1. Li Shangyin’s untitled love poems
Li Shangyin is a famous poet in the Tang Dynasty of my country, with more than 600 poems currently in existence. According to Wu Qiao, a poetry critic in the early Qing Dynasty, among the poets of the Tang Dynasty, there were only four poets, Li Bai, Du Fu, Han Yu and Li Shangyin. Among them, Li and Du opened up the magnificent atmosphere of the Tang Dynasty, the vast life of the era and the suffering of the people's livelihood. Han Yu pioneered a new realm of poetry that regarded non-poetry as poetry and non-beauty as beautiful poetry. Li Shangyin's achievements, in today's terms, are more modern consciousness and the discovery of people's inner world. This is a brand new field of poetry that has not been discovered by predecessors.
Of course, Wu Qiao’s original words are not like this. I just made a little translation, and the meaning is still correct. However, Li Shangyin's poems are more difficult to understand than the poems of other poets in the Tang Dynasty because they are oriented towards the deep and subtle emotions in his heart, coupled with the era in which he lived. They have a strong sentimental mood, hazy artistic conception and symbolic color, especially It's his untitled poem.
Li Shangyin is famous for his untitled poems. According to the poems collected in "Explanation of Li Shangyin's Poems", it is basically certain that there are 15 poems named after the poet when he was writing. However, although there are many poems with titles, those titles are mostly words in the verses and cannot express the meaning of the whole poem. Therefore, they can also be counted as untitled poems. It seems that Li Shangyin's untitled poems should total more than 100. One of the unique characteristics of his untitled poems is that it is difficult to rationally analyze the specific meaning expressed in the poems, and one can only appreciate the hazy beauty of the poems perceptually. For example, this is the case with Li Shangyin's masterpiece "Jin Se".
There are fifty strings of brocade strings for no reason, each string and one column is reminiscent of the past.
Zhuang Sheng was fascinated by butterflies in his morning dream, and looked forward to the emperor's spring heart with cuckoos.
The moon in the sea has tears, and the sun in Lantian is warm and the jade produces smoke.
This feeling can be recalled later, but it was already at a loss.
There have always been different explanations about the purpose of the poem "Jin Se". Just "Zhuang Sheng's dawn dream is obsessed with butterflies, and the emperor's spring heart is entrusted with cuckoos. The moon in the sea has tears, and the sun in the blue field is warm and the jade produces smoke" uses four allusions. Jin Renyuan Haowen once said in his "Thirty Quatrains on Poetry": "A piece of brocade can solve people's difficulties." Although it is difficult to explain rationally, "Jin Se" has conquered many people emotionally and can easily arouse readers' feelings and affection.
Why did Li Shangyin deliberately hide his true intentions in his writing? This starts from the time he lived in, the family background he was born in, and the life experience he experienced. It is these factors that created Li Shangyin's tragic character, temperament and mentality.
About 812 AD, Li Shangyin was born in Yingyang, Henan. Not long after his birth, the short-lived "Yuanhe Zhongxing" situation in the late Tang Dynasty came to an end. It was replaced by the separatist rule of vassal towns, the exclusive power of eunuchs, crony struggles, and internal and external troubles often intruded by ethnic minorities such as Uighurs and Dangxiang. The Li and Tang dynasties were heading towards an unstoppable trend. decline. Li Shangyin's famous poem "The sunset is infinitely beautiful, but it's almost dusk" can be said to be the best footnote.
The royal family that Li Shangyin often talked about did not help much. The ancestors of the Li family have always been petty officials since the generation of their great ancestor, and they have been orphans and widowers for several generations. When he was 10 years old, Li Shangyin's father Li Si passed away in the Zhejiang shogunate. In order to make ends meet, the mother and son had no choice but to "serve books and sell grunge", struggling to survive.
Therefore, as an adult, Li Shangyin longed to be an official and honor his ancestors, but due to the difficult times, his official luck was not smooth. As he said in the poem "Jin Se", "There are bright pearls in the sea." "Tears, the warm sunshine in Lantian creates smoke on jade." It means that beautiful jade is like a lost pearl in the ocean, and no one appreciates it. The poet is lamenting that his talent has been abandoned, and he has suffered a lot in his life. On the other hand, his early experiences also shaped his hesitant, aloof and sensitive character.
Of course, experience and personality factors are not the fundamental reasons why Li Shangyin’s poems are obscure and difficult to understand. He also wrote a lot of political poems and epic poems, which are relatively clear. On the other hand, the more than 100 untitled poems mainly involve the secret world in his heart, which makes it difficult to see the true face. Many people throughout the ages have made a lot of speculations about it. Among them, Su Xuelin in modern times was particularly bold. He said that Li Shangyin had four short-lived and bumpy but soul-crushing emotional experiences in his life, "which are rare adventures among literati throughout the ages. The first tragedy in the history of love."