This is a backwater of despair,
The breeze doesn't move at all.
Why don't you have some rubbish,
Throw out your leftovers.
Maybe copper will turn green into jade,
A few rusty peach petals on the tin can;
Let greasy weave a layer of Luo Qi,
Mold steamed some clouds for him.
Let stagnant water ferment a ditch of green wine,
Full of pearl foam;
Little Pearl smiled and became a big one.
I was bitten by a flower mosquito who stole wine again.
A desperate backwater ditch,
And a little image.
If frogs can't stand loneliness,
Dead water again. It is singing.
This is a backwater of despair,
This is definitely not the beauty,
Why don't we leave it to ugliness to cultivate,
Look at the world he created.
Written in 1926, Dead Water is Wen Yiduo's masterpiece. The poet compared the dark and corrupt reality of old China to "a pool of stagnant water", expressing his hatred of ugly forces and his love for the motherland. The last sentence of the poem shows that, on the one hand, he has no illusions about stagnant water, that is, darkness, and firmly believes that ugliness can never produce beauty; On the other hand, he didn't really despair, not because his heart was dying, but because he hated stagnant water and wanted it to die. "It is better to leave it to ugliness to cultivate" is an indignant sentence. Zhu Ziqing said: "It is simply to make ugliness full of evil early, and there is hope in despair." (Preface to the Complete Works of Wen Yiduo) Hope in despair and patriotic enthusiasm in cold are the ideological characteristics of this poem.
In Dead Water, Wen Yiduo draws lessons from the irony of modern western poetry and the artistic principle of "taking ugliness as beauty". In the middle three paragraphs of the poem, the imagination is enriched, all the ugly things in the stagnant water are painted in beautiful shapes, and the dirty, moldy, dim and silent stagnant water is satirized with bright colors and loud voices. Beauty and ugliness are intertwined and contrasted, and the artistic effect is refreshing.
Dead Water is a typical example of Wen Yiduo's experiments on his "three beauties" (music beauty, painting beauty and architecture beauty). This poem has strict meter. The whole poem consists of five sections, each with four lines. Each line consists of three "two-character (phonetic symbol) feet" and one "three-character (phonetic symbol) foot", with the same rhythm and the same number of words. Each bar is generally based on abcb rhyme, which is very neat from internal rhythm to external form. The poet is like "dancing in chains", but it is amazing that he dances so easily and harmoniously!