The term "Ci Yan" first appeared in Lu Youren's "Ci Zhi" in the Yuan Dynasty. "Ci Zhi" is divided into eight parts, six of which are dedicated to "Ci Eyes".
The word "poetry eye" was first seen in the Northern Song Dynasty. Su Shi's poem says: "The work of heaven suddenly turns its back, and the eye for poetry increases and loses."
Fan Chengda also wrote about the "eye for poetry" in his poems: "The eye of Taoism is empty, and the eye of poetry is there, and the plum blossoms are blooming." "The moving snowflakes are sparse." Fan
Wen's poetry is even named "Poetry Eyes", titled "Qianxi Poetry Eyes".
Looking for poetry eyes: can embody the meaning of a piece of poetry. The theme, the central meaning of a sentence, can be said to be the eye of poetry and the eye of words. Therefore, when looking for poetry, we must connect it with the meaning of the article and the sentence.
The ancients said that five-character poems use the third character as the eye, and seven-character poems use the fifth character as the eye. For example, "The lonely lamp is burning (burning) the guest's dream, and the cold weather makes homesickness" (Cen Shen), "Dangerous Peak" Entering the bird path, the deep valley writes (one says "rich") the sound of apes" (Zheng Shiyi), "Thousands of miles of mountains and rivers separate dreams of dawn, and the singing pipes in the neighborhood send spring sorrow" (Xu Hun), "The orioles pass on the old sayings of the charming spring day, and the flowers learn to be jealous of their strict makeup. Xiaofeng" (Zhang Xiaobiao). Therefore, it is advocated that five-character poems should focus on the third character, and seven-character poems should focus on the fifth character. This statement is not unreasonable. The rhythms of five-character sentences and seven-character sentences are mostly up, two, down, three and up, four, down and three, such as "Lonely lamp - a dream of a guest" and "Thousands of miles of mountains and rivers - a dream of dawn". The meaning unit is often unified with the rhythm unit. In a complete sentence of a five-character poem, the first two characters are often the subject, and the third character is the verb; in a complete sentence of a seven-character poem, the first four characters are often the subject, and the fifth character is the verb. verb location. Verbs are keywords for narrative, scene description, object description, and lyricism, so they naturally become an important object for word training.
But it would be biased to focus on the third character of a five-character poem or the fifth character of a seven-character poem. The reason is that there are various grammatical structures of poems, not all of them follow the above-mentioned complete sentence format, and the poetic eye is not limited to one category of verbs. "The body is light and a bird flies by" and "Bai Yutang is deep in the imperial edict" are examples that are not limited by the third and fifth words of poetry. In the words, the sentences are uneven, and the syntax is extremely different. Of course, there is no way to know which character to choose.
So "green, fat, red and thin" (Li Qingzhao) can be divided into two or four characters. As the eye, "petting willows and delicate flowers" (predecessor) might as well use one or three words as the eye.