"Come to Lintao and stay in Beiting" I heard that Luntai Road sees snow flying every year. Chunfeng has never been there, and imperial envoys seldom go there. The endless white Pennisetum stretches all the way to Kashgar, and the blue mountain is on the other side of Wuwei. Do your best for the king, dare to talk far away, and only hope to return to your dreams.
It is said that snowflakes can be seen flying every year on the way to the wheel platform. The poet heard that on the way to the wheel platform, snowflakes float every year, which is cold and desolate. Luntai is a place in Urumqi, Xinjiang today, and it is an important military stronghold of the frontier fortress in the Tang Dynasty. This sentence depicts the harsh environment in the frontier and highlights the hard struggle of the soldiers.
Chunfeng has never been there, and imperial envoys seldom go there. The poet said that the spring breeze never blows there, and the envoys sent by the court rarely go there. This sentence implies the distance and isolation between the frontier and the Central Plains, and also reflects the neglect and neglect of the frontier by the imperial court.
The endless white Pennisetum stretches all the way to Kashgar, and the blue mountain is on the other side of Wuwei. The poet continued to describe the scenery of the frontier fortress, saying that the endless white grass extended to Shule, and the green hills just passed Wuwei. Shule and Wuwei were both one of the four towns in Anxi in Tang Dynasty, in today's Xinjiang and Gansu. This sentence tells the vastness and remoteness of the frontier, and also implies the soldiers' long journey and no return.
Do your best for the king, dare to talk far away, and only hope to return to your dreams. How dare the poet say that he did his best for the king? He just wants to come back from his dream. This sentence expresses the poet's admiration and blessing for the soldiers. They are loyal to their country and are not afraid of sacrifice. Only in dreams can they return to their hometown. This also expresses the poet's homesickness. He also wants to go back to his hometown, but he can't.
With farewell as the theme, frontier as the scene and homesickness as the emotion, this poem expresses the poet's admiration and blessing for the soldiers, and also reveals his sadness and helplessness. The poet uses metaphor, personification and contrast to make his poems vivid and sincere. This poem is one of the representative works of frontier fortress poems in Tang Dynasty.
Extended data
Cen Shen was born in the third year of Kaiyuan (7 15). He was the great-grandson of Cen Wenben, a famous Tang Dynasty star, and the governor in history, so he was later called "Cenjiazhou, a native of Jingzhou Jiangling (now Jingzhou, Hubei). He lost his father in his childhood, studied hard, read through the classics, was brilliant and ambitious.