What does the poem "Homesickness" mean?

Homesickness is a modern poem written by modern poet Yu Guangzhong in 1972. Through the time series of "when I was a child", "when I grew up", "later" and "now", the poem concretizes the abstract homesickness with stamps, boat tickets, graves and straits, summarizes the poet's long life course and endless homesickness for the motherland, and reveals the poet's profound sense of history. The whole poem has simple language and deep feelings.

This poem was written in 1972. Yu Guangzhong's ancestral home is Yongchun, Fujian. He left the mainland for Taiwan Province Province on 1949. At that time, due to political reasons, Taiwan Province Province was isolated from the mainland for a long time, which prevented Yu Guangzhong from returning to the mainland for many years. He has always missed his loved ones and longed for the reunification of the motherland and the reunion of his loved ones. With strong homesickness, the poet wrote this poem in his former residence in Xiamen Street, Taipei.

Yu Guangzhong is known as a poet who "shakes hundreds of millions of China people with homesickness poems", and "homesickness" is a theme that he never forgets in many of his poems. Nostalgia gives a new explanation to an abstract theme, which is difficult to describe, but covered by a lot of descriptions. In terms of images, four common images in life, such as stamps, boat tickets, graves and straits, are selected to give them rich connotations, so that these four previously irrelevant images can be sung repeatedly under the support of homesickness.

Yu Guangzhong himself once said that this poem is "quite realistic": when I was a child, I went to boarding school and had to correspond with my mother; Go to the United States to study after marriage and return to Taiwan Province by boat; Later, my mother died and lost her maternal love forever. The first three sentences of the poem are all about women, and the last sentence thinks of the "big mother" like the mainland of the motherland, so the artistic conception and ideas will be suddenly enlightened, and there will be a sentence "Homesickness is a shallow strait".

Extended data

homesickness

Author: Yu Guangzhong

In childhood

Homesickness is a small stamp.

I'm at this end

Mom is over there.

When I grow up

Homesickness is a narrow ticket.

I'm at this end

The bride is over there.

We'll talk about it later.

Homesickness is a low grave.

I am outside

Mom's inside.

But now

Homesickness is a shallow strait.

I'm at this end

The mainland is over there

Baidu Encyclopedia-Homesickness (Yu Guangzhong's Modern Poems)