Far Altair
---selected from "Nineteen Ancient Poems"
Far Altair is a Han woman in the bright river.
The slender hands are used to make tricks.
I can’t make up my mind all day long, crying like rain.
The river is clear and shallow, but how far away it is!
The water is full of water, and the pulse is speechless.
The key point is that the greatness of a poem lies in the fact that in the process of being sung, the connotation of its text is continuously expanded. In this poem, "Yingying is in the water (jiàn), and the pulse is speechless." is known as the most beautiful verse among the nineteen ancient poems. The reason is that the words "yingying" and "pulse" are constantly given beautiful connotations in the singing. Let's first look at the word "ying". Its original meaning is that a person is standing in a bathtub and the water is overflowing. In this poem, the original intention is that the river overflowing on both sides separated the two lovers. But whenever people nowadays read the word "yingying", they often think of a woman's beautiful eyes filled with tears or full of affection. The original meaning of the word "pulse" is the blood flow network that distributes blood throughout the body according to the body's mechanism. The original meaning of pulse in this poem is to feel the beating of one's own pulse quietly. During the singing process, the pulse turned into an affectionate gaze. So poetry is the most beautiful language in the world!
This poem is related to the story of the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl. It is said that there lived a beautiful girl on the east side of the Milky Way. This girl was a weaver girl who worked hard every day to weave brocade clothes. Make the sky very beautiful. To the west of the Milky Way lives a morning cowherd who is responsible for grazing the cattle in the Heavenly Palace. Both of them worked conscientiously and won the favor of the Jade Emperor. So the Jade Emperor gave the two of them the gift of marriage. Unexpectedly, after the two got married, they fell in love so much that they gave up their jobs. This made the Jade Emperor very angry, so he sent a magpie to convey the order to the two. In order not to delay their work, the two could only see each other once every seven days. Unexpectedly, the magpie sent the wrong order, saying that the Jade Emperor ordered the two of them to meet only once a year on Chinese Valentine's Day. The two received the order and had no choice but to reluctantly separate. The Jade Emperor was very angry when he learned that the magpie had delivered the wrong order. In order to punish the confused messenger, he asked the magpies to build a magpie bridge on the Tianhe River every Chinese Valentine's Day so that the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl could meet each other.
It is said that every year on the Chinese Valentine's Day, magpies become bald because the feathers on their heads were trampled off by the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl when they were building the Magpie Bridge.
Little common sense about literature:
Since the Western Han Dynasty, although the main source of poetry was folk songs, literati gradually participated in the creation of poetry, and their creations were based on imitation of Yuefu Mainly folk songs. By the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, the five-character poems created by literati had become very mature and showed extremely high artistic value. Among them, "Nineteen Ancient Poems" is the most complete collection. "Nineteen Ancient Poems" is a link between the past and the following. It inherits the great realism spirit of "The Book of Songs" and opens up the glorious era of five-character poetry in the Wei, Jin and Six Dynasties.