The Position and Function of Poetry in A Dream of Red Mansions

In A Dream of Red Mansions, the characters and scenery are often integrated with the artistic conception of the poem. Symbolic symbols imply the connotation of the tragedy of the characters. Scenery and artistic conception contrast the life feelings expressed by the fate of the characters. Cao Xueqin reproduces the tradition of "Fu Bi's prosperity" in China's classical poems in a concrete external form. Poetry itself is transformed from simple and highly refined five-character poems, seven-character poems, quatrains, lyrics and songs into vernacular narrative descriptions of concrete images and scenery, so the artistic conception of poetry is integrated into the form of novels, and the narrative also summarizes the interpretation of poetry. Form includes three aspects: scenery, things and people's situation. At the same time, scenery and things set off people's mood. At the same time, the external scenery and the mood of the character show the "character" of another character, that is, the internal characteristics that conform to the central theme values. This "character" is manifested in both the scenery and the characters.

It is a very important part of A Dream of Red Mansions to use poetry to set off the subjective consciousness of characters and their feelings about the changes of objective environment, which combines two factors: novel style and poem title. The narrative in vernacular or classical Chinese echoes the vague meaning in poetry, such as the relationship between emptiness and reality. Poetry has the function of decoration and polishing the narrative of novels. At the same time, it is the condensation of plot and scenery description. The plots described in vernacular and classical Chinese play a connecting role, just like a long line passing through pearls. It is both a link and an induction. One is a summary of the overall situation, and the other is a summary of the details.

The poems in A Dream of Red Mansions are varied and scattered in different scenes through different uses. Among them, the forms are extremely diverse. Generally speaking, it can be divided into poems, words, songs, ballads, proverbs, ode, songs, ci fu, couplets, plaques, books, riddles and so on. Among them, poetry includes: five sentences, seven sentences, five laws, seven laws, arranged laws, aria and Sao style; Poems about homesickness, poems about things, ancient poems about homesickness, that is, poems about events, poems about scenes, riddles and doggerel; Limited topic, limited rhyme, limited poetic style, divided poems with the same topic, divided poems; There are counterparts, conjoined bodies and ancient styles. Cao Xueqin's original poems 197 in the first eighty chapters, and 40 original poems in Gao E in the last forty chapters. There are 128 poems written by characters in the book, accounting for 65% of the total number of poems.

Different from the poems in previous novels, the poems in previous classic discourses are mostly used as embellishments, modifications and touches to the text. In A Dream of Red Mansions, the vernacular narrative and the poem itself support each other, and the poem is interspersed with the inner meaning of the novel and becomes an inseparable whole. No matter the form or content of the world, it is inseparable from the structure of an organism. In A Dream of Red Mansions, poetry is not only a superficial decoration, but also a part of the novel framework itself, which makes the plane three-dimensional and concise. Therefore, it poetizes and refines the novel in depth, making it more expressive and highlighting the beauty of visual level and structure. At the same time, its perceptual elements also make the performance of the novel more vital and show the soul of the novel.

As a novel, The Red Chamber has a compact and rigorous format. Therefore, to tell the novel as a whole, we must be familiar with the details. Moreover, we should not only be familiar with the structural details of the novel and the poem itself, but more importantly, we should be good at observing the function and correlation between them.

It can be seen that summarizing and discovering the methods and rules used is an important channel to understand the relationship between poetry writing and the whole of A Dream of Red Mansions.