Hymn Gethsemane

Bing Xin wrote other poems before, during and after the publication of Stars and Spring Water. In this range, she is basically the successor of Hu Shi's new poetry tradition and the creator of prose poetry. Among Bing Xin's prose poems, her Christian religious hymns occupy a prominent position. It can be said that Bing Xin is the first and possibly the only Christian hymn poet in the history of China's new poetry. Her dusk, midnight, dawn and morning, who is he, Gethsemane Garden, Golgotha, messenger, life, children, silence, how to bear it? Many poems, such as Tian Ying, Evening Prayer (1), Going Wrong and Evening Prayer (2), obviously belong to the category of Christian religious hymns, while others, such as Autumn, Nature, Personality, A White Rose, Ice God, etc. As an ideological and cultural phenomenon, Bing Xin's poetry deserves serious study, but as a modern poetry art in China, it is of little significance, because an independent new art form has not been established for China's new poetry. The reason here is obvious. At that time, in China, Christian culture could not form the basis of China vernacular, and the concept of Christian culture could not become the basic concept of social and cultural exchanges. Inspired by the Bible, Bing Xin, a young girl, takes the description of the Bible as the theme of her poems and expresses her worship and belief in God. These are just the ideological phenomena in the process of Bing Xin's accepting external influences, not her unique ideological personality, so she won't feel the need to create an independent language form to express her thoughts and feelings about life. This idea is too common among church schools and Christian believers. This theme is fully expressed in the Bible, but in China society, it cannot arouse readers' rich imagination and stimulate their artistic interest. This is the gap between cultures, and Bing Xin can't connect these two completely different cultures with her own poems. Language is powerless here, and poetic language is even more powerless. On the whole, Bing Xin's poems are vague, which can't touch the sore spot in China readers' hearts or stir our hearts, so they didn't have much influence in the history of China's poems. Bing Xin later said: "My religious thoughts in this life are completely derived from the beauty of nature." Strictly speaking, Bing Xin's confession here is not realistic. She accepted the Christian religious thought of the religious school. Pure natural beauty can't produce Christian religious thought, but from the logic of the development of Bing Xin's thought, it has inherent rationality, because it is not her Christian religious thought that forms the basis of Bing Xin's thought, but her virginity heart brewed in nature and warm family environment in her childhood. In this way, she accepted the influence of Christian culture, the May 4th New Culture and China's inherent traditions, and reorganized all the cultural traditions she faced on this basis. In Bing Xin's view, "child" is the fundamental link between family, nature, Christian God and the May 4th new culture, and the most basic cultural concept among all her cultural concepts. She worships childlike innocence, not God. "Childlike heart" is the "God" in her deep consciousness.