"The Cornfield and the Poet" is divided into two parts: "Question" and "Reply".
In the poem, the poet questions the meaning of human existence in the form of questions and answers between the wheat field and the poet, but more importantly, he questions the meaning of the poet's existence. In the poet's opinion, God arranged all things in the universe out of a beautiful wish, "a kind of kindness", and the most beautiful things God has given to mankind are nothing more than the sun and land. The sun, as Haizi described in another poem "Sunlight", is "a whip and blood for the growth of all things", giving human beings unlimited energy and vitality. Land, for generations, has carried the most basic needs of human beings, that is, to enable human beings to eat and to relieve the predicament of human beings dying of hunger. In the poet's opinion, God's arrangement is precisely out of a good intention, otherwise all things would not be cyclical. And this kind of kindness and desire falls on the most spiritual species on earth-human beings. As the most sensitive group of human beings - poets, he was the first to understand this expectation of kindness and desire. The poet looks around at humanity's own performance and feels a little trepidatious. But as a representative of human excellence, the poet believes that he has a mission and can respond to God's expectations. Since the poet is desperate for mankind, he can only give an answer from his own side, regardless of whether God is satisfied or not. Therefore, the poet replied: "When I stand in front of you in pain/you can't say that I have nothing/you can't say that I am empty-handed."
The poet's next answer is the essence of the whole poem: "Mai Earth, human suffering/is the poetry and light it radiates." Haizi combines poetry into a carrier of truth and madness with bold logic reversal. Although human suffering is the driving force and raw material of poetry, in Haizi's eyes, it has become something that can be conquered and surpassed. It has become the poet's "radiating poetry and light." Moreover, after being processed by poets into "poetry and light", it can be used as a feedback to the gods. In the face of the huge reality that cannot be surpassed, the poet can only use his own talent to "radiate" human pain into poetry and present it with light, in response to the "kindness" of the wheat field. As a result, poetry has become a kind of madness, a kind of barbarism, a kind of powerful artificiality of the poet, transforming the ugly into the beautiful and the evil into the good.
This poem by the poet itself is a kind of entanglement between great helplessness and great detachment. For example, "I stand at the center of your painful questioning/burned by you", and "I stand on the sun/on the rays of pain". In the poet's other poems, such as "The village that cherishes the dusk/The village that cherishes the rain/The cloudless sky is like my eternal sorrow" ("Village"), "My hands are empty at the end of the grassland/I can't hold a single tear when I am sad" ("The Village") "Diary")...also transforms pain and sorrow into beauty - the beauty of vision and the beauty of sound. Pain and sadness are the eternal stories of mankind and the eternal themes of poetry. The poet crystallizes the tears that cannot be stored one by one in the lines of poetry, completing the sublimation of suffering.
The poem also reflects the poet's profound loneliness and self. Poets cannot control the fate of human beings, and sometimes poets often cannot even communicate effectively with human beings. In this realistic situation, poets often have no choice but to have a conversation with God alone. Haizi once said: "Tonight I don't care about human beings." ("Diary") In fact, the poet has never stopped "caring about human beings", it's just that human beings have always rejected the poet's "concern". The poet cannot transform human beings and cannot respond to the "kindness" of the wheat field, so he can only dedicate all his art to it. However, the art presented by the poet must be related to the entire human race, because God gave "snow and the light of the sun" and "wheat fields" to the entire human race. In the eyes of poets, only pain can be presented to human beings. Because human beings are best at causing suffering, whether it is for others or themselves, whether it is for nature or humans themselves. With an apocalyptic language impulse, the poet polishes and carves human suffering into rare works of art, which are comparable to "the light of snow and the sun", thus repaying "the friendship between wheat fields and light". It is in a kind of unchangeable pain, in a loneliness that is not understood, and in a melancholy that cannot respond (the "kindness" of the wheat field) that the poet integrates human pain and his own pain, and thus "radiates" it into Poetic.
In this poem, the author creates a way out for the group of poets that is not a way out. Human beings can only slightly reduce their pain by speaking about their pain, and poets can only alleviate their own pain caused by their deep understanding but cannot alleviate the pain of human beings in the slightest through artistic processing and the sound of pain condensed into frost for God. pain. However, even if he adopts this "detour", the poet still cannot make people believe that this is the meaning of the poet's existence: there is no solution to human suffering, it can only be left to its own devices, and only those who understand aesthetics can alleviate it slightly, while the poet It is still possible to talk to God in solitude. In the end, Haizi couldn't even convince himself (he chose to abandon the world and wander around). Facing Madi's questioning of the poet's existence, Haizi's answer still ended in failure.
It’s just that through this direct question-and-answer format, the poem allows readers to understand the deeper meaning of the poet’s praise of the sun, wheat fields, etc., allowing readers not only to understand the poem literally, but also fundamentally , I learned a fact: Haizi has actually been singing in a sad mood, praising those things that people never dare to respond to, let alone repay.