The night gave me black eyes, but I used them to look for light.
There are only two sentences in the whole poem, and the images in the poem are very common phenomena in daily life: night, eyes and light. Because of this, this poem has a thoughtful charm. Two novel combinations, seemingly contradictory turning points, contain wonderful rationality.
Generation is a poem written by the unknown poet Gu Cheng in Beijing in 1979. This poem is one of the representative works of obscure poetry in the new period, which is widely circulated. It expresses the voice of a generation, and also entrusts the ideals and ambitions of a generation-the tenacious desire and persistent pursuit of "light" after "night".
Extended data:
Creation background
Writing time
This poem was written in April 1979, published in the third issue of Stars 1980, and later included in the author's collection of poems, Black Eyes. cultural background
Lorca, a Spanish poet, wrote in the poem "Song of Spanish Constitutional Police": "On this platinum night, the night blackened the night." The author Gu Cheng may have been influenced by this poem.
Time background
Judging from the author's life course, the "Cultural Revolution" was the background for Gu Cheng to write this poem. Although the political movement of the Cultural Revolution has long faded away, in the minds of those who have experienced it, the Cultural Revolution is still a continuous process, which lasted until the early 1980s.
There are only two sentences in the whole poem, and the images in the poem are very common phenomena in daily life: night, eyes and light. Because of this, this poem has a thoughtful charm. Two novel combinations, seemingly contradictory turning points, contain wonderful rationality.
This contradictory logic is the essence of these two short poems. This contradiction is on two levels.
The first level is that the overall image presentation of poetry is contrary to their presentation in people's daily experience. This mainly focuses on the image of the eyes. In the vast darkness, the eyes are the only light. In people's experience, eyes are always a symbol of transparency. However, the eyes in the poem are "black eyes"
. This is the feeling in the poet's heart and the poet's profound reflection. This feeling is a heartbreaking pain, and it is an accumulation over time. This kind of reflection is heavy, and there is great fear behind it. And these all point to the "dark night"-the background of that era.
The second level of contradiction is the internal contradiction of poetry. This focuses on the image of "light". In such an era, such an environment, such a deep night, poets should look for light.
The poet looked for light with his black eyes. This is the horn that poets use to resist the night. This level is also the theme of this poem: the poet should not only reflect on the dark past, pour out the pain in his heart, but also look for it.
Gu Cheng (1956- 1993), male, originally from Shanghai, was born in a poet's home in Beijing on September 24th, 1956. He is an important representative of China's misty poetry school, and is known as a contemporary "Romantic" poet. Gu Cheng has high attainments in new poetry, old-style poetry and fable poetry. The phrase "The night gave me black eyes/I used them to look for light" of his generation became a classic sentence in China's new poems.
Gu Cheng/Kloc-started his writing career at the age of 0/7, contributing to various newspapers and magazines. 1987 began to travel to Europe for cultural exchange. 1988 lived in seclusion in Rapids Island, New Zealand, and lived a self-sufficient life. 1993, 10 year10.8, he killed his wife Xie Ye with an axe and hanged himself under a big tree. Xie Ye died later.
1987 is the later period of his poetry creation. After going abroad, Gu Cheng almost stopped copying poems, and he felt more and more that writing poems was the most basic and pure natural life phenomenon for him.
His poems can be written anywhere, on old newspapers and waste paper. He himself said in Germany 1992, "I write very well on the island, and I always feel that when I have time", "But it doesn't matter if I keep it, and there is no place to put it". He once said that nine times out of ten, his poems were "written and lost".
The poet thinks that the works of this period are his best and most emotional works. In the last few years of his life, he was completely in a state of "no self", completely independent of the times and following dreams, thoughts and inspirations. Poetic language and its image have a kind of broken beauty. On the surface, it seems that he has returned to the state of just writing poetry, but he is building a fairy tale world as a teenager. Now, he is building a fairy tale world.
But in any case, the beauty of fairy tales runs through his whole creation, which we can't give up when reading and analyzing Gu Cheng's works. Even later, he still looked at the world through the eyes of a child, but at that time he already had an adult body and a heavy heart. His pursuit of the beauty of fairy tales has never changed, and even as an adult, he is obsessed with building his own utopia on an island.