Zhu Ziqing, formerly known as Zihua, with the courtesy name Peixian and the nickname Qiushi, was born on the ninth day of October in the twenty-fourth year of Guangxu (November 22, 1898) and died on August 12, 1948. Originally from Shaoxing, Zhejiang. Because three generations have settled in Yangzhou, and he graduated from Jiangsu No. 8 Middle School in Yangzhou at that time, and worked as a teacher in Yangzhou, he calls himself a "Yangzhou native". He is a famous modern writer and scholar. Zhu Ziqing's grandfather, Zhu Zeyu, was named Jupo and his original surname was Yu. He changed his surname because he inherited the Zhu family name. He was a cautious person and served as a judge in Donghai County, Jiangsu Province for more than 10 years during the Guangxu period of the Qing Dynasty. His father's name is Hongjun, also known as Xiaopo. He is married to Zhou and is a scholar. In the twenty-seventh year of Guangxu (1901), Zhu Hongjun went from Donghai to Shaobo Town, Yangzhou Prefecture, and took office. Two years later, the family moved to Yangzhou City and settled in Yangzhou ever since.
Zhu Ziqing has lived in Yangzhou for 13 years, spending his childhood and adolescence here. His feelings about this period of life in the ancient city were subtle and complex. Probably because life was too monotonous, he later said that only "thin shadows" of childhood memories were left, "like being washed away by floods, so lonely that it was shocking!" However, in the long and tortuous journey of life, , after all, it was the first "inn" when I was a child.
Yangzhou is a cultural city with beautiful scenery, its lakes and mountains, and pleasant scenery. It has attracted many poets such as Li Bai, Du Fu, Su Dongpo, Ouyang Xiu, etc. to linger here, explore the secluded places, and write many popular and magnificent poems. Cantos. Yangzhou is also a heroic historical city. In the history of resisting foreign invasion, it has written countless glorious chapters and left many evocative stories. The beautiful scenery of the ancient city and the strong culture of advocating culture have invisibly cultivated the temperament of young Zhu Ziqing, developing his peaceful and upright character and his yearning for natural beauty. The beautiful mountains and rivers of Yangzhou nourished his soul like rain and dew, nourished his emotions, enriched his imagination, and made his feelings always full of poetry and painting. Yangzhou, a famous historical and cultural city, had a subtle and profound influence on him.
Zhu Ziqing has 27 kinds of works, totaling about 1.9 million words, including poetry, prose, literary criticism, academic research, etc. Most of them were included in the 4-volume "Collected Works of Zhu Ziqing" published by Kaiming Bookstore in 1953. In 1988, Jiangsu Education Press once again comprehensively collected, organized and published Zhu Ziqing's complete works in six volumes. Although Zhu Ziqing began to compose new poems after the May 4th Movement, "Qinhuai River in the Shadow of Oars and Lanterns" published in 1923 showed his talent in prose writing. From then on, he devoted himself to prose creation and made remarkable achievements. The collection of essays "Back" published in 1928 made Zhu Ziqing a famous prose writer at that time.
Zhu Ziqing's prose is mainly narrative and lyrical essays. The themes of his works can be divided into three series: the first is a group of essays whose main content is to write about social life and criticize the dark reality. Representative works include "The Price of Life--Seven Cents" and "Caucasians--The Proud Son of God". ” and “The Massacre of the Ruling Government”. The second is a group of prose represented by "Back", "Children" and "Mourning for the Dead Wife", which mainly describe personal and family life, express the human relations between father and son, husband and wife, and friends, and have a strong human touch. Third, there is a group of lyrical sketches focusing on natural scenery, such as "Green", "Spring", "Qinhuai River in the Sound of Oars and Shadows of Lights", "Moonlight in the Lotus Pond", etc., which are his representative masterpieces. The latter two types of prose are the most outstanding ones written by Zhu Ziqing. Among them, "Back View" and "Moonlight over the Lotus Pond" are even more popular. His prose is simple and meticulous, clear, meaningful and melancholy. It is refined with language and is famous for its clear and beautiful writing style, which is full of true feelings.
