Ai Qing's Autumn was written in Hunan in the autumn of 1939.
The special background of the times makes this poem have special feelings, but basically it still has the characteristics of "Ai Qing".
1937 after the outbreak of War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression, the poet threw himself into the torrent of the anti-Japanese national salvation movement. However, due to the lack of national strength and the failure of the Anti-Japanese War, the author had to move to Hangzhou, Wuhan and Guilin.
Ai Qing's wandering life has given him rich creative materials and his art has matured. He published many poems, which formed the prosperity and peak of his poetry creation, and gradually nurtured and formed his unique artistic style of poetry.
Autumn describes the social turmoil and gloom at that time through the use of a large number of symbolic techniques, and shows people's melancholy, sadness, hesitation, confusion and worries about the future in such a social atmosphere. However, the author is not completely desperate, and there is still hope for the future in the poem.
In this poem named Autumn, the author uses many images such as shovel, rain, fields, black mud and dark horses to express autumn in the eyes of a wandering person.
The ancients said, "It's raining at dusk, and it's clear in autumn.
Autumn is a dark, melancholy and sad traditional image in China literature, especially in poetry. The author firmly grasped this point and sublimated it into his own understanding of "autumn", that is, autumn in the author's eyes is a rainy, humid, suffocating, dark and changeable season with gloomy colors.
Isn't this season a symbol of China society at that time? At least it can be understood as the true embodiment of the author's mood at that time, wandering society, wandering life, turbulent times and turbulent mood. The author at this time is dark, sad and hesitant. Looking around, he didn't know where his way out was, but just drifted blindly from one place to another, just as the author said in the poem: "Walk slowly to the horizon/look for the last green in the four fields."
I think the "green" here also symbolizes the saint that the author yearns for, representing light and hope.
The words in front of the poem are all gloomy, such as "mud black, black, thick and black", but only "green" appears at the end. This bright "green" is the author's hope, the hope of society, and brings people infinite reverie.
Therefore, it can be said that although the tone of the whole poem is Ai Qing's simplicity, melancholy and sadness, it is also full of his infinite love for the motherland and people, with a strong flavor of the times and a heavy sense of history.
For reference.