You stand on the bridge and watch the scenery.
The landscape man is watching you upstairs.
The bright moon decorated your window,
You decorated other people's dreams.
[Summary]
It is the exchange of the position of subject and object in the picture composed of two groups of concrete images, which hides the poet's universal philosophical thinking on the relative relationship between life, things and society. In the poet's view, everything is not isolated, but exists in a relative relationship with other things. The relative relationship of things and the change of motion are eternal laws. (On the History of China's Modernist Poetry by Sun Zhu)
[Appreciation]
The broken chapter is written in 1935 10. It was originally a fragment of a poet's long poem, and later it became an independent chapter, so its title was broken chapter. It is a famous short poem with short words but rich and hazy meanings in the history of modern literature in China.
Mr. Li Jianwu once thought that this poem "contains infinite sadness and focuses on the word' decoration'", while the poet himself clearly pointed out that "my meaning also focuses on' relativity'". Regarding the difference between himself and the poet, Mr. Li Jianwu added: "My explanation may not make me agree with the author's confession. The author's confession may not let me explain. It is not so much conflict as complementarity. Both the poet's self-proclaimed "relativity" and Li Jianwu's "modification" of each other are the dissolution of "certainty". In the poem The Bright Moon Decorates Your Window, the "bright moon" exists in "for you" or "for you", and the "you" here is undoubtedly deterministic or subjective. Obviously, the first sentence of the two parts of this poem shows some kind of "joy". In the second sentence of each section, the certainty and subjectivity you get in the first sentence are "relative" and "objectified" by these two poems, and the joy of certainty has evolved into relative sadness. All these fall into the poet's "watching", and the basis of poetry is "Undoubtedly, we can experience the complex emotions of sadness, sentimentality, vagrancy, emptiness and sadness. On the other hand, if we can understand the philosophical thought that everything in the universe, including real life, is closely related and interdependent from this poem, we can get some comfort in life ... The short four-line poem gives us quite rich feelings and enlightenment!
In art, this poem mainly expresses abstract and complex thoughts and artistic conception, but the poet does not directly state and express emotions, but indirectly expresses the poem through the presentation of objective images and images. The sense of picture and space in the poem is outstanding, the artistic conception is far-reaching and far-reaching, and there is a hint of western poetry, which makes the poem implicit and deep, and quite emotional. (He, Nanjing Normal University)
The theme out of context caused a vague understanding. Liu Xiwei began to explain this poem, focusing on the meaning of "decoration", thinking that it shows a kind of sadness in life. The poet Bian himself wrote an article and replied that this was not the case. He said: "I don't pay much attention to the meaning of' decoration', just like the sentence in Broken Chapters,' The bright moon decorated your window and you decorated other people's dreams', and my meaning is the same. The "meaning" of a poem can't be fully captured in a word or two literally. Its deep connotation is often hidden behind images and words. It is true that, as the author explained, expressing the philosophical concept of "relativity" on the metaphysical level is the main theme of this poem "Broken Chapter".
This short four-line poem will have an enduring artistic charm among readers, and it still gives people a strong aesthetic feeling. First of all, because the poet avoids abstract explanations, he creates a symbolic and beautiful picture. The natural beauty of the picture and the profundity of philosophy have reached harmony and unity. This poem is divided into two independent pictures to show or metaphorically express the poet's thoughts. The first picture is a complete picture: "You are standing on the bridge watching the scenery,/the people watching the scenery are watching you upstairs." "You" is the main character in the picture and the central viewpoint of the picture. Around him, there are bridges, scenery and people upstairs watching the scenery. The author skillfully organizes these seemingly messy people and things in a frame to form an ink painting sketch or a symmetrical landscape sketch. This painting has no bright colors, but the picture arrangement is patchy, transparent and clear. You will never forget to pursue the symbolic meaning behind this picture, and then you will be surprised to find how the author skillfully conveys his philosophical meditation: in this universe and life, everything is "relative" and everything is interrelated. Yes, when you stand on the bridge and look at the scenery, you are naturally looking at the main body of the scenery, and those beautiful "scenery" are looking at it. The second line, the same time and space, people and scenery remain unchanged, but the perceptual status has changed. At the same time, another "person watching the scenery" upstairs became the subject of "watching", while the character "you" who was originally watching the scenery became the watched scenery, and the subject became the object at the same time. In order to strengthen this philosophical thought, the poet immediately launched the first one. This is a combination of reality and imagination: "the bright moon decorated your window,/you decorated other people's dreams." This is a picture, but it is no longer in a frame, and the big time and space are still the same. The "decoration" in the two poems is only a unique rhetorical device in poetry. If it is written as "shining in" and "entering", it will not become a poem. Maybe it's coming back from watching the scenery. It can also be changed to "I", which is not important. What matters is still the relativity shown by the exchange of subject and object positions. In the first poem, "you" is the subject of this "moonlight by the window", and the "bright moon" shining into the window is the object, but I don't know which friend's dream you entered at this time and night and became an "ornament" in his dream. The man who dreamed of you. The poet played the role of an object again. In meaningful pictures, he conveyed the philosophy of life gained from his intellectual thinking, that is, the poetic experience beyond the poet's emotion: everything can be relative and interrelated in the universe and even in the whole life process. In the combination of feelings, a moment can last forever; In the field of metaphysics, as the poet W. Blake said, "A world in a grain of sand" is not absolutely isolated, but relative and interrelated in the fields of life and morality, life and death, joy and sorrow, good and evil, beauty and ugliness. The poet wants to say that people who have insight into this truth will not be bound by some secular ideas.
