Ode to a Wanderer is a five-character poem written by Meng Jiao, a poet in the Tang Dynasty, which belongs to the ancient style. The whole poem consists of six sentences and three crosses. By recalling a seemingly ordinary scene of mending clothes before he left, he highlighted and praised the greatness and selflessness of maternal love, and expressed the poet's gratitude for maternal love and deep love and respect for his mother. This poem is sincere and natural and has been widely read for thousands of years.
A traveler's song
(Tang) Meng Jiao
The mother used the needle and thread in her hand to make clothes for her long-distance son.
Before leaving, I had a stitch for fear that my son would come back late and his clothes would be damaged.
But how much love an inch of grass has is three times!
The first two sentences, "thread in the hands of a loving mother makes clothes for her wayward boy's body", closely link "loving mother" and "wandering son" with two very common things, and write the flesh-and-blood feelings of mother and child. In three or four sentences, "She mended carefully and thoroughly, fearing that the delay would make him go home late", through the loving mother to the homeless.
A traveler's song
The action of making clothes and psychological depiction deepen this kind of flesh-and-blood love. The mother sewed thousands of stitches for fear that her son would "delay" and could not come back. Great maternal love is naturally revealed through the details of daily life. The first four sentences are very simple, without any modification, but the image of loving mother is really touching.
The last two sentences, "Only an inch of grass has a little affection, and three wisps of spring scenery are appreciated", are the author's heartfelt eulogies of love for his mother. These two sentences adopt the traditional contrast method: children are like grass, and maternal love is like spring sunshine. How can a child repay a mother's love in case? The contrast and metaphor of images entrust the son's heartfelt love for his loving mother.
This poem artistically reproduces the ordinary and great beauty of human nature that people feel, so it has won strong praise from countless readers for thousands of years. Until the Qing Dynasty, two poets in Liyang sang such a poem: "My father's books are full of laundry, and the bus is full of me" (Shi Qisheng's "Writing about my bosom"), "How many tears I always shed, dyed my hands and sewed clothes" (Peng Gui's "Visiting my mother for the first time"), which shows that this poem left a deep impression on future generations.