From: Tang Bai Juyi's "Looking at Wheat Cutting"
Original poem:
Tube cutting wheat
Tang Dynasty: Bai Juyi
The Tian family has less leisure in the month, and people are twice as busy in May.
In the evening, the south wind rises and the wheat turns yellow.
A woman's husband is hungry and her child is pregnant with pot pulp.
Go with Tian Xiang. Ding Zhuang is in Nangang.
Summer is steaming and rustic, and the back is burning.
I don't know about the heat, but I regret the long summer.
Another poor woman, holding her son,
Grab the ear with your right hand and hang the basket with your left arm.
Listening to his words of concern is very sad.
My family's taxes are gone, so I can take this to satisfy my hunger.
What are my advantages today? I have never been involved in farming and mulberry.
There are 300 stones in the land, and there is surplus grain in the year of Yan.
I am ashamed to read this in private, and I can't forget it every day.
Explanation:
Farmers have no leisure all year round, and they are even busier in May.
A warm south wind blew at night, and the wheat in the field was covered with ridges and ripe yellow.
Women carry food in baskets, and children carry jars full of water and soup.
Men accompany them to deliver meals in the fields and work in Nanshan.
The feet were smoked by the heat on the ground, and the back was baked by the hot sun.
Exhausted, don't feel hot, just cherish summer.
I saw a poor peasant woman, holding her child and following others.
He held the picked ears of wheat in his right hand and hung a broken basket in his left arm.
Listening to her talk about her family made everyone feel sorry for her.
In order to pay taxes, I sold the land and ate my hunger by picking up wheat ears.
What are my advantages now? I have never raised or picked mulberry trees.
The salary is 300 stone a year, and there will be surplus grain at the end of the year.
I am ashamed to think of these things, and I will never forget them day and night.
Dragon: the same as "ridge", here refers to the ridge where crops are planted in farmland, and here refers to wheat fields in general. H: shoulders, shoulders. Food: the food in the basket. Tian Xiang: Deliver meals to people who work in the fields. It refers to farmers who are working.
Expand the topic of the data:
This poem describes the busy farming scene in the wheat harvest season, criticizes the exorbitant taxes and levies that caused people's poverty, and feels deeply guilty that the poet himself can have plenty of food and clothing without virtue labor, showing the humanitarian spirit of a feudal official with conscience.
The poet's achievements:
In 822, Bai Juyi was appointed as the secretariat of Hangzhou. During his tenure in Hangzhou, he saw that the farmland around Hangzhou was often threatened by drought, but officials refused to use the water from the West Lake to irrigate the farmland. So he eliminated many obstacles and criticisms, mobilized migrant workers to heighten the lake embankment, built dams and sluices, increased the capacity of the lake, and solved the irrigation problem of hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland between Qiantang (now Hangzhou) and Yan Guan (now Haining).
Bai Juyi also stipulated that when the farmland is not irrigated, the large and small sluices and Doumen of the West Lake should be closed in time; If there is water leakage, it should be repaired in time. Bai Juyi also organized the masses to repair six wells dug by Li Bi, the secretariat of Hangzhou, in Qiantangmen and Yongjinmen in the Tang Dynasty, which improved the water use conditions of residents.
Bai Juyi not only left nearly 3,000 poems, but also put forward a whole set of poetic theories. He compared poetry to a fruit tree and put forward the viewpoint of "root feeling, Miao character, Watson and true meaning" (nine books are the same). He believes that "emotion" is the fundamental condition for writing poetry, and "those who move people should not care about emotion first" (nine books at the end of Yuan Dynasty). The emergence of emotion is helpful and tied up with current politics.