Source: Seven Songs of Military Service (IV) by Wang Changling in Tang Dynasty.
There is a dark snow-capped mountain in Qinghai, with long white clouds and a lonely city looking at Yumenguan. Yellow sand wears golden armor in hundreds of battles, but the loulan is not returned.
Interpretation: Qinghai Lake is covered with dark clouds, and the continuous snow-capped mountains are bleak. Yumen, the ancient city of frontier fortress, is a grand pass, thousands of miles away, facing each other from afar. The soldiers guarding the border have been through many battles, their armor is worn out, their ambitions are immortal, and they will never return to their hometown until they defeat the invading enemy.
Appreciation: The first two sentences mentioned three place names. Snow Mountain is Qilian Mountain in the south of Hexi Corridor. Qinghai and Yumenguan are thousands of miles apart, but they appear on the same picture, so these two sentences have various interpretations. Some people say that the first sentence is looking forward, and the next sentence is looking back at home. This is very strange. Qinghai and Snow Mountain are in front, and Yumenguan is behind, so the hometown that the lyric hero looks back at should be the Western Regions west of Yumenguan, not the Han soldiers, but Hu Bing. On the other hand, the second sentence is an inverted sentence of "Looking at Yumenguan, an isolated city", and the object of looking at it is "the dark snow mountain in Qinghai". There are two misunderstandings here: one is to interpret "looking from afar" as "looking from afar", and the other is to misunderstand the general description of the northwest border region as what the lyric hero sees. The former misunderstanding is due to the latter misunderstanding. The poet accurately grasped the rhythm of the soldiers guarding the border and endowed them with appropriate colors and light, which made the artistic picture of the poem magnificent and open, the artistic conception tragic and profound, and vividly reflected the spiritual characteristics of people living in the prosperous Tang Dynasty. An important ideological feature of the excellent frontier poems in the prosperous Tang Dynasty is that while expressing the lofty sentiments and ambitions of the frontier guards, they do not shy away from the hardships of war. This article is an obvious example. It can be said that three or four sentences are not empty and superficial lyricism, but only one or two sentences of rich environmental description are needed. The high unity of typical environment and characters' feelings is a prominent advantage of Wang Changling's quatrains, which is also clearly reflected in this paper.