Appreciation of Zhu Ziqing's "Hurry"
Zhu Ziqing's prose poem "Hurry" was written on March 28, 1922. It was the ebb of the May Fourth Movement, and reality kept disappointing the author. However, the poet was not willing to sink in the hesitation, and he pursued persistently from the standpoint of "neutralism". He believes: "Various processes in life have their own independent meaning and value - every moment has the meaning and value of every moment! Every moment has its own appropriate position in the duration of time." (Zhu Ziqing's "To Yu Pingbo") "Letter" November 7, 2022) Therefore, he must "step on the soil step by step and lay deep footprints" (Zhu Ziqing's "Destruction") in order to obtain "the satisfaction of the paragraph." The whole poem reveals the poet's inner complaint of injustice in a touch of sadness, which also reflects the common mood of intellectual youth during the ebb of the "May Fourth Movement".
"Hurry" is the poet's inspired work. The spring scene in front of him suddenly aroused his emotions, and the poet expressed it with the help of imagination. Imagination "makes unknown things take shape and appear, and the poet's pen makes their images complete, giving the ethereal nothing a place to live in and a name to call it." (Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream") The poet makes the ethereal nothing Time, an abstract concept, is expressed through phenomena, and the poet follows the clues of his emotions to select and capture the vivid image. The poet's emotions show undulating waves as time goes by, from invisible to tangible, from looming to clear, a set of constantly changing pictures.
"The swallows have gone, but they will come again; the willows have withered, but they will bloom again; the peach blossoms have faded, but they will bloom again." The poet outlines a light picture with a few strokes.
The author does not describe the actual feeling of the spring scene, but brings the readers into the picture, accepts the emotional infection, and at the same time makes visual hints: the prosperity and decay of nature shown in this picture are traces of the passage of time, from which the poet Trace the whereabouts of your own life. But "my" days are "gone forever", invisible and intangible. Was it "stolen" or "escaped"? The signs of natural metabolism contrast with his invisible days, revealing the poet's feeling of loss in a series of questions.
“Like a drop of water dripping in the ocean, my days drip in the flow of time.” Comparing my more than 8,000 days to a “drop of water” is a novel metaphor, an extreme exaggeration, and a metaphor for the ocean. Compared with the vastness of the flow of time, it highlights the "no sound, no shadow" characteristics of my own life. In fact, there are traces of my own life here, and a drop of water is its embodiment. When water drops in the sea, it has its slight sound. The poet tries his best to feel it visually and aurally, searching for the past days. But more than eight thousand days "slipped away" quietly. The ruthlessness of time and the brevity of life made the poet "weeping" and "crying".
How "hurried" is time? The poet did not make abstract discussions. He expressed his feelings and latent consciousness through images, "penetrating the familiar surface and looking for the "fresh things" where no one has been before. (Zhu Ziqing's "Poetry and Feelings") Therefore, the ethereal time is visualized, and the poet's "unique secret" is revealed in the accustomed life pictures
"In the morning, two or three directions shot into the hut. The slanting sun. The sun moves gently and quietly. "The sun is personified. He steps forward like a young girl, quietly walking past the poet, following the sun. The "movement" also "followed the rotation in a daze." Then, the poet uses a series of parallel sentences to show the flow of time. Eating, washing hands, and meditating are details of people's daily lives, but the poet keenly sees the flow of time. When he tried to keep it, it "stepped over" nimbly, "flyed" lightly, "slip away" quietly, and "flashed" quickly, and the pace of time became faster and faster. The poet uses lively words to describe that the image of time is constantly changing, giving people a sense of living life. We hear the light and lively footsteps of time, and also hear the trembling of the poet's heart.
In the rush of time, the poet wanders, ponders and pursues stubbornly. The dark reality conflicts with his own enthusiasm, and the rush of time contrasts with his own inaction, which makes the poet see more clearly: "The past days are like light smoke, blown away by the breeze, like mist, evaporated by the early sun." Melting." If the third section still uses the author's specific feelings of a day to reflect the passage of time, and the individual to reflect the general, here, the author makes a high-level summary of the passage of more than 8,000 days, making time rush. The various images that have passed away are condensed into one point, making the passage of time more clear and perceptible: there is color, which is light blue and milky white; there is movement, which is "blown away" and "evaporated" ". The poet saw it, touched it, and consciously felt the passage of time with all his body and mind, pursuing the "gossamer traces" of his life.
