What is the moral of Wen Yiduo's Dead Water?

This is an allegorical poem: an exiled prisoner, wandering aimlessly, without joy and hope, walks slowly and his feet are dripping with blood. This is not a realistic picture, but a vivid expression of a poet's spiritual experience. We can interpret its connotation from the following aspects. First, this fugitive is "in the prime of life". These four words vividly express the youthful glow and blood boiling of "I". The vitality of "I" is in an extremely vigorous rising period. Life is a colorful garden for it. I need life, happiness, endless courage and inexhaustible energy. Nothing seems to stop his pursuit and struggle. However, I am actually a "prisoner"! Dying prisoners bring people a long sense of desolation, and the combination of "prime of life" and prisoner status gives people a strong sense of depression, even tension. A young life is deprived of its due rights, which is cruel anyway. Secondly, this is not an ordinary prisoner who has lost his freedom, but a "fugitive" wandering around the world. "Liu" seems to have given him some freedom, so that he can live a life without sunshine all the year round like other prisoners and not be locked up in prison; However, the relative freedom given by "Liu" is no more than the suffering he suffered. When the front of me is at a loss and lifeless, when I can never step into any warm residence during a short rest, "flow" means helplessly flowing to death, which can't be that kind of painful sudden death. Death will be long and slow. What kind of freedom is this? If the first aspect and the second aspect are combined, then my experience will be even more unfortunate and bitter. So, what kind of spiritual experience did this bitterness symbolize at that time? This poem was written by Wen Yiduo when he first came to study in the United States. 1922 In September, Wen Yiduo talked about the origin of this poem in a letter to Liang Shiqiu and Wu Jingchao. He said; "I am a prisoner" is implied by Lu Junzhi; The truth about lujun is my business. "Jun Lu and Wen Yiduo are Tsinghua alumni, and they also like literature. However, because they are not used to life abroad, they are mentally stimulated and even crazy. This can be said to be a common phenomenon among young people at that time: new arrivals, long time, loneliness, and instinctive fear of the future. This state of mind corresponds to the poet's unique "prime of life" as a May 4th youth, which forms the complexity of the poet's inner experience. Perhaps it is because of his "prime of life" that he has his own independent understanding of life and the world. At that time, these outlooks on life and the world seemed lofty and few, and bosom friends were hard to find. Therefore, a strong sense of wandering and exile was generated, and the poet unconsciously regarded himself as a "floating prisoner". The sense of exile and wandering can be said to be the universal experience of human beings in the twentieth century. Many artists and philosophers claim that they are often shrouded in the intense experience of "abandonment" and "exile", and the long road of wandering is in front of them, extending to the infinite distance. Of course, in such a huge floating prison community, Wen Yiduo's experience is quite different. We can also understand Wen Yiduo's uniqueness from two aspects. One is the prisoner's own sense of innocence. Running through this poem is a confession: "I don't know what crime I have committed", which is undoubtedly a protest and accusation against this unfortunate fate. In his view, he is innocent, which shows that exile is the cruel persecution of him in the real society. Innocent self is in sharp contrast with the dirty social environment. Self-innocence is inevitably the result of the opposition between individuals and reality. The corresponding background is: the individual strives for the right to life from the society, the society suppresses the free development of the individual with its overall traditional strength, the individual has won the moral victory, he dares to openly safeguard his own interests, and he is very conscious of the justice of his ideal. These are the products of the May 4th cultural background. At that time, China intellectuals made a new revolution in the field of thinking mode and morality, and they fought for their own cause with confidence. However, as an autocratic rule and a stupid and weak nation, it is obvious that it constitutes a huge traditional force on the whole. It has surrounded and persecuted the prophet from all sides, and the suppressed intellectuals have only gained a sense of moral innocence. This is an important difference from the "wandering consciousness" in the 20th century. Almost all western writers in the 20th century no longer defend their innocence. What they want to emphasize repeatedly is the heavy mental pain in their wandering, the constant pursuit of truth and the constant failure. Here, moral issues aroused their interest. Western culture in the 20th century is not the result of oppression and persecution of individuals by traditional social forces, but a kind of confusion after the prophet elite surpassed history and people. In this era, important issues are discussed and discussed in a philosophical sense, and moral masturbation has long been a distant history. On the contrary, due to the revival of religious consciousness, they are likely to declare from self-abuse: I am guilty! I should accept God's punishment. Of course, this crime is not moral, but the spiritual fulcrum of his choice to bear suffering. In the history of western literature, the sense of self-innocence mainly exists in the works of some romantic writers (including Rousseau) in the early19th century, while the cultural background of the May 4th Movement in China is more similar to the western culture in the19th century in essence. The second is that it is the people around him who exile the prisoner. In the words of the poem, it is "them", those who live behind the "happiness at the bottom of Zhu Fei", which implies an image of "home". "Home is where we were born and where we died" (Lu Xun's words). The persecution of "I" has social significance, but it is not the "society" of the west19th century, but the "concrete cell" of social-interpersonal relationship. In China culture, human relations determine all the substance of the so-called "society", and the so-called social persecution is actually the destruction of human relations (Mr. Fei Xiaotong once thought that China had no "society" in essence). The way of persecution is also "ethical": depriving him of the right to enjoy the warmth of the world and shutting him out of all "homes", then China people who lose their "homes" will lose their souls, which is a fatal blow to him. You see, the poem says that "they" chose such a time-dusk, at this time, all life in nature is rushing back to their nests, but "I" is "pushed out". When the ancients traveled abroad, they still felt homesick when they saw the sunset in the western hills, not to mention being driven out of their homes forever. As for the illusion of "home" on the way, it is obviously a deliberate satire and insult to "me". We have to ask ourselves what the meaning of home is in our life, so as to understand why he suffered such serious internal injuries. In this sense, in this long wandering journey, what really scares the poet is not death or the darkness of the future, but something with China characteristics: he has lost his home forever. Interpersonal relationship is a key to interpret China's modern tragedy, which constitutes the national connotation of China's modern tragic spirit.