Ai Qing
A tree, a tree,
Stand apart from each other
Wind and air
Tell them the distance
But under the cover of soil,
Their roots have been elongated.
In the unseen depths
They tangled their roots together.
Background knowledge]:
1. The tree was written in the spring of 1940. The great War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression has been working for more than two years. Is turning into a difficult deadlock. This great national war is giving all our people a baptism, making their souls undergo severe tempering in the war and gradually moving towards spiritual awakening.
2. Introduction to the author:
Ai Qing: a modern poet, formerly known as Jiang Haicheng, was born in Jinhua, Zhejiang. 1937 published the first book of poetry, Dayan River. During the Anti-Japanese War, his creation was the most vigorous, including poetry anthology "North", "His Second Death" and "Dawn Notice", among which lyric poem "Towards the Sun" and narrative poem "Torch" were popular with readers. 1945 published a collection of essays. After liberation, he published Cheers, Black Eel and Ai Qing's Poems.
[Interpretation of Poetry]:
To understand this poem, we need to know a historical fact, that is, in the past, foreigners insulted our nation as "the sick man of East Asia" and "fragmented sand". Although this is not necessarily the whole truth, it does reflect some phenomena that the humiliation spirit of our nation has been distorted under the aggression of foreign powers.
It was with the poet's sensitive spiritual feelings and keen political vision that Ai Qing profoundly observed the trend of the times and the pulse of society and realized that the awakening of our nation had arrived. He was inspired by the image of trees standing in isolation from each other in "Yuanye", and produced the association of "in the invisible depths/their roots intertwined". Ai Qing endowed the trees growing on the earth with vivid characters, and saw the potential fact that "they are covered with soil/their roots are spreading" with a unique eye, and regarded them as a symbol that a great nation is uniting and condensing into a powerful force. His artistic expression makes people get a poetic pleasure in observing and integrating life phenomena, and then get a philosophical understanding.