"Long Song Xing" is a five-character ancient poem in the "Yuefu Poetry Collection" compiled by Guo Maoqian (1041-1099), a scholar of the Northern Song Dynasty. It is a famous poem that exhorts the world to cherish time and forge ahead.
Long Song Line
The sunflowers in the green garden are waiting for the sun to set in the morning dew. In the spring of Budeze, all things will be radiant.
I am often afraid that when the autumn festival comes, the yellow flowers and leaves will wither. Hundreds of rivers flow from the east to the sea, when will they return to the west?
If a young man does not work hard, the old man will be miserable.
This is a song that sings about life. Singing about people naturally starts from the sunflower in the garden. This is called "supporting things to rise" in writing, that is, "preface other things to trigger the words to be chanted." The sunflower in the garden stands gracefully in the spring morning, with dewdrops rolling on its green leaves, shining brightly in the morning sun, like a young man full of youthful vitality. The poet extended it from the vigorous growth of sunflower in the garden and wrote about the entire nature. Due to the sunshine, rain and dew in spring, everything is shining with the light of life, and there are vibrant and prosperous scenes everywhere. These four sentences are literally a tribute to spring. In fact, they are borrowing things to compare with people. They are a hymn to the most precious thing in life - youth. An era when life is full of youthful vitality is as beautiful as spring in all four seasons of the year. In this way, in terms of writing, it also has a metaphorical meaning, which is the so-called "Xingerbi". The time sequence of nature is constantly changing. In the blink of an eye, spring passes and autumn comes. The sunflowers and everything else in the garden experience spring growth and summer growth. In autumn, they mature, and the once brilliant leaves become scorched, withered, and lose their vitality. The same is true in life. We grow up from youth and old age, and we also have to go through a metabolic process. This is an immutable law of nature. The poet expresses his cherishment of the fleeting "youth" with "I am always afraid of the arrival of the autumn festival". One of the words "fear" shows people's powerlessness against the laws of nature and the inevitable withering of youth. Then from the change of time sequence to the endless time and boundless space of the universe, time is like a river passing eastward, never to return. Measured by the time scale, human life cannot be resurrected after death. In the face of this eternal nature, isn't life just like the dew on the leaves that is dried as soon as it sees the sun? Aren't they just like the green sunflower leaves that wither and wither at the sound of the autumn wind? The poem shifts from the exploration of the universe to thinking about the value of life, and finally comes to the deafening conclusion of "If a young man does not work hard, an old man will be sad", and ends the poem. This reasoning process is not written out literally, but readers can follow the path of the poet's thinking and use their own life experiences to supplement it: all things in nature have a process of spring and autumn, and life also has a process of young people working hard and getting older. ; All things in nature can bear fruit in autumn as long as there is sunshine, rain and dew, but people are different. They cannot succeed without their own efforts. All things decay in autumn, but they realize the value of life, so they are not sad. This is not the case for people, because "Young people don't work hard" and old people achieve nothing, isn't it the same as walking through the world in vain? It is undoubtedly better to mobilize readers to think than to think for them. Precisely because of this, this poem avoids the boring life preaching, and makes the final aphorism appear powerful, deep and implicit, like the long tolling of a bell, deeply touching the hearts of readers. The word "tu" at the end of the sentence has a profound meaning: first, it means that the boss has no success, and his life is wasted; second, it means that he wakes up in his old age and can't help, and he just sighs, which is intended to emphasize that he must work hard in time.
When reading this poem, we will naturally think of the famous saying in "How Steel Was Tempered" about how human life should be spent. "The most precious thing for a person is life. Everyone has only one life. Therefore, a person's life should be spent in this way: when he looks back on the past years, he will not regret for wasting time, nor be ashamed of having accomplished nothing; this way , when he is about to pass away, he can say frankly: I have dedicated my entire life and all my energy to the most magnificent cause in the world - fighting for the liberation of mankind." Guide readers to work hard in time. Don't waste your time, this attitude towards life is undoubtedly positive. This "Long Song Xing" is different from other literati poems in the Han Dynasty that lamented the shortness of life and advocated carpe diem. It is a poem that sings the opposite tune and is a rare masterpiece.