Nie Yizhong
Series: Ancient poems about worrying about the country and the people
Tian Jia
His father plowed the field and his son went to the mountains to be abandoned.
before June's harvest, the government has repaired the warehouse.
note
1: big hoe, used as a verb here. It means digging.
2 He: He Miao, especially rice Miao.
Show 3: Grain is blooming.
My father plowed the fields in the mountains, and my son reclaimed land at the foot of the mountains. It's June, and the rice in the fields has not been eared yet, and the official tax collection warehouse has been repaired and is waiting to be collected.
Appreciating
Among the numerous poems of showing concern for farmers in the middle and late Tang Dynasty, Li Shen's Two Poems of Showing Concern for Farmers was the first short and pithy one, and Nie Yizhong's Tian Jia was the next one. At first glance, the content of this poem is plain, the language is clear, and the words are simple, and there is almost no mystery, but it can achieve great results with the least number of words, which is very durable, which is by no means accidental. The main form of exploitation of farmers in feudal times was land rent. In the troubled times like the end of the Tang Dynasty, the feudal state spent a lot of money and lacked capital, which inevitably aggravated the peasants' expropriation. The purpose of writing this poem is to expose such a dark reality. If we start from the situation of rent collection, it will cost a lot of ink and the actual effect may not be good. One of the writing characteristics of this poem is to abandon this positive description and only choose the scene before the topic of collecting rent, that is, the farmer is working hard and the official is waiting for collecting rent. So far, what to do and what will happen to the farmer should be left to the readers to think. The author saved a lot of energy, but "didn't say a word, and he was very romantic."
Commentators often know the beauty of the concrete image of poetic language, but they don't know that it is wonderful to generalize and extract images. The poem "A millet is planted in spring and ten thousand seeds are harvested in autumn" is good at summarizing the general bumper years in a general way, and is not good at specific images. The first two sentences of this poem are the same. "My father plowed the original field, but my son went to the barren hills." This is not just an incident about a father and son, but it highly summarizes the families of thousands of farmers in Qian Qian. The so-called "it is common for farmers to shout at midnight while plowing, and the cows are unable to walk gradually." And "going to the field in the original" and "going to the wasteland under the mountain" do not refer to a certain mountain or a certain plain, but generally refer to cultivated mature fields and wasteland to be cultivated. From ploughing to land reclamation, it succinctly and powerfully describes the hard work of farmers all year round, and there is almost no leisure. Ten words have a high degree of coverage, which increases the typicality of poetry. It almost became a microcosm of rural life in feudal society.
When exposing satire, the poet does not make comments, but lays emphasis on facts, which is thought-provoking. The phrase "the crops are not showing in June" doesn't just mean that the crops are immature. According to the normal situation, the wheat seedlings should bloom in April and May ("show"), and the crops should have been harvested in June, which means that there is a drought, suggesting a poor harvest. According to the two tax laws of the Tang Dynasty, June is the season when summer tax should be paid, so "the government has repaired the warehouse. The fact that the government has repaired the warehouse itself implies that the farmers' labor achievements are being watched and will be deprived soon, and this kind of watching is even more meaningful when the crops are not shown in June. The word "the grain has not been shown" and the warehouse has been repaired, and the word "not" and "already" echo each other. The farmer's hope is burning, the official can't wait to collect rent, and the rulers are not sympathetic to the people's feelings. All these facts are in it, and the author's heart of caring for the people and caring for the farmers is also vividly on the paper.
Take a picture before the topic, refine and summarize, and integrate feelings into things. Any one of these techniques can achieve the effect of being concise and meaningful. And this poem properly uses these three techniques at the same time, and the artistic effect is even more remarkable.