(Tang) He
I have been away from my hometown for many years, and I have been half-dead recently.
Only in front of Jinghu Lake, the spring breeze does not change the waves of the past.
In the third year of Tianbao (744), He resigned and retired to his hometown of Yongxing, Yuezhou (now Xiaoshan, Zhejiang). At that time, he was eighty-six years old, and he had left his hometown for more than fifty years in middle age. Life is easy to get old, the world is vicissitudes, and my heart is filled with emotion.
After the poet got home, he learned about the personnel changes in his hometown through conversations with relatives and friends. While sighing for a long time, he could not help sighing about the impermanence of personnel. "Leaving my hometown for many years" is equivalent to the last song "Leaving home to be the boss when I was young". The poet never tires of repeating the same meaning, just because all feelings are caused by decades of exile. So the next sentence is to dig out the discussion about personnel. The sentence "Recently, people have passed half" seems abstract and objective, but it actually contains many specific contents that deeply touch the poet's feelings. The sigh of "finding half our friends dead" and all kinds of sighs caused by the sinking of relatives and friends are included. It's too numerous to mention, and you have to go in a cage.
After three or four sentences, the poet's eyes shifted from personnel changes to the description of natural scenery. Jinghu Lake is located at the northern foot of Huiji Mountain in Shaoxing, Zhejiang, more than 300 miles from Fiona Fang. He's former residence is next to Jinghu Lake. Although it has been decades since I left Jinghu Lake, the water waves in Jinghu Lake are still rippling in the surrounding spring scenery. By the independent mirror lake, a feeling of "things are different from people" naturally came to my mind, so I wrote a poem "Only the mirror lake in front of the door, the spring breeze will not change the old waves". The poet compares "semi-killing" with "unchanging", further develops the meaning of "semi-killing" with "only", and emphasizes that almost all things in the past have changed except the lake wave. From the direct expression of one or two sentences to the writing and discussion of three or four sentences of scenery, it seems to be idle and irrelevant. In fact, this is a clever contrast, which only strengthens the feelings to be expressed from the opposite side. Under the background of continuous lake waves, the feelings of personnel are getting deeper and deeper.