To the Sun is more than 400 lines long, which is the longest poem by Ai Qing in 1930s. It consists of nine independent chapters that echo each other. Although there are many different scenes and characters in this poem, they are not mainly narrative. The author still writes in a simple, frank and personalized lyrical way, and takes the emotion of the first person "I" (the author himself) as the main line and lifeline of the whole poem from beginning to end. At that time, Wuhan, as an important town in the Anti-Japanese National Liberation War, was vigorously carrying out mass activities to defend Wuhan. Ai Qing immediately plunged into the real world, which showed the determination of national awakening and struggle. The passion and desire for creation in my heart and the intensity of combining with reality have obviously reached a burning level. So the poet's long-suppressed feelings broke out like a fire: fatigue, painful memories and persistent pursuit, which had been tormented in the long and tortuous road of life for many years, broke out together with tears in the poet's eyes and boiling blood in his heart. As a pious and young reader of To the Sun, I am still excited to reread this poem that nourished my heart, and I can still deeply understand the lofty and strong feelings of the poet when he wrote this long poem. This may be what Eliot said, "Historical consciousness contains an understanding, not only understanding the past, but also understanding the existence of the past." Over the past decades, there have been many sensational poems in China's poetry circles, which often lose their "existence" in less than a few years. Most of these short-lived poems belong to works lacking artistic sincerity and strong utility. In recent ten years, there have been many such short poems. To the Sun can be a poem that can stand the strict deletion of history precisely because it can make today's readers understand the existence of history and profound life enlightenment.
The poet quoted six lines from the old work The Sun as the prelude to this long poem, which is often ignored by readers and literary critics, but I think it has a far-reaching influence that cannot be ignored. It is this 1937 spring "sun" that the author predicted the charming scene of the coming sunrise: "Let life breathe/let tall trees dance for it/let rivers run towards it with crazy songs." "When it came, I heard/the insects and pupae that had been stung in winter were going underground/people were talking loudly in the square ... so my heart was torn open by the hand of fire/the stale soul was abandoned by the river/I was sure that human beings were reborn." "To the Sun" is a celebration of the joy of human rebirth from suffering. In other words, Ai Qing wrote about the feeling of sunrise in Ran Ran, China as predicted in his mind. The six-line poem quoted from the sun pushes the sense of time and space and the whole plot of this long poem to a far-reaching realm. The author was less than 30 years old at that time, and dared to touch this ethereal and eternal theme about human destiny, which fully demonstrated his confidence in creation. This self-confidence stems from the author's strong perception of the real world. Whether it is the experience of life or the cultivation of art, at that time, it has been bred into a mature artistic creation potential in the author's life. Writing this kind of poem involving the eternal destiny of mankind often becomes vague and mysterious. Or take another simple way and construct a dazzling aperture with the logical language of argumentative writing. However, the author's mentality of "facing the sun" is not a superficial catering to reality, but a continuation and revelation of inner feelings. From the first chapter "He Appeared", the author abandoned the old rules, making the situation of the poem directly close to and cut into the reader's emotional world, so that the feelings of the reader and the author can be exchanged, and the enthusiastic poem is like a voice full of friendship for the reader:
"I got up-/.../struggled for a long time/propped up my upper body/opened my eyes/looked for the horizon/.../My body/sore body/stayed deep/tired of running last night/.../I opened the window/used the prisoner's eyes for the first time/saw the dawn/-this real dawn."
These sounds from the chest are simple and symbolic, without any exaggeration or exaggeration. Pain has become a thing of the past, a plain confession, which makes readers feel the heavy and strong lyrical charm of history from the concise situation of poetry. The residual pain in your life only means that you have to struggle for a long time to stand up. These physical and psychological feelings that anyone can really feel can actually arouse readers' association and thinking, thus making plain poetry have great tension and gravity. In fact, this joy of waking up with tears, this joy of life interwoven with the pain of last night and the dawn, can never be considered as belonging to this poet who was once a prisoner's own review of life. This should be regarded as the voice of a child who is fighting with the sons and daughters of Qian Qian to save the country's danger and destiny. This is how I feel about this poem.