Meaning: During the Qingming Festival, the peach red and plum blossoms bloom like a smiling face. The overgrown graves in the fields were desolate. The rolling spring thunder awakens the hibernating dragons, snakes and hundreds of insects, and the timely spring rain nourishes the soft vegetation on the suburban plains.
In ancient times, there were Qi people who went to tombs to beg for sacrificial food to show off to their wives and concubines, and there was also a Jie Zitui who refused to become an official and was burned to death. Whether they are poor and stupid or virtuous and honest, who knows today? What's left now is nothing but tangled weeds.
From Huang Tingjian of the Song Dynasty, the original text: During the Qingming festival, the peaches and plums smile, but the wild fields and graves only produce sorrow. Thunder shakes the sky and earth, dragons and snakes sting, and rain falls on the grass and trees in the countryside. People beg for sacrifices for their arrogant concubines, and noble men are burned to death for unjust marquises. The wise and foolish have known who they are for thousands of years, and their eyes are full of basil and grass.
Extended information:
Creative background:
Huang Tingjian's "Qingming" was written during the "Yuanyou Party Struggle" in the late Northern Song Dynasty (1086-1094) , because when Wang Anshi carried out the reform, he vigorously implemented the New Deal measures and went his own way, thus forming the "new faction" that supported Wang Anshi's reform and the "old faction" that opposed the New Deal. The old school is also known as the "Yuanyou Party members", including the great writers Su Shi, Sima Guang and others. Huang Tingjian was also slightly implicated because of his good relationship with Su Shi.
Appreciation:
A lot of contrasts are used in the poem. The first couplet is "the laughter of peaches and plums" versus "the sorrow of the grave"; the chin couplet is "animals dormant" versus "the growth of vegetation"; the neck couplet is It is the contrast between "shameless beggar" and "loyal hermit". The contrast is sharp and arouses people's thinking; the poet in the last couplet expresses his emotion that no matter whether he is a sage or a fool, he will be covered with loess in the end.
The poet contrasts the vitality in nature with the inescapable fate of death in the world, showing his negative and nihilistic thoughts, expressing his lament for the impermanence of life and his anger at social injustice.