A good lyric poem should be the crystallization of artistic beauty. It will transcend the limitation of time and space and arouse people's aesthetic feelings.
However, for many years, Dai Wangshu's poems such as Rain Lane have been regarded as the moans of symbolism and modernism, and have been excluded from the vision of literary history. Only recently did people dig these works out of the forgotten dust like unearthed cultural relics and see their artistic brilliance again.
Dai Wangshu left us only more than 90 lyric short poems on the bumpy and tortuous creative road for more than 20 years. Rain Lane is one of his early famous works.
Rain Lane was written in the summer of 1927. First published in Novel Monthly, Volume 19, No.8, published in August, 1928. Du Heng, a close friend of Dai Wangshu, wrote in 1933:
Speaking of Rain Lane, we can't ignore Mr. Ye Shengtao's award. Rain Lane has been written for almost 1 year. When Mr. Ye Shengtao was editing the Novel Monthly, Wang Shucai suddenly posted it. As soon as Mr. Shengtao saw this poem, he sent a letter praising him for opening a new era for the syllables of the new poem. ..... strongly recommended by Mr. Shengtao, Wang Shu got the title of "Rain Lane" poet until now. ("Preface to Wang Shucao")
Rain Lane creates a lyrical artistic conception with strong symbolic color. Here, the poet metaphorically described the dark and dreary social reality at that time as a narrow and lonely "rain lane". There is no sound, no joy, no sunshine here. The poet himself is such a lonely person wandering in the rain lane. He has good hopes in loneliness. I hope there is a beautiful ideal in front of me. The "lilac-like" girl described by the poet is a symbol of this beautiful ideal. However, the poet knows that this beautiful ideal is difficult to realize. She is as full of sadness and melancholy as herself, fleeting and drifting away like a dream. What is left is only the poet himself who is still wandering in the dark reality, and the hope that the dream that cannot be realized generally floats away!
Some critics say that Rain Lane is the poet's self-liberation by covering up the ugly truth with beautiful imagination, and it is "deceiving himself and readers with some gorgeous fantasies like soap bubbles". Apart from the artistic beauty of harmonious melody, it "has no merit in content". (Fanny: On Dai Wangshu's Poems, Literature Review1980,4), these questions and conclusions are too simple and harsh for Yuxiang.