Appreciation of Yaxian's The Colonel

Colonel is one of the representative works of Yaxian, a poet in Taiwan Province Province. In this poem, the poet shows the absurdity of the wounded officers in the war about the significance of war. Next, let's try to interpret this poem. Before appreciating this poem, it is necessary for us to have a general understanding of the poet: the poet 1932 was born in a peasant family in Dongzhuang, Nanyang County, Henan Province. 1August, 949, joined the Kuomintang army in Hunan and went to Taiwan Province. 19665438+February, the rank of major retired. During the seventeen-year military career, the poet has a personal experience of war, so the poet's understanding and thinking of war and its ultimate meaning are also different from ordinary people, which can be seen in this poem. Let's look at the title of this poem-Colonel, which is the highest rank among field officers in Taiwan Province Province. As mentioned above, the highest rank of a poet is "specialty", so why don't poets take "specialty" as their topic? In terms of rank, "colonel" is slightly lower than the lowest rank of general-"brigadier general", which is more convincing than "major" among middle and senior commanders. This persuasiveness is reflected in the war. As the commander and even initiator of military war, the colonel is more enthusiastic about war than ordinary soldiers, and even belligerence is their nature. Here, the poet used "Colonel" to express his complete denial of the war. In the first section, the poet wrote: "That is a completely different kind of rose/born from the flame/they met the biggest battle in Jojo's wheat field/one of his legs must be different from 1943". First of all, the image of "rose" is very symbolic and full of contradictions and opposites. We know that although roses look beautiful, they are full of thorns. If you want to reach out and pick it, you will inevitably be stabbed by thorns. It's just like the military profession. In the eyes of others, they seem to have unlimited scenery, especially soldiers with outstanding military achievements and honors. However, who knows the pain they have experienced, and who knows their unspeakable suffering, just as the poet said, they were "born from the flame" and they were ruthlessly destroyed by the war. "They met the biggest battle in the bridge wheat field" is simply a miniature epic, which makes people have infinite associations: under the blue sky, in the bridge wheat field in the wilderness, thousands of soldiers are fighting to the death, gunfire and guns resound through the sky, smoke, gunfire and blood are everywhere ... The poet shows a sense of sight and hearing with this limited narrative. For a soldier, their greatest happiness is to have the opportunity to go to the battlefield and make achievements. To this end, they even forgot the pain that war might bring them. "But one of his legs is definitely different from that of 1943". What a contradiction between ideal and reality! "He" lost a leg, but the poet calmly used a word-farewell, as if it were just a short separation before the reunion of two old friends. "He" doesn't know that this is just the beginning of his painful life, and his later life will be in a desperate situation because of the lack of a leg. How ironic! In the second section, the poet wrote: "He heard history and laughter". What kind of history has he heard? What kind of laughter has he heard? Countless ancestors in history have realized and proved the ignorance, meaninglessness and absurdity of war with blood. War is just a plot played by politicians, and "He" and Qian Qian's ten thousand "He" are just political tools. However, "he" did not wake up and still stubbornly embarked on the road of no return stained with the blood of his ancestors. In the end, he paid a price, a price that can't be redeemed in his life. At this time, he seems to remember that before that, "he heard history and laughter." What is eternal life? Is it military? Is this an honor? No, it's all gone. It's too far to touch. What is immortal is his leg, which is definitely different from that of 1943. "Cough medicine, razor, last month's rent, etc." This is the strong opposition and conflict between ideal and reality, and it is the price that ignorance must pay. Isn't that ironic? But even so, in the sound of his wife's sewing machine that kept turning for the sake of family livelihood, "he" seemed to hear sporadic battles on the battlefield that year, and seemed to see his lithe figure galloping freely on the battlefield. And this reflects his infinite desolation of reality. This poem is really a stroke of genius, which is both a sketch and a metaphor: the war seems to be constantly recalled in the colonel's mind, which just discusses the unconsciousness of the characters. Finally, "he felt that the only thing that captured him was the sun." Everything is empty, everything is empty, everything is absurd. The eternal "sun" proves that he is wrong, and he is really wrong. The poet once said: "It is not ordinary people or even ordinary readers who always ask the question of the popularity of poetry, but poets who read their own poems. Bai Yuan in the Tang Dynasty is an example. When a poet writes a poem that even his peers cannot appreciate, it should be the poet himself, not the reader. " "From the vain rhetoric, the difficult sentences are disguised deeply, and the mystery is expressed by flashing ambiguity, and the accidental arrangement of words causes unexpected effects. It's just an empty gesture, an emotional cut corners, and a poetic degeneration. " The author uses this poem to practice, which proves that there are no embarrassing sentences in disguise, so the mystery and chance shown are just plain narration and colloquial language, which can also create a distant artistic conception and show a profound theme, and can also "express the greatest connotation with the least number of words and express infinity with the limited number". "In the vertical direction of history, we must first get rid of the shackles of standard customs and habits, stride out of the old city, admit the facts and accept its challenges. On the international cross-section, we hope that more modern literary pilgrims will go west and return to the East. " The poet did it. This poem is full of irony, symbolism, paradox and metaphor, but it contains endless tension behind countless opposites and contradictions. History, reality, times, individuals, survival, fate, war, etc. Emotions that can only be expressed in "river novels" or "heroic epics" are all displayed in this short poem with less than 100 words. Images, spoken language, lyricism, narration, drama, fable, novel attempt, irony and stream of consciousness, which are scattered in various schools of modern China poetry, are all put into practice in this little poem. This is the extraordinary talent of Yaxian, as the poem says, "This is really another kind of rose"!