The poetry of "New Year's Eve"
On New Year's Eve, the traditional habit is for the family to get together happily and "stay awake till the end of the night, which is called staying up late" ("Feng Tu Ji"). The title of the poem "New Year's Eve" should have evoked people's many happy memories and imaginations about this traditional festival. However, the New Year's Eve in this poem is a different scene.
The beginning of the poem is the word "hotel". It may seem ordinary, but it cannot be ignored. The emotion of the whole poem is born from this. It was a New Year's Eve night. The poet looked at the brightly lit houses outside and gathered together happily, but he was far away from his family and was living in a guest house. Comparing the two, I couldn't help but feel emotional about the scene. Even the lamp in front of me, which also had light and heat, became "cold". The word "cold lamp" exaggerates the coldness of the hotel and the loneliness of the poet's heart. It’s hard to fall asleep under the cold lights, especially on New Year’s Eve! And "not sleeping alone" naturally brings to mind the scene of a family getting together and staying up happily, which is even more unbearable. Therefore, this sentence seems to be about the foreground and the immediate things, but it is closely tied to the title of the poem from the reverse side, depicting a lonely and cold artistic conception. The second sentence, "Why does the guest's heart turn so sad?" This is an inherited sentence. It uses the form of a question to make the thoughts and feelings more clear, thus forcing the following. "Ke" refers to himself. Because he is among the guests, he is called "Ke". What is it that makes the poet "turn into sadness"? Of course it’s still “New Year’s Eve”. In the evening, the strong New Year's Eve atmosphere surrounded me in the guest house with only the shadow of cold lights, and the feeling of loneliness and desolation arose spontaneously.
After finishing one or two sentences of the poem, it seemed that the poet was about to express his feelings at the moment. However, he put aside himself and wrote from the opposite side: "My hometown is thousands of miles away tonight." "Hometown" is a borrowed word. Refers to relatives in hometown: "Qianli" refers to oneself thousands of miles away. That means that my relatives in my hometown must be thinking about me thousands of miles away on this New Year's Eve, thinking about where I will end up tonight, and how I will spend this evening alone... In fact, this is exactly A manifestation of "Missing Hometown A Thousand Miles Away". "It's another year in the Ming Dynasty", "Tonight" is New Year's Eve, so it's another year in the Ming Dynasty. From the old year to the new year, I will "think" about it again. This endless pain of longing, and To add new white hair on the temples. Shen Deqian said: "It is more meaningful to be friends and relatives in one's hometown and miss people thousands of miles away." ("Tang Poems") The reason why it is "more meaningful" is that the poet skillfully used "counterwriting" to express his deep feelings in a more euphemistic and subtle way. This is also a common expression technique in classical poetry, such as Du Fu's "Moonlight Night": "Tonight I look at the moon in Changzhou, and I can only look at it alone in my boudoir." The poem is about a wife missing her husband, which is actually the reflection of the poet's own feelings. .
Hu Yinglin believes that the quatrain "must be full of meaning. For example... Gao Dafu's hometown is far away tonight, and the frost on the temples is another year." . Internal Edition" Volume 6). The so-called "exhaustion of meaning" probably refers to the completeness of poetic meaning; the so-called "adding a word but not enough" refers to the refinement of language. "My hometown is thousands of miles away tonight, and there will be another year tomorrow with frost on my temples." It is precisely the long, deep and painful thoughts of both parties that are expressed through New Year's Eve, which perfectly expresses the theme of the poem. Therefore, in terms of its highly summarized and refined and implicit characteristics, it can be said that it has achieved the artistic effect of "exhausting all ideas" and "adding a wordless".