Author: Wang Wei
I am a lonely stranger in a strange land, and I miss my family more often during the holidays.
When I think of my brothers' bodies climbing high, I will feel a little regret for not being able to reach me.
Wang Wei is a precocious writer. He wrote many excellent poems when he was young. This poem was written when he was seventeen. Different from his later landscape poems, which are rich in painting and exquisite in composition and color, this lyric poem is very simple. But for thousands of years, people have read this poem when they are away from home, but they have strongly felt its artistic power. This artistic power comes from its simple, profound and highly artistic generalization.
I wrote this poem because I missed my relatives in my hometown on the Double Ninth Festival. Wang Wei lives in Zhou Pu (now Yongji, Shanxi Province), to the east of Huashan Mountain, so he is called "Recalling Shandong Brothers". When he wrote this poem, he probably sought fame in Chang 'an. Although the bustling imperial capital was very attractive to young literati who were keen on official career at that time, it was a "foreign land" for a young wanderer after all. The more bustling and lively, the more lonely and helpless the wanderer is in the vast sea of people. The first sentence uses a word "unique" and two words "different", which is sufficient. My thoughts about my loved ones and my feelings about my lonely situation are all condensed in the word "independence". "Being a stranger in a foreign land" only refers to being a guest in another country, but the artistic effect caused by the word "different" is much stronger than that caused by the general description of being a guest in another country. In the feudal era dominated by natural economy, there were great differences in customs, languages and living habits in different regions. When you leave your hometown where you have lived for many years and go to a strange place, you will feel that everything is strange and unaccustomed, and you will feel like duckweed floating in a strange place. "Foreign land" and "stranger" are the simple and true expressions of this feeling. A stranger's homesickness naturally exists on weekdays, but sometimes it doesn't necessarily show up, but once it encounters some kind of catalyst-the most common one is "festival"-it is easy to explode and even uncontrollable. This is the so-called "I miss my relatives twice during the festive season". Festivals are often a time for family reunion, and many fond memories of hometown scenery are often associated, so it is natural to "miss your family more during festivals". This kind of experience can be said that everyone has it, but before Wang Wei, no poet has successfully expressed it with such plain and highly summarized poems. Once the poet speaks it, it becomes an epigram that can best express the homesickness of the guests.
The first two sentences can be said to be the direct method of artistic creation. There is almost no detour, but directly into the core, quickly forming a climax, with epigrams. However, this kind of writing often makes the last two sentences unsustainable, resulting in insufficient stamina. If the last two sentences of this poem extend in a straight line along the line of "I miss my relatives more during the festive season", it must be a snake's foot; It is also difficult to find new ideas and form a new climax. The author takes another approach: with the torrent of emotion, a rippling lake appears, which seems calm, but it is actually deeper.
There is a custom of climbing mountains on the Double Ninth Festival. It is said that wearing a dogwood bag when climbing a mountain can avoid disaster. Cornus officinalis, a kind of pepper, is an aromatic plant. In three or four sentences, if you just think about how brothers climb mountains and wear dogwood in the Double Ninth Festival, but they are alone in a foreign land and can't participate, although they also write about homesickness in the festival, it will appear straightforward and lack freshness and intimacy. The poet thought in the distance: "There is one person missing from the dogwood." Brothers who are far away from home are wearing dogwood when climbing the mountain today, only to find that one brother is missing-he is not among them. It seems that it's not that I can't spend the holidays with my brothers in my hometown, but that my brothers can't get together completely on vacation. It seems that it is not worth saying that a person is a stranger in a foreign land, but the shortcomings of brothers need to be understood. This is tortuous and unnatural. And this unusual place is precisely its deep place, where the new police world lies. Du Fu's Moonlit Night: "For our boys and girls, poor little babies, it's too young to know where the capital is" is similar to these two sentences, but Wang Shi doesn't seem to be so focused.