As the poet's emotions fly, he creates a situation, visualizes the ethereal time, and adds a series of lyrical questions, naturally revealing his soul's self-struggle and self-confession of pain. See his wandering persistent pursuit. There is a strong lyrical atmosphere in the simplicity and plainness.
Poetry has the quality of musical beauty. Metrical poetry relies on meter and rhyme to reflect its musicality, while free verse also uses line division and rhyme to maintain its rhythm. Prose poetry abandons all external forms, and its musical beauty naturally emerges from the organic unity of the poet's inner emotional ups and downs and the rhythm of language. Hunter believes: "Although it is prose, it sometimes shows the full existence of rhythm, so it diverges from its nominal type and acquires the name of 'prose poetry', which is a semi-form in the field of poetry. Rhythm piece”. (Translated by Fu Donghua in "Introduction to Aesthetics") "Hurry" is such a "semi-rhythmic work".
"Hurry" expresses the rapid flow of emotions caused by the author's pursuit of time traces. The whole style is unified in "lightness", the rhythm is sparse and smooth, brisk and fluent. In order to harmonize the rhythm of emotions, the author uses a series of parallel sentences: "When I wash my hands, the days pass by the basin; when I eat, the days pass by the rice bowl; when I am silent..." The same sentence pattern is streamlined, one after another. The lively yet tranquil picture unfolded rapidly with strands of emotions, making me seem to see the flow of time. Moreover, most of the sentences are short, with five or six words per sentence and appear brisk and smooth. The syntactic structure is simple, without multiple levels of changes. It is like a flowing river that is continuous, like a well-tuned piano, with continuous waves of sound. Its musicality does not focus on the rhythm of the pronunciation of the words, but on the smoothness and lightness of the sentences. The author did not deliberately carve it out, but just "wrote it casually and honestly", using vivid and vivid spoken language, Express the poetic feeling without restraint, and the rhythm of the language and the rhythm of the emotion will naturally match, making the poem achieve symmetry and harmony.
The use of overlapping words in "Hurry" also gives its language a rhythmic beauty.
The sun is "slanting", it moves "gently and pretty", "I" rotates "in a daze", time goes "hurriedly", it spans "quickly and cleverly"... The use of these repeated words, The poem not only achieves visual authenticity, but also achieves auditory authenticity, that is, on the one hand, it depicts the appearance of the passage of time, and on the other hand, it writes the sound of time moving forward. At the same time, the poet describes objective things on the one hand, and expresses subjective feelings on the other. The sound of reality causes the poet's emotional fluctuations, which are expressed through the sound of language, and the emotions and scenery are naturally integrated. We can also see that the poet's repeated words are naturally and evenly distributed in each sentence to show its distant and distant rhythm, which is consistent with the author's subtle emotional fluctuations.
The use of repetition is also a common method used in prose poetry to maintain its musical characteristics. The so-called "saying it again and again" not only shows the depth of the poet's emotion, but also adds to the melody of the poem. "Only wandering, nothing but hurrying; in the rush of more than eight thousand days, what else is left but wandering?" Words such as "wandering" and "hurrying" appear repeatedly, and a feeling of resentment echoes repeatedly. "What traces have I left? Have I ever left traces like gossamers?" The changes in numbers in sentences with the same meaning advance the emotions layer by layer, showing neat beauty in the unevenness. The repetition of the conclusion repeatedly strengthens the main theme of the work and depicts the ups and downs of the poet's emotions. The use of fuda and repeated chanting have the effect of singing three sighs.
The structure of "Hurry" is also very simple. The eleven questions are clues to the ups and downs of emotions. Questions are asked without answering, and they float by, which not only shows the smoothness of the work, but also the jumping nature of the poem's mood, allowing the image to unfold quickly. In order to show the jumping nature of emotions, general poetry often differs from the general syntactic structure of language and omits some sentence components regardless of grammatical restrictions. This is not the case with prose poetry. It basically uses prose sentence patterns, and the author's emotional jumps are generally not as wide as free poetry. But it is also different from prose. There are gaps between sentences and paragraphs, which are connected by the author's thoughts. The questions in "Hurry" are asked but not answered, and the answers are implicit. This can not only inspire the readers' imagination, arouse deep thinking, and show its implicit beauty, but also the rapid flow of the collaborator's emotions, showing the poetic mood. The rhythm is beautiful.