In the secular sense, it seems that the expression of mourning for relatives and friends should be an oath to "always remember …". This language is full of passion, but when you think about it, it is a bit vague and empty, and it can't stand deep scrutiny. For example, true grief and remembrance do not need to be fixed by any mandatory language. This is natural and cannot be easily blocked by some external forces. On the contrary, if mourning must be maintained by such a binding oath, its true emotional factors may be quite weak.
Poets are sincere, they don't need to rely on the aura of ethics to dress themselves up, and of course they don't need to force themselves to maintain what kind of emotional state. Mars is his beloved daughter, and he has devoted a lot of feelings to her. In this sense, the poet has reason to say surprisingly: "Forget her, like a forgotten flower", which seems to have many meanings. First of all, "forget her" is a painful word, because the poet has deep feelings for her and is deeply saddened by her death. This sadness, this regret and this attachment are deeply felt. This is the same as Lu Xun's famous work "In Memory of Forgetting". However, even at the moment of making up his mind, the poet's psychology is still complicated: in the life world we have experienced and will experience, there are countless "flowers", and "a flower" is nothing, which is self-forgiveness; However, "flowers" are still "flowers" after all. It is charming, beautiful and moving, and no one can deny it.
It is precisely because of this psychological contradiction that in the next series of "forgetting" efforts, the poet always tries to be detached and affectionate.
The first or second verse of this poem seems to be trying to imagine the contingency and transience of "she". I didn't make much waves in my emotional world. The morning glow on the petals and the fragrance of the flower heart are fleeting. The dream in the spring wind, the clock in the dream, has come and gone without a trace, and you can't invite it or keep it. Life is made up of countless accidents, so isn't it just like "she" who only lived for four years? Come and go in a hurry, there is nothing in this world, but the morning glow on the petals and the fragrance of the flower heart, including the spring dream and the bell in the dream, still give people a good impression and are not so easy to erase.
Next, the poet used three stanzas to try to "forget her" in different senses.
The first meaning is to emphasize that "she" no longer exists, really disappeared from the world, and merged with nature in a very short time. "Listen to how well the crickets sing/see how tall the grass grows in the grave." It can be seen that nature is running in full accordance with its established procedures, as if this human tragedy never happened. Mars has gone, and has gone a long way, so it seems unnecessary for the living to fall into that kind of self-entangled sadness for a long time. But there is another layer of contradiction here unconsciously, that is, the peace and vitality of nature, far from the pain of the poet hurting his daughter, and he is naturally indifferent to human feelings. Is this sad, too? Therefore, the poet's unforgettable pain is still manifested. In particular, we must understand the fact that Wen Yiduo, who is far away from Shanghai, was the first to come to his daughter's grave when he received the notice of returning home. Perhaps this scene is the impression he left at that moment. Obviously, at that time, a poet could not have his own sense of regret.
The second meaning is that the poet imagines the psychology of his dead daughter, "She has forgotten you,/She doesn't remember anything". Wen Yiduo imagined her daughter leaving this world, and now she is completely used to life in the "other world". Everything in the past life is quite strange and distant to her. Since the dead are indifferent to the living, there is no need for the living to be so stubborn.
The third layer means that the poet imagines that time flies, the years are ruthless, all youth will pass away, and everyone will face death one day. My daughter's life is short, but yours and mine won't last long! On the road of life guarded by death, this is only the difference between 50 steps and 100 steps. Everyone is each other! So, what is the end of a life? From the perspective of human fatalism tragedy, Wen Yiduo seems to have a certain alleviating effect on his sadness. However, the death of his daughter made him think he was "old", which was a new bitterness.
In the last two verses, the poet reminds himself again and again to forget her and even deny that she ever existed! This is obviously more painful, and the poem goes back to the second verse. The decisiveness of "forgetting her" and the lingering of "unforgettable" are repeated together. This is like the theme of the whole poem "forget her, like a forgotten flower", which is repeated thirteen times in the whole poem, thus forming the multi-layered meaning of the whole poem. The superficial meaning of "unforgettable" and the melody form of "unforgettable" create a meaningful relationship between them.
However, it is also necessary to point out that Wen Yiduo did not write this poem himself, but quoted the poem Let It Be Forgotten by the modern American poetess Saint Tisadell (1884 ─1933). There are only two paragraphs in the original poem, and the translation of Taiwan Province poet Yu Guangzhong is:
Forget it, like a flower,
It's like forgetting the golden flame,
Forget it, forever and ever. Time is a good friend,
He will make us old.
If someone asks, they forget,
A long time ago,
Like flowers, like fire, like quiet footsteps.
In the long forgotten snow.
It is not difficult to see that when Wen Yiduo described the deceased as a short-lived "flower", he drew lessons from teasdale's original works, used the power of "time" to "forget" himself, and the theme of the poem was "forget like a flower", which made the two poems basically similar in basic thoughts and emotional trends. The original work is more concise and Wen Yiduo's works are more complicated, which makes the thoughts and feelings of poetry more delicate, lingering, self-entangled and difficult to distinguish. Tisdale's simplicity makes poetry relatively free and easy.
After reading the poem "Forget Her", the poet Mr. Yu Guangzhong raised an interesting question: "On poetry, the impression is closer to love". (Comment on Wen Yiduo's three poems, published in Appreciation of Masterpieces1No.4, 992) Personally, I am not surprised by this "impression". I need to know that the so-called "love" itself is a fairly broad emotional circle. We call it "love" because of the attachment and admiration between equal men and women, but the same attachment can also be expressed between other men and women, such as sincere friends. Of course, due to the power of civilized habits and social morality, these emotions can't develop into "lovers' love", but in terms of psychological composition, there is no insurmountable gap between them and "lovers' love"-perhaps the same is true of other emotional forms in the human world. When I said this, I had not applied Freud's theory of "father-daughter complex". I just want to emphasize that any form of emotion is not "purely" isolated. For various reasons, it may be close to other emotional models. Wen Yiduo's writing in this way is not a failure, nor is it "unclean" in the mirror of China's feudal morality.