Petals on wet black branches. Count the petals on the wet black branches. )
In the subway station is an image poem with only two lines 14. This was written by Pound according to his impression of the subway station in Place de la Concorde in Paris. Although this poem is very short, it took the poet quite a long time to brew and think before he finally put pen to paper. At first glance, there are only two lines of Japanese haiku poems, but I don't know that the poet's accidental impression is repeatedly refined between subjective and objective. After a year of hard thinking, the first 30 lines have been processed into these short two lines, which are really classics.
Pound once defined image as the precise moment when external objective things shot into his mind and became internal subjective things. Indeed, from this poem, we can fully experience the vivid effect of negative overprint made by the corresponding face and petals, which truly reflects Pound's connotation of images. At the subway station, beautiful faces flashed in front of Pound.
This poem is very similar to19th century French impressionism. Readers can draw a colorful picture if they read it repeatedly. At the same time, we will find that poetry is very clever in sound processing. The [p] sound in the first line echoes the [p] sound in the second line, but one of them only constitutes an unstressed syllable; There is an [au] sound at the end of both lines, but the former has a consonant [d] and the latter does not. The repetition of the sound [e] in the second line strengthens the musical sense of this short poem. Compared with the petals hanging from the wet black branches, the face that flashed before his eyes reflected the poet's convincing imagination.
This poem can reflect two important characteristics of Imagist poetry: the fuzziness caused by heartbeat is one of the characteristics of modernist poetry, especially in this poem, the image is mysterious and the meaning of the sentence is separated, which adds to the fuzziness of the poem. Not only is the meaning of each poem unclear, but the combination of the two poems has exactly the opposite meaning orientation. What kind of face is it? Appear like a ghost? The translation of "apparate" is very important. This is very strange. The original meaning of hallucination and illusion, as well as the meaning of ghosts and ghosts, is translated into "ghostly appearance" here, which is probably a combination of these two meanings. The question is, what is the poet's intention in describing these faces as ghosts and ghosts? It cannot be understood that in the nation where poets live, ghosts and gods are close to people and bring good luck, but should be understood as the opposite. So, these faces look like ghosts and ghosts. Are they ominous?
However, in the second sentence, the crowd is metaphor for wet black branches, and these faces are metaphor for many petals. Among them, the metaphor of petals should be beautiful, bright and kind in all ethnic groups in the world, which seems to be contrary to the metaphor of ghosts and gods. In other words, there will be no doubt when you look at one sentence alone, and there will be doubt when you put two sentences together. If the first sentence is regarded as an interpreted sentence and the second sentence as an interpreted sentence, there will be disharmony between the interpreted and interpreted sentences, which will hinder readers from trying to convey the original intention of the poem and the poet's creative significance. It is the main feature of modernist poetry, especially imagist poetry, and it is also the main reason why this poem is difficult for readers to understand. It stands to reason that there is no poem that can't be solved, but according to the subjective orientation of the interpreter, each solution has its own magical power. However, the interpretation of modernist poetry is really difficult. What the poet reveals may be just the tip of the iceberg, and a lot of meaning is sunk in the black box behind it. The rich connotations under this iceberg include poetic significance, literary significance, aesthetic significance, sociological significance, cultural significance and philosophical significance. It is not as simple and poor as interpreting works from an aesthetic point of view.
We assume that there is a gap between the two sentences in this poem and a bridge of meaningful communication, so why should we cross this bridge of communication and reach the other side of meaning? The "true meaning" of modernist poetry is like Kant's so-called "thing itself", hidden behind the phenomenon, mysterious and unknowable. People's feelings can't be reached, and they can only be grasped by imagination and transformed into reading appreciation terms, that is, guessing and reading. Therefore, the following understanding and understanding of poetry are all imaginary and purely subjective, which may not conform to the poet's original intention.
Let's grasp the meaning of the poem with the help of the poet's own appearance: 19 13 one day, Pound got off at the Concorde subway station in Paris, and suddenly, "I saw a beautiful face, then a beautiful child's face, then a beautiful woman", and then what? It's a 3 1 line poem, which was condensed into two lines a year later. This material is very important. Let's see how this poem (actually the first poem) came into being.
But if it is limited to this, it seems that the excavation of poetry has not been completed. What about the poet's emotional tendency? What is the epochal significance of poetry? We don't know yet, so we find an important feature of this poem: vivid image and obscure feelings. In fact, poetry can't be empty, as Croce said in Italy: "Emotions without images are blind emotions, and images without emotions are empty images." We might as well use our imagination from the correspondence and mutual reflection of the virtual and real images in the poem and trace it back to the deep level of the poem. As mentioned above, the second poem is an interpretation of the first poem, so the feelings and significance implied or caused by the second poem are very important. Petals are a metaphor for a beautiful face, as if China's ancient poems had similar usage; Black branches are a metaphor for the vulgar and ugly figure and face in the crowd. In this way, the poet's love and hate tendencies and likes and dislikes have been hinted.
However, we must also rely on our own imagination to dig deeper. It seems that just like a beautiful face appears and flies away like a ghost, the beautiful phenomena in real life and people's beautiful feelings are fleeting. Just as beautiful faces only appear on people who pay attention to them, beauty in real life needs people to discover with appreciation; Just as petals grow on rough and ugly branches, beauty in real life often grows on ugly and evil soil. Beauty and ugliness are in sharp contrast, they are too close to each other and even depend on each other. Just like petals give people a feeling of joy and affinity, wet black branches give people a feeling of nausea and boredom, and modern society gives people a strong sense of shock, which is a great gap between positive and negative. So we say that "a subway station" is a special environment and a microcosm of modern society. It presents all kinds of things in modern society, but it has been purified in the eyes of Pound, a great poet who only saw two words "beauty" and "ugliness". Is this the complex feeling of Pound standing in the endless crowd at the subway station? At least the reader guesses the feeling of reading with imagination.
This poem can also be interpreted from another angle. Petals attached to dark and damp branches are beautiful, but lifeless. When the petals wither from the flowers, they have lost their souls and drifted away. Just like people in the subway, like ghosts and animals, they are crushed by the gears of modern life. Although it looks exquisite, it is empty and helpless inside.