When your eyes are sore, the lights are still sitting in the dark and the waves are beating against the wind.
One of the most effective characteristics of fragmentation is value aggregation. Because the fragment involves something beyond itself, it often has a certain fullness and strength. It goes without saying that the remaining fragments have some special powers, which cannot be obtained by this alone. From this, we get an aesthetics about silence, about what has been said, what has been said and lost, and what has not been completely said. However, in poetry, the aesthetics of silence can only be expressed through words. In its most basic form, silence aesthetics has no essential connection with fragments. It needs a character who doesn't talk, or a character who stops talking before saying what he should say, and a narrator who pays attention to this fact. We found this sinking power in Bai Juyi's pipa: the female musician stopped after playing a song: "Don't have secret love, tell more in silence than they tell in their voices." Bai Juyi limited things to "this time" and told us a basic truth: its strength comes not from itself, but from its atmosphere.
The poet created a wordless eloquence for himself, because he couldn't think of a better way, except to stop where he could continue writing. In poetry, it is characterized by discontinuity, fracture and ellipsis in the process of evolution. Silence can express the sudden change of mood, theme, background or intention, and the reader's attention is accurately attracted by the quoted but unsent content. But the most common thing in poetry is the silence at the end of the poem, which breaks up with the words before falling into the stereotype that the end of the poem is easy to fall into. This silence provides a useful form for the poet, so that he can regard the incompleteness of the poem as a fragment from the life world and explore its deeper meaning.
The written poem is a fragment that enriches the life world, and this commitment is strongest in the impromptu poem. Here, the silence at the end itself is a moral, that is, the promise that feelings will continue to develop after reading the poem. Bai Juyi's Reading Nine Poems in a Boat is an example of this kind of poem.
First of all, we should realize that this little poem is really written for Yuan Zhen. If Bai Juyi showed it to our later readers, it seems that it was only an afterthought, and this poem was not regarded as a work of art, but because of this, when we listened to his conversation with Yuan Zhen, we learned about his relationship with his best friend. What Bai Juyi told Yuan Zhen was not so much a real moment as a fragment in the long river of time. This poem has various narrative elements, but it has no internal integrity of narrative; Its two ends are open-leading to his life, their relationship before that, and Yuan Zhen's poems and his poems collected by Bai Juyi will be collected by Yuan Zhen. It is actually a fragment of a longer continuity; If he hadn't written it this way, Yuan Zhen might have misunderstood his meaning. Bai Juyi sent this poem as a fragment to make Yuan Zhen understand that he would continue to think after reading or writing it.
As an art, one of the most unique attributes of China's literature is the fragmented form: the works are permeated and connected with the life world before and after poetry writing. Poetry also entered its readers' life in the same way. Yuan Zhen and later readers read Bai Juyi's poem, which was written on the basis of reading Yuan Zhen's poems. Yuan Zhen had already read it earlier. We can feel that the modality of poetry continues to develop, so we have this modality because we understand how the modality of Yuan Zhen's poetry continues to develop. Perhaps the most mysterious aspect of this continuity appeared in the new silence when Bai Juyi stopped reading and listened attentively. At this time, only the sound of water waves beating against the ship's side stopped, and at the same time, our reading stopped, and we listened to the sound coming from our new silence. This special poem teaches us how to read it and how to read all the poems. It transcends the timeliness of poetry and points out the life world around it and the inner emotional world. No one told us what Yuan Zhen's poems said, and no one told us how Bai Juyi felt when he read them. What we see is only a superficial fragment, but this fragment is enough for us to continue to move towards the whole.
He unfolded the poem, read it out loud, and read it one by one under the lamp until he read "Poetry is exhausted" and "My eyes hurt". Like the poem at the end, he can feel the power of this poem here. Something connects us with the material world. In the physical world, we always meet the end and limit: poetry is at the end, the lamp oil is running out, and the eye's endurance is almost at the top. However, every time it comes to an end, every time it reaches the critical point of the limit, it is transformed into a continuity. He put out the light, but it was dawn in the east. He turned off the light and had a rest, but he didn't rest: he sat in the dark. His reading stopped, but the sound of water waves still rattled.
The last poem is not so much "emotional language" as "environmental language". If Bai Juyi uses "I am very sad to hear ..." in this last poem, then what is before us will not be like a famous quatrain, but just one of hundreds of sad quatrains in this era. In the present form, the last sentence provides an incomplete state. It is omitted, and in the omission, it looks for a person who is listening with a special psychological state. It throws our attention away from itself and into the feeling at the moment. It is just a "fragment", just a fragment of the whole situation; The last sentence is the concretization of continuity in form, just like the continuous beating of water waves on the ship's side is the visualization of continuity, and Bai Juyi's sitting in the dark is an action to provide evidence for his friends who are still thinking about him. Bai Juyi didn't tell Yuan Zhen all the situation at that time, all the tangible details and his mental state. So what he sent out was just a fragment, letting readers know that he was a fragment and guiding readers' thoughts away from itself.
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This poem was written on the boat on the way to Jiangzhou's relegation house. In the tenth year of Yuanhe (8 15), Bai Juyi was demoted to Jiangzhou Sima for offending powerful people. Five months ago, Yuan Zhen was demoted to Tongzhou Sima. In adversity, he missed his best friend with the same fate. This poem describes in detail the touching scene of reading Yuan's poems under the light of a ship, as well as the mood and complicated thoughts caused by it, and expresses deep nostalgia for friends. The first three sentences of the poem use the word "light" one after another, which deepens the feelings layer by layer: reading with the light on at night shows yearning; Read that the light is broken, indicating that it has been a long time to miss; Sitting in the dark with lights out, showing the deep pain of missing. The ending of this poem is profound and thought-provoking. The stormy waves not only hinted at the sinister political environment, but also expressed the poet's anger, which was as difficult to calm down as this rolling wave.