1. The connotation of "vanilla":
There are many places where vegetation is written about in "Chu Ci". In "Li Sao", "A mixture of peppers and mushrooms and cinnamon is just a sage of a living man", which is a metaphor for a virtuous minister with herbs (pepper, osmanthus, hui, and zhi); The four sentences "Hundred acres of acres" are used to plant herbs (Lanhui, Liuyi, etc.) to symbolize the cultivation of talents.
Since "Chu Ci" praised the sweet grass and trees and denounced the smelly grass and evil trees, these natural objects have also been personified and given different qualities of good and evil, noble and despicable.
2. The connotation of "beauty":
"Beauty" uses the love between men and women to symbolize the friendship between king and minister. "Beauty" is mentioned many times in "Li Sao" and "Nine Chapters", sometimes referring to the monarch, sometimes referring to the poet himself.
Qu Yuan used the love and marriage between men and women to symbolize the situation of the emperor and his ministers. In the feudal era, ministers were appreciated by the monarch just like women were loved by men, so the ministers missed the monarch as much as they missed the beauty.
"Songs of Chu" is a new poetry style created by Qu Yuan, and it is also the first collection of romantic poetry in the history of Chinese literature. It originally contains sixteen poems and poems by Qu Yuan and Song Yu from Chu in the Warring States Period, as well as Xiao Shan, Dongfang Shuo, Wang Bao, Liu Xiang and others from Huainan in the Han Dynasty.
They are Qu Yuan's "Li Sao", "Nine Songs (11 Chapters)", "Tianwen", "Nine Chapters (9 Chapters)", "Yuanyou", "Divination", and "The Fisherman" , Song Yu's "Nine Debates" and "Calling the Soul", Jing Zai's "Big Move", Jia Yi's "Cherishing the Oath", Huainan Xiaoshan "Calling the Hermit", Dongfang Shuo's "Seven Admonitions (7 articles)", Yan Ji's "Sorrow for the Time", Wang Bao's "Nine Huais (9 chapters)", Liu Xiang's "Nine Sighs (9 chapters)", and later Wang Yi's "Nine Thoughts", totaling 17 chapters.
The whole book "Chu Ci" is mainly composed of Qu Yuan's works, and the other chapters also inherit the form of Qu Yuan's Fu. Because of its use of the literary style, dialect rhymes, customs and products of the Chu region (note: today's Hunan and Hubei areas), it has a strong local flavor, hence the name "Chu Ci", which has a profound impact on later generations of poetry.