"Sitting Alone on Jingting Mountain"
Tang Dynasty: Li Bai
All the birds are flying high, and the lonely cloud is alone.
I never get tired of seeing each other, only Jingting Mountain.
Translation: The birds are flying high without a trace, and the lone cloud is free and leisurely. You look at me, I look at you, we don’t hate each other, it’s just me and the Jingting Mountain in front of me.
Creative background
In the second year of the Yuan Dynasty (761), Li Bai was already over sixty years old. After experiencing the wandering and wandering after the Anshi Rebellion, he experienced the disaster of being wrongly imprisoned. After experiencing the humiliation of being exiled for a crime, when Li Bai came to Xuancheng for the seventh and last time, there was no longer the scene of seeing friends and friends greeting each other, and there was no more drinking and discussing in the pavilion. The poetry is so chic.
He staggered up Jingting Mountain alone, sat alone for a long time, and was moved by the scene. He was very sad, and the loneliness and desolation came to his heart. He couldn't help but sing "Sitting Alone on Jingting Mountain", an eternal masterpiece. . This is more in line with the time and space background of Li Bai's creation of this poem.
Extended information
Jingting Mountain is located in Xuanzhou (the administrative seat is now Xuancheng, Anhui). Xuanzhou has been a famous county in the south of the Yangtze River since the Six Dynasties. Great poets such as Xie Lingyun and Xie Tiao once visited I worked as a prefect here. Li Bai visited Xuancheng seven times in his life. This five masterpieces was composed when he visited Xuanzhou in the autumn of Tianbao's twelfth year (753). It had been ten years since he was forced to leave Chang'an in Tianbao's third year.
Li Bai's long-term wandering life made Li Bai taste the bitterness of the world and see through the harshness of the world, which deepened his dissatisfaction with reality and added to his sense of loneliness. This poem describes the joy of sitting alone on Jingting Mountain. It is a portrayal of the poet's life of seeking comfort in the embrace of nature with the loneliness and loneliness caused by his unrecognized talent.
The first two sentences, "All the birds are flying high, and the lone cloud is alone," seem to describe the scene in front of you, but in fact, they describe the feeling of loneliness: a few birds fly high in the sky and go away, until There is no trace; there is a white cloud in the vast sky, but it does not want to stay, and slowly floats farther and farther away, as if everything in the world is rejecting the poet.
The words "end" and "idle" lead readers into a "quiet" realm: it seems that they feel particularly quiet after the noise of a group of mountain birds disappears; they feel especially quiet after the rolling thick clouds disappear. Extraordinarily quiet and peaceful. Therefore, in these two sentences, "dynamic" is written to meet "quiet", and "dynamic" is used to contrast "quiet". This kind of "quietness" highlights the loneliness and loneliness of the poet's soul.
This vivid and vivid way of writing can give readers associations and hint that the poet has been visiting Jingting Mountain for a long time, outlining the image of him "sitting alone" in trance, which is the second line of "looking at each other". "Never get tired" serves as a foreshadowing.
The second half of the poem uses personification to describe the poet's love for Jingting Mountain. After the birds flew away and the clouds went away, only the poet and Jingting Mountain were left quietly. The poet stared at the beautiful Jingting Mountain, and Jingting Mountain seemed to be looking at the poet motionless. This makes the poet very emotional - it is probably the only one in the world that is willing to be my companion, right? "We never tire of seeing each other" expresses the deep feelings between the poet and Jingting Mountain.
The words "phase" and "liang" are synonymous, closely connecting the poet with Jingting Mountain, showing strong feelings. The word "only" in the conclusion is also refined, which highlights the poet's love for Jingting Mountain. "It's enough to have a confidant in life." It doesn't matter if the bird flies into the clouds!
The artistic conception created by these two lines of poetry is still "quiet". On the surface, it seems that the poet is looking at Jingting Mountain opposite each other with affection. In fact, the more the poet writes about the "sentimentality" of mountains, the more he expresses the "ruthlessness" of people; and his cold treatment, lonely and desolate situation is also revealed in this quiet scene.
"Quiet" is the blood of the whole poem. The reason why this plain and quiet poem is so moving lies in the "silent" realm created by the high integration of the poet's thoughts and feelings with the natural scenery. No wonder Shen Deqian praised this poem in his "Tang Poetry Collection" "It is said that the god of 'sitting alone'".