The Wei State is located in the north, "its land is rough and narrow, and its people are poor and frugal" (Zhu Xi said). However, the Chinese ancestors were industrious and optimistic. "Wei Feng·Between Ten Acres" outlines a fresh and tranquil pastoral scenery and expresses the relaxed and happy working mood of the mulberry picking girls.
Using relaxed melody to express joyful mood is the most distinctive aesthetic feature of "Between Ten Acres". First of all, this is related to the appropriate use of modal particles. Readers will naturally think of "Zhou Nan·Fengju", which also mainly writes about labor scenes and feelings. However, due to the different labor scenes it depicts, the melody, rhythm and aesthetic sentiment of the poem are also different. "裊苢" describes the labor process of a group of women picking plantain seeds. Through the continuous changes in picking movements and the rapid increase in harvest results, it shows the girls' skillful picking skills and cheerful working mood. In terms of structure, it is composed of four characters in one sentence, with the word "Zhi" added to every other sentence, which is short and powerful, making the rhythm of the whole poem bright and compact. "Between Ten Acres" and "裊苢" form a sharp contrast, and have become the two most comparable labor ballads in artistic style in the "Book of Songs". The predecessors commented that "Between Ten Acres" is "elegant and light as pottery" (Chen Jikui's "Du Feng Zubu"). Tao Yuanming's "Returning to the Garden and Living in the Fields" indeed wrote: "I wake up in the morning to sort out the filth, and return home with a lotus shovel in the moonlight. The road is narrow and the grass and trees are long, and the evening dew touches my clothes." But the former is full of the girl's relaxed joy, while the latter contains the Taoist spirit. The male is leisurely and transcendent; the former is bright and the latter is melancholy, seemingly yet mysterious.
For the interpretation of the poetic purpose of "Between Ten Acres", in addition to the politically attached "inspiring time" theory in "Preface to Mao's Poems", there are also Su Che's "returning to seclusion with friends" theory and It is similar to Fang Yurun's "husband and wife live together" theory. In fact, this is the creative imagination of readers who have a vague awareness of "retreating" and feel the pastoral scenery depicted in the poem. It is not based on the objective interpretation of the poem's text. In addition, some people today also interpret the words "Xing and Zi returns" and "Xing and Zi passes away" as the girl inviting her lover to go together. This is a misunderstanding caused by the ambiguity of the meaning of the word "子". Reading the whole poem carefully, the poem shows a picture of a mulberry-picking girl returning home at night from a mulberry garden.