Wen Yiduo was the first poet who advocated and practiced the new poetic meter. His advocacy and practice not only played a great role in correcting many disadvantages of May 4th new poetry, but also built a bridge between China's modern poetics and traditional poetics. And "Dead Water" is a typical work on this bridge. The poem "Dead Water" has five sections. The first section is the overall impression of stagnant water, which symbolizes the darkness of warlord rule with "desperate stagnant water" and "the breeze can't blow the slightest" Sections 2 to 4 describe the ugly situation of stagnant water respectively. In the second section, the poet decorated the beautiful images of "jade", "peach blossom", "Luo Qi" and "Xia Yun" with "copper", "tin can", "greasy" and "mold", which is a satire on the ugly nature of the existing society. This superficial phenomenon is nothing more than "broken copper and iron" giving birth to rust, and "leftovers" have become moldy. The third section reveals the essence of stagnant water. The so-called "green wine", "white foam", "small beads", "big beads" and "flower mosquitoes" are just the evil consequences of the decay and fermentation of stagnant water, which makes people feel disgusted and desperate about this "stagnant water" that is flooding and about to be destroyed. In the fourth quarter, the poet made the frog "sing" in the stagnant water, which was a wonderful irony. A ditch of stagnant water should have been lifeless, but the frog fed by stagnant water sang a "vivid" hymn, and the shameless face of the reactionaries jumped out of the paper. In the fifth section, the poet puts forward a firm attitude towards "stagnant water", which means that "stagnant water is not where beauty lies" and "let ugliness cultivate it". The poet's implication is to let "stagnant water in this ditch" have a carnival. The so-called "full of evil" will only lead to a dead end. It implies the poet's hazy expectation for the future. As Zhu Ziqing once pointed out: "Wen Yiduo is really a fire. In the poem "Dead Water", he said:' This is a desperate backwater. /This is definitely not the beauty. /It is better to let ugliness cultivate it. /Look at what kind of world he has created.' This is not to praise the flower of evil, but simply to fill' ugliness' with evil as soon as possible, and' despair' will have hope. "(Zhu Ziqing's preface to Wen Yiduo's Complete Works) There is light in the darkness and hope in despair. This is the dialectics of Wen Yiduo's patriotic thought and the strength of his patriotic poems. The whole article uses symbolic and ironic artistic techniques to deeply expose the dark rule of Beiyang warlords and show their determination to be at odds with this dark government.
This poem adopts symbolism in art, and the singing of "evil" is influenced by the French symbolist poet Baudelaire's Flower of Evil. The most important artistic achievement of this poem lies in the creation of a new metrical poem. After Wen Yiduo joined the Crescent Society, he advocated that "poetry should dance with shackles" and put forward "three beauties", that is, "musical beauty", that is, the harmony of syllables. "The beauty of painting" is the beauty of rhetoric; "Architectural beauty" refers to being organized in form. This poem "Dead Water" is the concrete practice of his poetry. "Dead Water" is a work that Wen Yiduo thinks is "the first experiment with the most satisfactory syllables". Each line of the whole poem consists of a "three-character ruler" and three "two-character rulers", and the three-character ruler is in a trembling process in the poem line, that is, from the third ruler of the first sentence to the second ruler of the second, third and fourth lines; Interlaced rhymes end with disyllabic words, which are cadenced and catchy, and have a strong sense of rhythm and rhythm. The whole poem has five sections, each with four lines and nine words. Chinese characters are called square characters, and each character is a square building. In this way, each row forms a cuboid; The sum of four cuboids constitutes a big cuboid; And the whole poem is five big cuboids, which constitute a bigger cuboid. From the overall appearance, the structure is neat, the joints are symmetrical and evenly arranged. This looks very much like China's traditional metrical poems. In addition, the beauty of painting. The words "green wine", "foaming at the mouth", "emerald" and "Luo Qi" in the poem are colorful, giving people dazzling visual effects. Moreover, the author is not satisfied with this. He made full use of the linguistic features of poetry, writing both static images like jade and dynamic images like frogs' cries. The combination of static and dynamic makes the images contrast with each other, producing tension and making the picture more vivid. The application of such "three beauties" makes the stagnant water form a whole neat and dignified style, and the personality characteristics of the author's traditional Confucian intellectuals are even more vivid.
Wen Yiduo was the first poet who advocated and practiced the new poetic meter. His advocacy and practice not only played a great role in correcting many disadvantages of May 4th new poetry, but also built a bridge between China's modern poetics and traditional poetics. And "Dead Water" is a typical work on this bridge.