This poem "Broken Chapter" is entirely about common things and outlook, and the philosophy of life expressed is not original by the poet. There is a sense of freshness after reading it. Apart from symbolizing the "meaning and image" of poetry, where is the secret? In my opinion, the key lies in the poet's ingenious arrangement of familiar materials (symbols) with modern consciousness. The poet said: "old materials, even rotten materials, are not necessarily unusable, as long as you are creative and properly arranged." As long as they are new and smart, a rag head can also be made into a blank sheet of paper. " What the poet calls "novel and ingenious arrangement" is also a novel artistic conception and ingenious language scheduling. Everything out of context is common, even familiar in classical poetry: people, bridges, landscapes, buildings, windows, bright moons, dreams ... After careful selection and arrangement by the author, they are organized into two pictures. Linking unrelated things together, the two poems are at arm's length in content and time sequence, independent of each other and set off against each other, giving full play to the artistic functions of image superposition and film montage in modern art. A poem "Broken Chapter" is really a complete artistic world.
There is a harmonious and inseparable relationship between the arrangement of language form and the implication of content in Broken Chapters, which reminds us of some famous classical poems. Zhang's Moonlit Night on the Spring River has the following words: "Who has seen the moon by the river?" Photo taken at the beginning of Jiangyue "; There is a saying in Li Shangyin's "Midnight Suburb Villa": "Looking at the mountain and drinking makes you miss me, listening to the drums and leaving the city, I will visit you". Lv Kun, a Qing Dynasty man, used the term "intertextuality in duality" in the last two sentences. These two lines of poems are intertextual, that is, the subject and object of the two sentences are the same in connotation, but the functions are opposite. Bian Zhilin's "bright moon decorated your window" and "you decorated other people's dreams" are the same syntax. In this way, not only the end of the sentence, but also the language density, the exchange of subject and object, the subject image and the object image have been strengthened, the artistic conception of poetry and painting has been improved, and the aesthetic effect of sound and meaning has been produced in both vision and hearing, and the philosophy of the relative relevance of metaphor is also profound and concrete.
Bian likes the works of poets and poets in the late Tang and Five Dynasties, such as Li Shangyin, Wen and others. He has the ability to creatively absorb and transform "turning decay into magic". After reading Yu Pingbo's Selected Readings of Tang Poetry and Song Poetry, we read the second half of Feng Yansi's Liangzhu: "Why do you worry about the new every year?" The independent small bridge is full of wind sleeves, and the linping crescent people return to the rear. I can't help but be surprised to find that the artistic conception of the two pictures in Broken Chapters, Standing on the Bridge Overlooking and Moonlight Through the Window, is closely related to Feng Ci's "independent small bridges are full of wind sleeves, and the crescent people in Linping belong to the rear area". However, Bian is a modern poet after all, and his creative absorption and transformation have reached the point where no trace can be found. We can't simply judge that the out-of-context is a dilution of the modern spoken language of two poems in Feng Yansi's Dead Hua Lian, just as we can't simply think that Dai Wangshu's Rain Lane is a dilution of the modern spoken language of Jing Li's Lilac Empty Sadness in the Rain. "Broken Chapter" unfolds into two artistic images. The characters, bridges, upstairs, scenery, bright moon and imaginary dreams in the painting are not only more colorful than the original two words, but also have profound philosophical thinking in addition to the description of these scenery. The composition of natural scenery and characters creates a symbolic and suggestive realm. Every poem or image only plays a symbolic role in the whole organization. Even the topic of "out of chapter" has a relative connotation. This deep thinking and pursuit is unique to modern poets. Secondly, Feng's "A single bridge is full of sleeves, and people return to the crescent moon" still focuses on expressing feelings, leaving friends behind (at the time of "The Crescent Moon"), and the poem contains an unavoidable sadness. Although Bian's "Duan" is a lyric poem, it shows great emotional "restraint", which dilutes personal emotional color and increases the intellectual tendency of the poem. The poem does not explain the concept of philosophy, but "Broken Chapter" implies the great philosophy in common pictures. It contains the poet's philosophical proposition of thinking about the whole life of the universe, and "a single bridge is full of sleeves, and a crescent moon returns to Lin Ping", which is exquisite and beautiful, but falls into a trap. It can't be compared with the artistic conception and ideological level out of context. Thirdly, because the poet "washed away" his personal feelings, he practiced the impersonality of poetry and enhanced the universality of poetry. As the author explained, due to impersonality, you in the poem can be represented or replaced by "I" or "he" (she), which is more similar to the reader. The ideological realm of poetry itself has also become more open, leaving a broader creative space for readers' beautiful imagination. Once you understand the broken chapters, which imaginative reader will not put forward a "mirage of the soul" in his spiritual space? (For Yu Sun's poems, see "A Guide to Modern Poetry in China")