Farewell Cambridge
Xu Zhimo
Gently I leave, just as lightly I came;
I gently leave beckoning, making farewell to the clouds in the western sky.
The golden willows by the river are the bride in the sunset;
The beautiful shadows in the ripples of light are rippling in my heart.
The green banana-plants on the soft mud sway gracefully under the water;
In the soft waves of the Cam River, I would willingly be a waterweed!
The pool under the shade of elm trees is not a clear spring.
It is a rainbow from the sky crushed among the floating algae, depositing rainbow-like dreams.
Looking for a dream? Take a punt and slowly row upstream to where the grass is greener,
Load a whole boat of starlight, and sing in the colorful starlight.
But I can't sing, silence is the shengxiao of parting;
The summer insects are also silent for me, silence is tonight's Cambridge.
Quietly I left, just as quietly as I came;
I waved my sleeves and did not take away a single cloud.
Poetry Review]: Seizing the Eternity of the Moment - Text Analysis of "Farewell Cambridge Again"
"Farewell Cambridge Again" is one of Xu Zhimo's most influential works.
This is a short poem that expresses the beauty of nature and the author's mood. The poet is noble and praises nature. The description of the scenery in the poem is true and delicate, which shows that Cambridge has left a deep imprint on the poet's heart. Not only that, but Cambridge is the poet's ideal. He said: "It was Kang Qiao who taught me to open my eyes, my thirst for knowledge was stimulated by Kang Qiao, and my self-awareness was the embryo that Kang Qiao gave me." However, China is devastated, an era of reversal of right and wrong, and difficult times. The poor people's livelihood gradually shattered the poet's Cambridge ideal. This poem was written when the poet returned to England in 1928 on his way home. Revisiting the old place, the past scenery evokes the author's memories of the past, and the departure is imminent, how can the poet's sensitive heart not be filled with sad ripples! The theme of this poem is to describe the natural beauty of Cambridge and express the author's lingering attachment to Cambridge and his inner melancholy.
Xu Zhimo became popular for his unique poems expressing his soul. His poems are light and elegant, graceful and free, integrating the beauty of artistic conception, architecture, syllables and painting. At the same time, he integrates Chinese and foreign poetic arts to pursue an "innocent poetic feeling". These can be seen in "Farewell Cambridge".
This poem has a beautiful artistic conception, deep and implicit emotions, and exquisite and unique poetic thoughts. The poet takes the natural scenery of Cambridge as the direct object of his lyrical expression, and adopts an indirect lyrical method to embody emotions in the scenery, and the people and scenery interact with each other. Reading through the whole poem, there is no place that is not describing the scenery, and no place is not containing the poet's faint sadness of parting. The first stanza of the poem: "Gently, I leave, as gently as I came; I gently wave my hand to bid farewell to the clouds in the western sky." The writing seems free and easy, but in fact it is helpless and melancholy: the poet knows that Cambridge's The beautiful scenery lasts forever and cannot be taken away. What changes is people's mood. What is lost is the dream of the past. What is taken away is only the attachment and sorrow that seems to be light and solid. Next, the poet uses metaphors to regard the golden willow as the bride that stirs up his heart. He is even willing to be a waterweed in the Cam River, "swaying gracefully under the water." In the fourth stanza, does the clear spring reflect the rainbow in the sky, or does the rainbow in the sky merge into the clear spring? The artistic conception of "moonlight is like water and water is like sky" is broad and distant, just like the poet's faint but ubiquitous sadness. That splendid dream like a rainbow has long been crushed and settled in it. The poet softly chanted: "Maybe it is a kind of mourning for the ideal of Cambridge in the past?" Emotions continue to rise to a climax in every artistic conception. If the first four stanzas of the poem describe natural scenes, the fifth stanza recalls human activities. The poet seemed to see himself in the past, wandering the grass and looking for dreams in Cambridge. How high-spirited he was at that time. The poet in reality couldn't help but sing too - but he couldn't sing because he had to say goodbye. When we parted, we were filled with reluctance and melancholy. Only silence is tonight's Cambridge. The poet's state of mind is like a fully-stretched bow. Before the arrow leaves the string, it is snatched away alive. The faint thoughts once surged for a moment, but this surge again. Gone in an instant, just as quietly as he came, echoing the beginning. The emotional clues of the poem are: light sadness - gradual sublimation - moment of climax - return to light sadness. In such clues, the whole poem's mood and scenery are integrated. The exquisiteness of the poet's conception is reflected in the clever tailoring. The beginning of the poem: "Quietly, I left." The end of the poem: "Quietly, I left." The two "I left" one after the other indicate that the poet intercepted the moment of "walking". It is not a long process of coming and going. This moment has been forever fixed in the poet's heart. The poet's series of emotions and all the artistic conception of Cambridge he described were completed in an instant. A moment is eternity. Perhaps this is the reason why the poem "Farewell Cambridge Again" stands out among the many farewell lyric poems and is loved by the world and has endured for a long time.
Look at this poem structurally. The whole poem has seven stanzas, each stanza has four sentences. Each section describes a scene and an artistic conception, and the sections are interconnected and connect the previous to the next. Take the second and third sections as an example. In the second stanza, the poet describes the golden willows by the river in the first two sentences, and uses layers of progression to deepen the emotion in the last two sentences. The third section inherits the "wave light" written in the second section to write "the clear water under the water". It can be seen that the sentences and stanzas are interlocking. The poet attaches great importance to the aesthetic effect of the poem itself.
His poems pay great attention to the neat appearance of poems. This kind of neatness focuses on the neat planning of the overall arrangement of the poems, and there is no rigid limit on the length of the poem lines. This poem uses formal poetic forms, and the poems are long and short. The overall poem is well-proportioned and not monotonous and rigid, which makes people visually feel the beauty of the poem's uneven patterns and the rigor and stability that contain changes. A sense of harmony.
The poet said: "The beauty of poetry does not lie in its literal meaning, but in its elusive syllables." It can be seen that the poet is pursuing the rhythm and rhythm of syllables. In his poetry, syllables and content achieve a natural and perfect unity. "Gently, I leave, just as I came gently." The overlapping of the two "gently" is not so much an exaggeration of the artistic conception as it is the poet's intention to enhance the lightness of the rhythm. The poet regards rhythm as the inner life of poetry. What he calls "the evenness of the contained syllables" is more about pursuing an equal number of "pauses" between lines than an equal number of words. Day, that is, distinguishing syllables according to different components in the sentence. The last stanza of the poem can be divided as follows according to the meaning group: "Quietly, / I / left, just as I / quietly / came; I / waved / my sleeves, without taking away / a single cloud." The number of pauses between each line of the poem is roughly equal, giving the whole poem an overall consistent rhythm. In terms of phonology, the poem's even lines rhyme, and two or four lines in the same stanza rhyme with the same rhyme, creating an ups and downs of phonological beauty. In the poet's rhythmic singing, the artistic conception in the poem and the poet's melancholy are also changing and spreading.
This poem adopts the form of modern vernacular, inherits the implicitness and elegance of traditional Chinese classical poetry, and adopts the grammatical mode of phonetic language. It can be said to be a combination of Chinese and Western. The color beauty of painting is also clearly reflected in the poem. The clouds, golden willows, green cattails, clear springs, and rainbows in the poem are all vivid in color, describing the beauty of Cambridge. Such a brightly colored picture is not inconsistent with the poet's mood. It is precisely because of its beauty that it is so difficult for the poet to part with it!
Reading "Farewell Cambridge" is like viewing a building, singing a song, or appreciating a painting, and what I feel is the poet's faint sadness of parting love.