People once called Meng Jiao and Han Yu "Han Meng Poetry School", mainly because they were curious about ancient times and wrote more ancient poems. But Meng Jiao's works are mostly short sentences and five-word old sayings, and the language is carved but not gorgeous. He is good at combining strangeness with Gu Zhuo, such as Han Yu's so-called "hard words, appropriate words" ("Recommended Scholars"). And Han Yu's seven-character ancient style is the most distinctive, magnificent and magnificent. Their poems are full of strength, but Han Yu's strength is unrestrained, while Meng Jiao's strength is restrained. He learned more about the tradition of five-character ancient poems in the Han, Wei and Six Dynasties. As Li Ao said, "Suburb is a five-character poem, and since the Southern Dynasties, Li (Ling), Su (Wu) and Jian 'an scholars have been able to be both men and women" (Book of Zhang Servant Shooting Xuzhou). Therefore, compared with Dali and Zhenyuan poets, he is closer to the character of Han and Wei dynasties; Compared with Han Yu and Li He after him, he retained more traces of Dali and Zhenyuan's poetic style.
This does not mean that Meng Jiao just blindly imitated the poetic style of the Han, Wei and Six Dynasties. While studying the art of ancient poetry, he also has his own distinctive characteristics.
From the content point of view, Meng Jiao's poems are beyond the narrow range of themes in Dali and Zhenyuan periods. Of course, the main theme of his poems is the resentment of the middle and lower literati against poverty and hardship, which is determined by his repeated trials and tribulations, hard career and the loss of children in middle age. But he can still see some broader social life through his personal destiny and reflect these lives with poetry. Some of them expose and criticize the ugly phenomena in social interpersonal relationships, while others sharply reveal the inequality between the rich and the poor. For example, The Poem of the Weaver Girl describes the abnormal phenomenon of the Weaver Girl's "how to weave a quilt and wear a blue silk dress" by comparing it with "the frost blows through the wall and the pain can't escape". He often has profound psychological experience in writing such poems. For example, the phrase "A cold man would rather be a moth and burn him to death" in Folk Songs of Cold People is beyond the reach of ordinary people who describe people's sufferings. It should be said that after Du Fu, Meng Jiao once again profoundly exposed the contradiction between the rich and the poor and the disparity between bitterness and happiness in society with his poems. There are also some poems by Meng Jiao, which describe the ordinary love of human relations, such as the love between husband and wife in love, the love between father and son in Apricot Wounds, and the love between mother and son in Wandering Son. These themes have long been ignored by poets. Among them, Ode to a Wanderer is a sincere, profound and touching poem:
The mother used the needle and thread in her hand to make clothes for her long-distance son. Before leaving, I had a stitch for fear that my son would come back late and his clothes would be damaged. Who can say that a filial child like the weak can repay his mother's love like the sunshine in spring?
In terms of artistic techniques, Meng Jiao's poems have a new feature, which Dali and Zhenyuan's poems do not have, and which has never existed before. That is the danger and difficulty mentioned in Han Yu's Epitaph of Mr. Yao Zhen. On the one hand, it is related to his deliberate job search and hard thinking, on the other hand, it is related to his depressed mood and depression. In Interpretation of Night Feeling, he said that he "reads at night and talks about ghosts and gods. How not to be idle, the heart is the enemy. " To write poetry hard, we must deliberately seek new words and expressions, and use strange words and cold images that are rare in past poems; And psychological depression, uneven, makes his pursuit of new language performance with cold astringent, desolate, withered color and meaning, so as to as far as possible the inner sadness and sorrow carved into the bone, shocking, such as:
The old worm sounds like iron, and the beast is surprised by the solitary jade robe (the twelfth of "Fifteen Poems of Autumn");
Sick bones can be chewed, and sour groans can also be written. You are so thin, you follow the west (the same as the fifth);
Coody Leng's dream was shattered, and the cold wind combed his bones. Ill words are printed on the table, and the intestines turn to worry (ibid. 2);
After twists and turns, it did turn around. Black grass and iron hair, white hair and ice money (the fourth of Ten Stones);
Wash your eyes hard, and the angry water will disturb the rest of the turbulence (ibid., tenth).
