Red beans from the South --- Wang Wei has a poem "Red Beans" or "Lovesickness", "Red beans are born in the South. How many branches will they grow when spring comes? I hope you will pick more of them. This is the most lovesick thing." This poem by Wang Wei "Love" may be the most widely circulated love poem in China. It has been recited by people from ancient times to the present, and even babbling children can recite it now. Red beans were also called Xiangsi Zi in ancient times. Wang Wei's poem was also titled "Xiangsi Zi". Many people have never seen the red bean in the poem. It is indeed a tree growing in the south. In the Han Dynasty, this tree was called acacia tree. The knots of the acacia tree are red and black, bright and smooth, like works of art carved out of red coral. Li Shizhen's "Compendium of Materia Medica" has the following record about red beans: "Acacia seeds are round and red. Therefore, there is an old saying: In the past, someone died beside him. His wife missed him and cried under the tree and died, so he was named after him." This record , not only depicts the shape of red beans, but also explains the origin of the acacia tree. It was a woman who missed her dead husband under the tree and died of grief. This tree was called the acacia tree. More than 20 years ago, I saw a hundred-year-old acacia tree in Wuyi Mountain, picked a handful of red beans, and wrote a poem about it.
In fact, Wang Wei was not the only ancient poet to write about red beans. Wen Tingyun has written red bean poems, such as his "Newly Added Sound to Willow Branches": "Lamps are lit at the bottom of the well, and candles are deep in the dark, and the master is always playing chess. The red beans are placed on the exquisite dice. Do you know that the lovesickness is deep in the bones?" This is also a poem. It is the first poem about the love between a man and a woman. In the poem, it is said that red beans are embedded in the dice, which evokes the sigh of longing for each other.
Wang Wei's "Lovesickness" uses the image of red beans as a symbol of love, and the meaning ends there. Later people wrote red beans to express the pain of missing each other in two different places. For example: "There are red beans soaked in orchid paste, and I remember them every time I hold them" (Han Xie's "Yuhe"), "The red beans are unbearable to look at, and my eyes are filled with tears of lovesickness" (Niu Xiji's "Shengchazi"), "Half-dressed red beans, each of them "Acacia is thin" (Huang Tingjian's "Red Lips"), "Thousands of lovesick red beans are sent to one person (Liu Guo's "Jiangchengzi"), "Looking at the red beans in the rain, I will drip all the lovesickness blood for you" (Zhao Chongqi). "Returning to the Morning Joy"), "After several lovesicknesses, all the red beans are sold, and the blue silk is empty" (Wang Yisun's "Three Shumei·Cherry"), these poems contain a higher level of meaning than Wang Wei's poems. /p>
Wang Wei's "Lovesickness" was often used to express thoughts about the homeland and introduce new artistic conceptions in the chants of the ancients. This poem by Wang Wei was sent to the famous court at that time. It is recorded in "Yunxi Youyi" written by Fan Xuan of the Tang Dynasty that Li Guinian, a performer, sang "Red beans are born in the South" on his way to exile during the Anshi Rebellion. After singing in the Year of the Turtle, I suddenly felt extremely stuffy and my left ear felt slightly warm. My wife couldn't bear the funeral. After four days, she was dead. "Why does "Lovesickness" make people so sad? It's not because of love. During the war, the scenes in the poem made the exiles emotional, worried about the king and the country, and even miserable and depressing.
Such red bean sentiments, At the end of the Ming Dynasty and the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, there was another outbreak. At that time, the red beans in the poems expressed the mournful thoughts of the Ming Dynasty survivors about their homeland. Qian Qianyi wrote the most poems about this kind of red beans. His collection of poems includes " "The First Collection of Hongdou Poems", "The Second Collection of Hongdou Poems", and "The Third Collection of Hongdou Poems". Most of these red bean poems are written with sadness and anger, such as the eighth poem of "Fourteen Quatrains on the Farewell Play of Wang Lang, the Singer of the Spring Festival in Xin Mao" : "But if you fall into exile in Huxiang, you will be stained with red beans. Don't sing Tianbao's desolate song to the Chang'an banquet master. "The so-called "Tianbao Desolate Song" in the poem is the red bean poem that Li Guinian sang when he was in exile. He used ancient metaphors to describe the present, chanting red beans and nostalgia for his homeland. The poet's thoughts are self-evident.