It means counting the sounds of bells and drums carefully, and the more you count, the longer the night becomes. Look at the stars and the sky in the distance, until the dawn shines in the east. It comes from "Bai Juyi's Collection of Notes" written by Bai Juyi in the Tang Dynasty.
"Song of Everlasting Sorrow" is a long narrative poem by Bai Juyi, a poet in the Tang Dynasty. The whole poem vividly describes the love tragedy between Tang Xuanzong and Yang Guifei. The poet used historical figures and legends to create a moving and moving story, and through the artistic image he created, he reproduced the reality of real life and infected readers for thousands of years. The theme of the poem is "everlasting regret". The poem had a profound influence on many literary works in later generations.
Bai Juyi’s thought combines Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism, with Confucianism as the leading thought. He believes that "emotion" is the fundamental condition of poetry. "What touches people's hearts is nothing more than emotion" ("Yu Yuan Jiu Shu"), and the generation of emotion is based on feelings and events and is tied to current affairs. Therefore, poetry creation cannot be divorced from reality and must be based on various events in real life and reflect the social and political conditions of an era.
Extended information
On the one hand, "Song of Everlasting Sorrow" is a major historical and political theme, and on the other hand, it is a humanistic and psychological theme with a long tradition among the people. In his creation, Bai Juyi obeyed the cultural psychology of the nation and the poet's individual thoughts, that is, the traditional model and the author's subjective initiative coexisted at the same time. This is of course inseparable from the poet's life experience and outlook on life.
Bai Juyi's life spanned the middle and late Tang Dynasty. His thoughts were bounded by the demotion of Jiangzhou Sima. He experienced two stages from actively joining the world to passively emerging from the world. The Confucian life model of "take care of yourself".
At the beginning of the poem, there is some condemnation of the hero and heroine, but as it progresses, the poet enriches the story with his own feelings and imagination, giving this love tragedy a more universal significance, making the author Both myself and the readers have a high degree of sympathy for it. To a certain extent, it has been separated from its historical original appearance and has become a sentimental "style" poem that mainly sings about the love between Li and Yang.
Baidu Encyclopedia-Song of Everlasting Sorrow