In these poems, he carefully selected penetrating verbs such as "Hui", "Comb", "Seal" and "Brush", as well as verbs such as "cold wind", "old bug", "iron hair", "surging water", "black grass" and "ice". Meng Jiao's poetic style has always been widely evaluated. For example, Han Yu and Li Ao praised him, but later generations, such as Yuan Haowen, called him a "poetry prisoner" (Thirty Poems), and Su Shi compared his poems to "empty claws" with hard shells and tasteless chewing (reading Meng Jiao's poems). But to be fair, the linguistic originality of Meng Jiao's poems is undeniable. Xu Yi, a poet in the Song Dynasty, said that he "can tie facts together, which is the most difficult thing to do", that is, he expressed his appreciation for his ability to transform the form of objective things into self-expression with powerful language, which is really not easy.
Of course, Meng Jiao also had simple, natural and fluent poems, but these poems were not very eye-catching at that time (although poems such as Ode to a Wandering Son were widely recited in later generations), but the poems of the above styles showed the new changes and new features of poetry creation in the Yuan and Mongolian periods in content and language.
Curious and dangerous poetic style has been further developed in Han Yu's hands and has become a trend.
Story:
Meng Jiao Jr. deftly defeated an imperial envoy.
In the Tang Dynasty, there was a gifted scholar named Meng Jiao in Wu Kang County. This Meng Jiao was born in a humble background, but he studied hard and achieved outstanding results.
One winter, an imperial envoy came to Wu Kang County to learn about the people's feelings. Grandfather County hosted a banquet in honor of an imperial envoy. Just as the magistrate raised his glass and said "please", an imperial adult Guang Chen nodded to entertain him, and Meng Jiao Jr. came in wearing tattered green clothes. County grandfather looked very unhappy. He stared and shouted, "Go, go, there are little beggars. I am really honored. "
Meng Jiao Jr. angrily replied: "The poor in the family are uneven, and there are immortals in three places off the ground."
"ouch! Little beggar, don't talk, I'll test you. I'll connect online. If you're right, you can eat here. If you can't get it right, I will sentence you to a private court and break your dog's leg. " The imperial minister said strangely.
"Please." Xiao Mengjiao is not afraid at all.
Seeing that the other person is a child, the imperial envoy shook his head and said, "The little frog is dressed in green."
Little Meng Jiao saw that an imperial envoy was wearing a red embroidered robe and there was a burnt crab on the table. After a moment of meditation, he said to himself, "This big crab is wearing a red robe."
The imperial envoy was as angry as a sieve when he heard this. But he said to the county magistrate, "Give the boy a seat, give him something to eat, and I will confront him again."
The old imperial envoy left three cups of old wine and swaggered away again. He glanced sideways at Xiao Meng Jiao and said in a strange voice, "The kitten is looking for food."
Meng Jiao looked at the imperial envoys like a greedy dog gnawing at bones, and looked at the flattering county grandfather. He thought to himself, you corrupt officials angrily replied, "Rats steal imperial grain."
Hearing this, the imperial envoys and the county grandfather were dumbfounded and broke out in a cold sweat. It turned out that they were eating money for disaster relief, so they had to have a guilty conscience.
works appreciation
A song of an innocent girl
The branches and leaves of the male martial arts spread for the rest of my life, and two pairs of mandarin ducks and waterfowl died together.
If a sincere girl only loves her husband in her life, she will live faithfully like them.
Swear to God that my heart will always be faithful, just like a quiet old well!
A traveler's song
The mother used the needle and thread in her hand to make clothes for her long-distance son.
Before leaving, I had a stitch for fear that my son would come back late and his clothes would be damaged.
Who can say that a filial child like the weak can repay his mother's love like the sunshine in spring?
Lienvcao
The branches and leaves of the male martial arts spread for the rest of my life, and two pairs of mandarin ducks and waterfowl died together. Virgins are your husbands, and they live as faithfully as they do.
What kind of stormy waves can annoy a soul like water in an eternal well? .