This sentence comes from Gu Cheng's "A Generation", the original text is as follows:
"A Generation"
Gu Cheng
The night gave My black eyes,
I use them to find light.
Definition
Generation: refers to the people who grew up during the historical stage of the Cultural Revolution.
Dark Night: Alluding to the Cultural Revolution political movement from 1966 to 1976.
The meaning of this sentence is: "dark night". This image encompasses the vast and indefinite time and space, metaphorizing an abnormal and inhumane time and environment, which itself is a kind of The tragedy in the development of history "gave me black eyes" is the result of this tragic forward development, and the bearer of the tragedy is "I".
Because the connection between "dark night" and "black eyes" (the derived image of "dark night") is "I", and "I" passively became the bearer of this disaster. , "Black Eyes" is actually a concrete form of "alienation", which has gone deep into the tragedy of the irreconcilability between man and the environment.
But the more profound tragic meaning is that "I use it to find light." Here it seems that "I" is in an active position, and there is undoubtedly a spirit of daring to rebel against the "dark night" and search for light. , adhere to it, and the weapon used - "it" turns out to be a derivative of "night".
This seems to indicate that this search will inevitably fall into a new tragedy. This tragic cycle reveals the violation of the law that people can discover themselves but cannot realize themselves. This has almost become an eternal tragic complex in human spiritual life.
Extended information
Poem Appreciation of "A Generation"
"The night gave me black eyes, but I used them to find light." The poet gave this short two-line poem the broad title "A Generation", which stipulates the perspective from which we enter this poem - the perspective of social judgment. But the poet does not "explain", he "presents".
The "dark night" symbolizes that unprecedented catastrophe; the "black eyes" have a double meaning here: one means that these eyes have been deceived and infected by the "dark night", and the other means that these eyes After being deceived, the eyes became deeply suspicious. In the darkness, they gradually developed a kind of consciousness, a kind of adaptability and penetrating power, and they took on a completely new quality.
In the end, it became the rebellion of the "dark night" and the symbol of the will of life to "find the light". In the deep image of "black eyes", deception and awakening are magically integrated. They are cause and effect, and are in opposite directions. This is exactly what Pound said: "Don't use images for decoration, use images for decoration." It is language itself, and image is the way beyond formulaic language."
This poem is short in structure, but has muscles, flesh, bones and spirit. It is the best among deep image poems.
Reference: Baidu Encyclopedia-A Generation