance. Yin Kun, a famous poetry critic in the prosperous Tang Dynasty, likes to use the word "Xiang Xing" to talk about poetry. When commenting on Meng Haoran's two poems, he also said that "whatever the image, it is also true" (see He Ji Ling). The so-called "towards the star" means that the poet's emotion and spirit control the image, making it integrate with the vibration of the poet's mind, thus gaining life, personality and vitality. It is a common feature of Meng Haoran's poems to emphasize "looking to the stars". This can be seen more clearly by comparing several different works. The three poems, A Message from Dongting Lake, A Boat from Tonglu to Yangzhou Friends and A Night Sleeping in Jiande, are all about rivers and lakes, but they have different personalities. The first song was written by Meng when he applied for the Zhang Jiuling shogunate. He was excited to have a chance to try his ambition. He once wrote "Grateful to Play the Crown, Safe and Poor" ("Shu Huai Yi Jing Yi Hao Tong") and "An old friend is in office now, so it is not too late to die" ("Send Ding Dafeng Jinshi to Zhang Jiuling"). It is this high-spirited emotion that made him write such a magnificent famous sentence as "Clouds, dreams and fog around Yueyang". The second and third songs were written on the day when I traveled to southern wuyue after I was down and out. The former wrote his own sad inner turmoil with the turbulent scenery of the wind and the river, while the latter wrote the feelings of lonely wanderers with the quiet scenery of the wild Qingjiang River. Their spirits are very different. Taking "Xing" as the essence and "Image" as the essence, highlighting the subject's emotional feelings, unifying the two and constructing a complete artistic conception are the important contributions of Meng Haoran's landscape poems.
Creative poetic expression
Being in and out of ancient physique is full of free and easy feeling, which is also one of the manifestations of Meng's creation. The language of Meng Haoran's poetry is "light language but not light taste" (Shen Deqian's Poems), which does not communicate the strange and the different, but avoids the common. Some of his poems are often refined in simple descriptions, but the dense latitude and longitude seem to be inadvertently displayed, showing high artistic skill. For example, his famous work "Passing through the Old People's Village". Throughout the narrative, it seems to be homely, which is similar to Tao Yuanming's "Drinking" and other poems, but Tao wrote ancient style, but this poem is close to it. The couplet "We see green trees around your village, and the mountains in the distance are light blue" makes the finishing point to outline the typical environment of a village surrounded by green mountains and trees. There is also a five-line poem "Spring Dawn" that women and children can recite, which is also a subtle feeling of cherishing spring in natural language. In addition, Meng Haoran often breaks through the limitation of the inherent formula in the use of poetic style, which makes him have a different interest. For example, in the poem "Looking at the boat in the middle", the flat and parallel tones are all in pentatonic format, but China's couplets are not parallel prose, which is full of ancient charm. Hu Yinglin's "Poems for Poetry" holds that such poems are "naturally short and ancient in the Six Dynasties, and if they rhyme, they will feel detached." Another example is "Returning to Lumen Mountain at Night", which is poetic, but only writes the journey of returning all the way at night, without extravagance. The scale of his writing system is similar to that of modern poetry, which absorbs the concise language of modern poetry and highlights the sentence structure of chorus, which is quite exciting to read.
Unique aesthetic view of poetry
Meng Haoran also has his own unique views on the artistic form of poetry creation. He advocates that poetry should think in images, shape images through the language of poetry and express the meaning of poetry through images. Readers are proud of "abandoning images and forgetting words". In the poem Ben Li Yue Xin Zuo Ting, he wrote: "We should abandon the image and realize, but forget the words and reason. What do you get in silence? Singing is also awkward! "Meng Haoran borrowed the theory of' abandoning images and forgetting words' in Buddhism and Taoism philosophy, and advocated that the lyrical expression and expression of poetry creation should not be too straightforward, but should have overtones and meanings beyond images.
Meng Haoran also advocated that poetry should be "exquisite and natural" instead of being bound by near-body rhythm. Meng Haoran collected 267 poems, including 63 five-character poems, 6 seven-character poems, 30 five-character poems, 4 seven-character poems, 37 five-character poems, 9 five-character quatrains, and 8 seven-character quatrains. It can be seen that except for 69 ancient poems, all of them are modern poems, with the most five-character poems. It can be said that he was the first poet who wrote a lot of modern poems in the prosperous Tang Dynasty. However, most of these poems can't be regarded as modern poems in the strict sense. Poems such as Looking at the Night in the Boat, From Sending to Yangzhou, Sending Yanjiu from Dongting Lake, Sending New moths from Duxia, and Going to Yanshan with Friends do not conform to the duality of five-character poems. However, the poet spoke highly of them. Yan Yu's Cang Lang Shi Hua said: "Everything is orderly and sonorous." The complete maturity of modern poetry forms was in the Du period before Meng Haoran. Du is also from Xiangyang, and he can't help but know. So, why doesn't he go the way of Lao Du? In this regard, Shi Buhua's "Poems on Servants" thinks: "There are two typos and two typos in five-character Chinese, and all typos should be written in one breath, which is wonderful and natural. Novices should pay attention to confrontation and not fall into this situation. " In other words, Meng Haoran's five-character law is illegal because of its deep-seated aesthetic reasons. His pursuit of natural beauty is a correction to the excessive pursuit of formal beauty in the early Tang Dynasty. He combines ancient style with modern style, and his modern style is mostly ancient style. The metrical spirit of modern poetry is organically combined with the natural peace of ancient style, thus achieving the artistic realm of "beautiful artistic conception". Reading Meng Haoran's poems, we can't see the bondage of near-body meter, but there is a flowing nature. We should not only accept the rules of the near body, but also be burdened by the rules of the near body, and take nature as the first standard in everything.
Personal work
Meng Haoran's Collection has three volumes, which was compiled by Wang Shiyuan in the Tang Dynasty. This book contains 2 18 poems by Meng Haoran, and is photocopied by Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House 1994. Many works have been derived from this book, including: Jin Mao's original name in Ming Dynasty is Meng Xiangyang Collection, and there are also three volumes, the arrangement of which is different from that in Song Dynasty. In the Ming dynasty, there was an addendum to Gu Daohong's engraving, with a volume compiled outside Xiangyang. Photocopying and engraving four volumes and four series; Zhang Xunye published two volumes in Ming Dynasty, and Yang Yitong published one. 1975 Taipei Student Bookstore published You Xinli's Notes on Meng Haoran. 1988 collation of Li Menghaoran's poems published by Bashu Bookstore. 1998 People's Literature Publishing House published Xu Peng's Notes on Meng Haoran's Collected Works. In 2000, Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House published Tong Peiji's Notes on Meng Haoran's Poems.