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The opening chapter clearly states, "The new leaves in the forest urge the old leaves, and the waves in front of the flowing water give way to the waves behind." These two lines of poetry were written by Liu Yuxi, a poet of the Tang Dynasty. This poem They are also two sentences from a poem he wrote to Bai Juyi.
This poem is not only a poem in praise of Bai Juyi, but also a poem mourning the death of Yuan Zhen and others. The title of the poem is "The poem of Dun, Uncle Hui and the three gentlemen all have deep feelings when seeing Lotte and showing sadness." Yin Cheng is a poem to send." It turned out that after Liu Yuxi heard the news of the death of Yuan Zhen (also known as Weizhi) and other friends from Bai Juyi's letters, he was so sad that he couldn't help but write this poem. The original poem is as follows:
I sing two quatrains lamenting the death of the king, which makes me sad and play a short song.
There are few people in the world who are surprised by the deceased, but there are many memorial tributes.
The new leaves in the fragrant forest urge the old leaves, and the waves in the flowing water give way to the waves behind.
How can we share this hatred from all eternity to this day, and shed tears when we hear the piano.
Before interpreting this poem, it is necessary to understand the relationship between Liu Yuxi, Bai Juyi and Yuan Zhen. Liu Yuxi had a rich life experience, not only because of his thousands of miles in official career, but also because of his top-notch circle of friends who "talked and laughed with great scholars".
Liu Yuxi dated and sang with many poets in his life. He was as famous as Bai Juyi during his lifetime, and was known as "Liu Bai" in the world. Bai Juyi called him a "poetry hero"; he and Liu Zongyuan were close friends and were close friends in Jinlan. When he was demoted to Jiangxiang, he sang harmony with the poet Yuan Zhen. He sang more than 60 poems with the famous minister Linghu Chu.
Among them, he sang with Bai Juyi and Yuan Zhen over a long period of time. The three of them are called the Iron Triangle of Poetry, and their singing harmony has become a legend in the poetry world.
Liu Yuxi and Bai Juyi sang harmony the earliest, from the third year of Yuanhe to the second year of Huichang, and they sang harmony for nearly 40 years. Even though we are far apart, it never stops. In the third year of the Yamato period, Bai Juyi compiled the harmonious poems of himself and Liu Yuxi into two volumes of "Liu Bai's Singing Harmony Collection", which contains 138 harmonious poems by the two.
Liu Yuxi and Yuan Zhen made peace slightly later than Bai Juyi, about the fifth year of Yuanhe. At that time, Liu Yuxi had been relegated to Langzhou for five years, and Yuan Zhen had just been demoted from the supervisory censor to Jiangling Shicao to join the army. The most frequent period of harmony between them was when they were demoted to Jiangxiang. The same life experiences and fateful twists made them often encourage each other with morality and integrity. After leaving Jiangxiang, the frequency and enthusiasm of their harmonies decreased slightly, but they did not stop.
After understanding the poetry and sincere friendship between the three of them, and then interpreting this poem, the poetic meaning will become much clearer.
The main idea of ??this poem is: Reciting the two quatrains you sent me to mourn my deceased friend, I wrote this short song with infinite emotion in my heart. I marvel at the fact that there are fewer and fewer old friends in the world, and I feel that there are more and more tributes in the anthology. New leaves in the fragrant forest constantly replace old ones, and the front waves always give way to the back waves in the flowing water. From ancient times to the present, everyone has the regret of mourning the deceased. So what if we shed all our tears for our deceased friends?
The first couplet is about Liu Yuxi reading two quatrains sent by Bai Juyi. Bai Juyi wrote in the first poem: "The pair of Luan and Luan are lost, and the body of the elk is left empty. Only Songluo should descend The content of the second poem is: "The Lord of the Night will go first, how old I will be. The autumn wind is full of tears, and there are many old friends under the spring."
The chin couplet writes about the friends one by one. After leaving the human world, the number of memorial texts naturally increased, resulting in the largest number of memorial texts in the anthology. The pain and helplessness of my friend's death was palpable, and my loneliness was beyond words.
In Bai Juyi's poems, the sadness over the death of his friend is extremely strong, almost sobbing. Liu Yuxi's poem should naturally echo the meaning of the title, and sadness must be the theme melody of the poem.
If the whole article is written like this, it will be confused with an ordinary work about mourning the death and fail to escape the tone of Bai Juyi's original song. Therefore, the neck couplet in Liu Yuxi's poem can be regarded as the essence of the whole poem. He directly surpassed Bai Juyi's original song with his philosophical thinking.
The neck couplet "The new leaves in the fragrant forest urge the old leaves, and the waves in front of the flowing water give way to the waves behind" are the finishing touch of the whole poem. These two lines suddenly enhance the realm of the whole poem: without the withering of the old leaves, what would happen? Come to the growth of new leaves? In the same way, if there is no cessation of the previous wave, how can there be the turbulence of the subsequent wave? Contained in this seemingly descriptive brushwork is the philosophical thought of metabolism and endless growth.
The neck couplet is a famous sentence through the ages, which best embodies Liu Yuxi’s philosophical thoughts. The original meaning refers to the new leaves growing in the lush woods in spring, replacing the old leaves; in the river, the rushing water in front gives way to the waves rising behind. In the poem, Chen Ye and Qian Bo refer to deceased friends such as Yuan Zhen, and they can also refer to old things. Xinye and Houbo are metaphors for rising stars in poetry, and they can also refer to new things.
In Liu Yuxi’s view, the emergence of new things and the demise of old things have their objective inevitability and are not dependent on human will. This is an inevitable law for the development of things; since the law is independent of human will, people must comply with and utilize the law.
Liu Yuxi felt the death of his friend. While grieving, he may have thought of respecting the deceased, being kind to the living, and that the living should cherish their lives and live well. Therefore, Liu Yuxi thought from the perspective of life and came up with this philosophy of life: without old leaves, there will be no new leaves, without the previous wave, there will be no later wave. The old and the new are not absolutely opposite, and they are not unrelated. of.
New things contain the best elements of old things, and old things breed certain genes of new things. The two are dialectically unified. It can also be seen that Liu Yuxi already had dialectical thinking, which coincided with the law of the unity of opposites. These two lines of poems can also show Liu Yuxi's optimistic and open-minded outlook on life after recognizing the laws of development of things.
This poem by Liu Yuxi in response to Bai Juyi achieves the perfect blend of poetry and philosophy, and reflects in it his extraordinary mind, feelings and philosophical thinking. This kind of cognition did not appear accidentally, but ran through it, like a gray line between grass and snakes, stretching throughout the entire process of his harmony with Bai Juyi. This reached a height of cognition that would be difficult for future generations to reach.
Later, Liu Yuxi and Bai Juyi met again in Luoyang in their later years, and their singing reached another peak, which directly contributed to the "Liu Bai Poetry Group" that had an important influence in the history of Chinese literature. The formation of this poem was a cultural event in the poetry world of the Mid-Tang Dynasty.
As the leaders of this creative group, Liu Yuxi and Bai Juyi are the undisputed protagonists of the "Luoyang Literary and Wine Party" that is envied by future generations, and their singing and poetry are also the most artistically vital and outstanding among them. Impactful results.